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SSA050: Every apple, pomegranate, strawberry, and almond in sacred art is doing theological work — and most viewers walk right past it. For the 50th episode of Secrets of Sacred Art, Kathryn Laffrey and Alix Murray turn their attention to the fruit scattered across the borders and still lifes of Christian art, and assemble a symbolic fruit salad as they go.

The forbidden fruit wasn’t always an apple. For centuries it was depicted as a fig — Adam and Eve reached for fig leaves, after all — and the apple only took over after a 12th-century shift in Old French turned the word pom from “fruit” in general to “apple” in particular. The Latin malum pun is weaker than it sounds; the linguistic accident is the stronger case.

From there the episode moves through Jan Brueghel and Peter Paul Rubens’ collaborative Garden of Eden, Lucas Cranach’s compressed Eden narrative (unicorn included), and Jan van Eyck’s Lucca Madonna, where two apples on the windowsill and one in the Christ Child’s hand quietly announce the redemption of the fall. Early Christian sarcophagi set up the visual grammar; a 16th-century Baroque still life stitched with New World corn shows how Eucharistic symbolism absorbed the age of exploration.

Then the tour opens up: cucumbers, melons, and gourds as redemption and resurrection (the pilgrim’s water gourd is the practical root); pomegranates as sweetness, fertility, and the Church, with the tradition of 613 seeds tied to the commandments of the Torah; strawberries as the “northern pomegranate,” standing for Mary’s purity and fruitfulness because they bloom and bear at the same time. A Cherokee origin story for the strawberry turns out to share ground with devotion to the Sacred Heart among Native American converts.

Cherries signal the sweetness of paradise — see Titian’s Madonna of the Cherries with Joseph, where Joseph looks like a man you could pass on the street. A Prado painting of Joseph pulling the Christ Child’s hand back from fruit prefigures the Passion with a single gesture. Lemons carry fidelity and love, linked to Mary in Girolamo dai Libri’s Virgin and Child with St. Anne. Pears — treated by Dürer and named in a Byzantine Orthros liturgy — stand for Christ incarnate and Mary’s sweetness. And almonds give us the mandorla itself, the almond-shaped frame of divine and human meeting; St. David the Dendrite, who lived in an almond tree for two years, gets a mention.

Along the way: Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation with St. Emidius, the Book of Hours of Anne of Brittany, Orsola Maddalena Caccia’s still life catechesis, Kathryn’s own chalice pall commission, and a fruit salad passed across the Atlantic by “transporter.”

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Links for this episode:

• Smarthistory — Jan van Eyck, Lucca Madonna
• Chicago Scholarship Online — Temptation Transformed: The Story of How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple
• Catholic Tradition — Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (part 4)
• Michael Rennier — The Secret of the Pomegranate
• Museo del Prado — Saint Joseph with the Christ Child
• Museo del Prado — Garland with the Virgin and Child
• Museo del Prado — The Explorers Sent by Moses Return from Canaan
• Gallica (BnF) — Horae ad usum Romanum (Great Hours of Anne of Brittany, 1503–1508)
• Anna Kasper — Symbols in Christian Religious Art
• New Liturgical Movement — The Pear as a Symbol of the Fruit of the Tree of Life
• KL Art Studio — Wheat and Grapes chalice pall

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