ERASMUS QUELLINUS II and DANIEL SEGHERS, S. J.        Flemish, 1590-1661 and 1607-78        A Garland of Flowers with the Education of the Virgin,        c. 1645        Oil on canvas        Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts        Eliza S. Paine Fund in memory of W. and F. Paine, 1966.37

     By the 1600s, many parts of northern Europe were well supplied with Jesuits. The Flemish city of Antwerp, in the Spanish Netherlands, was a wealthy port and trading center, as well as a vibrant center for printing and the arts.

      Seghers entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1614, and took his final vows as a Jesuit brother in 1625. Though he did not seek ordination as a priest, Seghers lived in Jesuit communities as a brother, and continued his work as a painter. He came to be known especially as a painter of flowers and still life. In the Worcester Art Museum’s painting by Quellinus and Seghers, Quellinus painted the central portion, as a grisaille (shades of gray to resemble a sculpture) of the education of the Virgin Mary by her mother Saint Anne. Paintings of the Madonna and Child surrounded with a garland of flowers were a theme that had been developed by Jan Brueghel, Seghers’ teacher.

      It is Seghers, the Jesuit, not Quellinus, who painted what one might think of as the more secular part of the work. But was a floral garland seen as ‘secular’ in circles influenced by the Society of Jesus?

      Both the theme of Mary—whether as mother of Jesus or as a student—and the theme of a floral garland echoed the spirituality and pastoral priorities of the Society of Jesus. In the culminating meditation of his Spiritual Exercises, on God’s love, Ignatius speaks of how God dwells in creation, including in plants and animals. Ignatius invites those undertaking his Spiritual Exercises to pay attention to such created things, and to consider how God’s love is manifested in and through them. Seghers’ work as a flower painter would in no way have contradicted his vocation as a Jesuit; such loving attention to floral beauty was central to his way of living out Ignatian spirituality.

      Jesuits in the seventeenth century imagined Mary as a model for all Catholics to follow. The Society of Jesus founded so-called Marian congregations in most places where Jesuits worked; these congregations were organizations of laypeople formed by the Spiritual Exercises, often students and graduates of Jesuit schools, along with other persons attracted to Jesuit spirituality. In these congregations, devotion to Mary was linked with works of charity such as visiting the sick and feeding the hungry.