This painting takes us straight to the heart of the mystical interpretation of the Song of Solomon. The depiction of a hortus conclusus, a garden enclosed, refers to Song 4: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse’ (4:12).

And that archetype governs the way the whole book is read by Christians, including the love celebrated in this chapter. The garden is symbolic both of the paradise garden which has been lost, and which salvation restores, and also of the inner garden of the praying soul (Bernard of Clairvaux 1979). 

This way of reading the text is not confined to the Middle Ages. In her twentieth-century commentary on the Song, M. Timothea Elliott, reflecting on the arc of scriptural narrative, writes in a comparable vein:

[W]ithin this drama of brokenness we find the Song of Songs echoing with the language of Eden and containing the promise of love redeemed. (Elliott 1998: 896)

Mary is typically present in Christian depictions of this mystical garden. This is in part because she is in Christian tradition the second Eve, whose faithful obedience was crucial in the restoration of that paradise which the disobedience of the first Eve lost, so Mary rightly takes her place in paradise regained. It is also because she is herself the type both of the whole Church and of the individual soul in prayer, open to the Spirit and fruitfully bearing Christ into the world.

This painting, though, is unusual. Mary is normally depicted in solitude in the hortus conclusus—sometimes with the Christ Child or angels but otherwise the only human figure, representing the intimacy of the soul-garden tryst with Christ.

Here, however, the garden is shown as a place of communion and community not only with other saints, but with the whole of nature redeemed. There are myriad specific flowers and birds, naturalistically represented, whilst the martyrs St Dorothea, St Barbara, and St Cecilia—joined on the ground by the Christ Child—show the redemption and healing of those who have suffered violence, and St George and St Michael (shown with a figure who is probably St Oswald, the Northumbrian king and martyr) show the triumph of faith over the evil that was the source of that violence.

The rapturous love of this chapter is not the exclusive preserve of the individual soul and her Saviour, but reaches out to include all of humanity and non-human nature.

References

Bernard of Clairvaux. 1979. On the Song of Songs, vol. 3, trans. by Irene M. Edmonds and Kilian Walsh (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publication)

Elliott, M. Timothea. 1998. ‘Song of Songs’, in The International Bible Commentary: A Catholic and Ecumenical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, ed. by William Reuben Farmer (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press)