Marian associations, no longer necessarily identified with intercession, persisted into the fifteenth century, not only in the words of the pageant scripts but also in the painted images of queens. The most explicit instance of the latter is a picture of Elizabeth Woodville in the records of the Skinners of London, produced in the 1470s to record her membership of their fraternity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. In this image Elizabeth wears a red dress beneath a blue cloak with loose blonde hair beneath a crown. This was the attire in which the Virgin Mary was most commonly depicted, the red symbolizing her earthly nature and the blue her heavenly attributes, the loose blonde hair suggestive of her virginity. In the Skinners’ picture Elizabeth was also surrounded by roses and gillyflowers, which were both flowers associated with the Virgin; the rose particularly with her virginity and the gillyflower with her purity and her motherhood. Elizabeth’s blue cloak is spread wide like that of Mary as Mother of Mercy, a parallel emphasized by an alteration on this page in the title of the fraternity to read ‘oure Fraternite of oure blissed Lady and Moder of Mercy Sanct Mary Virgyn the Moder of God’ (x)(x).
