Guardian Angel with a girl holding a flower

In the iconography of the Guardian Angel, the child is sometimes shown praying, sometimes walking, and sometimes — as here — holding a flower offered as a gesture of love. The flower carries its own long Christian symbolism: the lily of purity in paintings of the Annunciation, the rose of Marian devotion, the small wild bloom of innocence in nineteenth-century prints. To couple a child holding a flower with an attending angel is to picture an entire small theology of trust: the gift of beauty, given freely and watched over freely.