These photos are of a postcard from the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, Italy. The Biblical art is of 'The Oration in the Garden', and it's the garden I'm focused on at the moment. The exotic plants and flowers are not familiar to me. I'm curious to know if they replicate local specimans from the time the artwork was created, or if the artist took creative license and created them more as symbols and decoration.

I've seen medieval paintings at the Chicago Institute of Art where there are wildflowers carefully reproduced in paint. The flowers are details in larger religious paintings like on altar panels. Those flowers were more familiar to me.

I've been told that each species of wildflower at that time had different meanings, and that the paintings were a language, a way of communicating to a people for whom reading was not as yet a common skill. The paintings sometimes recorded medicinal and edible plants.

I've visited the Cathedral at Chartres in France, and remember lengthy story lines sculpted into stone, another way of educating the community. There were sculptures of ancient mathematicians, architects and philosophers, as well as Biblical stories. There were clocks and calendars. It's as though the cathedrals were not just places of worship, but, like libraries today, centers of knowledge accessible to the community in ways people could enjoy and comprehend, through the arts.

Music in cathedrals may have been another medium to expand the knowledge and consciousness of local people and visitors. Ancient cathedrals and the arts - visual and auditory - must be a fascinating field to explore.