Divine sparks in the beauties of nature
Very common fruit tree (Amygdalus communis of the Rosaceae), not large in size, about 12 meters high, whose pinkish white flowers appear in spring before the leaves. Originally from western Asia, Persia, Turkestan, it spread through cultivation in the Mediterranean area. It is the plant of which Aaron's rod is said to have been made which miraculously flourished. It is intended as an announcement of salvation as the blossoming of the almond tree is the first to greet spring.
The fruit, the almond, is made up of a green husk, a very hard wood-coloured shell, a peel and an internal part called the core. It symbolizes something precious, a secret closed by nature in three wrappings: husk, shell and peel, almost to protect it in the same way as a feeling that is hidden from strangers: this was the wedding gift in ancient civilizations, a pledge given by representing the gift of oneself. Even today, wedding sugared almonds have the shape and substance of an almond.
With Christianity the almond was an image of the mystery of Christ: God who hides the divine nature beneath the human one; that is, Christ in the cave who reveals himself only to a few men, Christ in the tomb destined to rise again. Then the custom of depicting Christ inside an ovoid shape, known as a mandorla, spread on the portals of churches and on the ambos. Tags also often have an oval shape.
In the Middle Ages the almond represented Mary's virginity, an inviolate container that contains the fruit of her womb, destined to give birth to the Savior.
The Mandorla of glory is the figure obtained by intersecting two circles in half, each up to its center. The arches inside the two circles form the mandorla of glory, also called vesicula piscis (fish bladder, due to the analogy of the shape), a synthesis of two perfections. It is the architectural mandorla within which sacred images were inserted in Christian iconography, especially of the Virgin and that of Christ. Furthermore, it is a symbol of the soul as an indestructible knot of being, in the receptacle of the body, but far from corporeal materiality.
It seems that initially it was the nimbus, the cloud in which Christ ascends to heaven and disappears from the sight of men: it later took the form of an ogive, a horizontal open mandorla, understood as a halo of diffused light around a sacred being as in the Assumption of the Virgin and in the Ascension of Christ.
