The Pomegranate
In Christian art the pomegranate's many seeds in one fruit suggest the Church, and its red, bursting fruit the Passion and Resurrection.
What the Pomegranate means
The pomegranate is a fruit packed with red seeds inside a single tough skin. Christian writers and artists drew several meanings from it: the many seeds held together in one fruit as an image of the Church gathering all her children, the red juice as Christ's blood, and the fruit bursting open as the Resurrection.
It appears often in fifteenth-century Italian paintings of the Madonna and Child. In Botticelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate the Christ Child holds an open fruit, and the sorrowful faces in the painting are often read as pointing ahead to his Passion. A pomegranate tree also appears in The Unicorn in Captivity, one of the Unicorn Tapestries at The Cloisters in New York.
The fruit already had sacred associations in the Bible. Carved pomegranates decorated the capitals of the pillars of Solomon's Temple (1 Kings 7:18-20), and the Song of Songs praises an orchard of pomegranates (Song of Songs 4:13). St. Francis de Sales later used the pomegranate as an image of charity.
