Virgin Mary holding flowers statue

The full-length Mary bearing a bouquet of flowers belongs to a softer iconography that flourished in the 19th and early 20th centuries — the Madonna as gentle protector, the figure to whom believers brought their flowers and to whom flowers were returned in image. May, the month of Mary, is still celebrated across Catholic Europe and Latin America with flower-bearing processions that descend in unbroken tradition from these very statues.