The Heart in art
by Virginia Brilliant, PhD
The heart is love’s emblem par excellence. Yet, how long has the heart been coupled with love? When was the heart icon created? How did its image spread across the world and across time?
Ancient Egyptians recognized the heart as the body’s most vital organ, identifying it as the source of intelligence, feelings, actions, and memory—in essence, the soul. Egyptian religious belief dictated that after death the heart was weighed in the presence of Osiris against the feather of truth and justice to determine whether it had become heavy with misdeeds. Yet in representations of this process the heart is invariably represented by the small jar into which its real mummified counterpart was placed during the embalming process (fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Anubis Weighing the Heart of Hunefer, ca. 1285 BC, papyrus, British Museum, London.
The connection between the heart and love was evident to the ancient Greeks and Romans, but when the heart shape appears in the ancient world, its significance is unrelated to love. For example, it was stamped on coins from the city of Cyrene in ancient Libya to celebrate their most prolific export, the silphium plant, a now-extinct species of giant fennel whose seed resembles the present-day heart icon (fig. 2). Ancient drinking vessels were also decorated with hearts, though scholars believe them to be abstracted forms based on ivy-like leaves, having nothing to do with love. Hearts punctuate tenth-century manuscripts of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, composed in eighth-century Spain by the monk Beatus of Liébana, but their significance beyond mere embellishments, if indeed they had one at all, remains elusive.
Fig. 2. Ancient coin from Cyrene.
The stylized heart shape as we know it today was not ubiquitous until the later Middle Ages. During the fourteenth century, love, amour, amore, liebe, became the subject of innumerable poems, songs, and narratives in English, French, Italian, and German, among other languages. At the same time, scenes of men offering hearts to their lady loves were inscribed on the pages of manuscripts, carved onto ivory jewelry cases and the backs of mirrors, and woven into tapestries (fig. 3). Heart-shaped brooches and pendants were decorated with French inscriptions like “de tout cuer” (with all my heart) and “mon cuer avez” (you have my heart), or the Latin motto
“Amor vincit omnia” (Love conquers all) (fig. 4). Rings, too, were made with heart-shaped stones or settings and carried similar inscriptions. By the fifteenth century, hearts graced coats of arms, playing cards, combs, rings, jewelry cases, ivory carvings, wooden chests, sword handles, ceramic vessels, burial sites, woodcuts, engravings, and printer’s marks. Manuscripts containing love poems were even fashioned into the shape of hearts (fig. 5).
Fig. 3. Tapestry with the Offering of the Heart, ca. 1400–10, wool and silk, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
Fig. 4. Brooch from the Fishpool Hoard, 1400–64, gold and enamel, British Museum, London.
Meanwhile there was an explosion of heart imagery related to the theological virtue of caritas, love of one’s fellow man. Following Saint Paul, “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (I Corinthians 13:13), love became the subject of prayers, hymns, and devotions in which caritas offered a religious or spiritual counterpoint to amor. Around 1305, Giotto painted a figure of Caritas among the panels of Virtues in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, in which monumental figure of Charity lifts her heart to Christ (fig. 6).
Renaissance artists, in contrast with their medieval predecessors, looked to the ancient Greeks and Romans for their artistic models. To represent romance, they resurrected Venus and Cupid, and by and large jettisoned the heart. Hearts were simply not included on objects produced in Renaissance Italy to celebrate betrothals and weddings. Instead, mythological or biblical scenes were painted or carved on the cassone (chests) given to a bride at the time of her wedding and permanently on display in the bed chamber. Family arms, not hearts, decorated maiolica plates and bowls; some bore images of couples in profile facing each other or clasped hands with the inscription fede (faith). Some artists, however, still employed the heart as a decorative element. Raphael, for example, included the motif among mythological figures, birds, owls, snails, and various grotesques in the Vatican Loggetta, though within such mixed company the heart’s amatory message was certainly diminished (fig. 7).
Though the Reformation destroyed many traditional Catholic symbols and images, Martin Luther rescued the heart from Protestant iconoclasts. Luther constructed his personal seal from a red heart placed within a white rose, with a black cross set at the center of a heart, expressing the idea that faith in Christ gives joy, comfort, and peace. With Luther’s approval the heart appeared in Protestant churches and publications across Europe, with the heart-shaped Colditz altarpiece made by Lucas Cranach the Younger in 1584 being a particularly remarkable example (fig. 8).
Fig. 5. Master of the View of Sainte Gudule, Young Man Holding a Heart-Shaped Book, oil on panel, ca. 1480, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Fig. 6. Giotto, The Seven Virtues: Charity, 1306, fresco, 120 x 55, Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua.
In response to the Protestant upheavals across Europe as well as its own internal reform movements, the Catholic Church initiated what became a century-long Counter-Reformation at the Council of Trent in 1545. New orders, such as the Ursulines for women, the Discalced Carmelites for both women and men, and the Jesuits for men, promoted the Sacred Heart, which the Spanish and Portuguese then carried with them to the New World. The Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary graced prayer books and stained-glass windows, statues and paintings, family seals and other personal objects of devotion (figs. 9, 10). As medical science advanced, such hearts were made to resemble the plates found in anatomical studies. The more the heart of Jesus resembled a human organ, the more credible its capacity to be wounded, to suffer, and to feel compassion for all, even sinners.
From the eighteenth century, the heart increasingly became the preserve of ordinary folk, rather than that of the most elite artisans. The French carved hearts into window shutters and on the backrests of chairs. Germans painted hearts on wooden or papier-mâché boxes, often used as containers for love letters. Swiss girls embroidered hearts on textiles folded carefully into their hope chests, and the Romansch-speaking Swiss decorated their New Year’s greetings with hearts. German speakers carried the heart icon across the Atlantic to colonial America, where it assumed a new life among the Pennsylvania Dutch. Between 1750 and 1850 the heart symbol appeared on numerous birth and baptismal certificates, marriage and house blessings, bookplates and writing samples known as Vorschriften (fig. 11). Fraternal organizations popular in eighteenth-century Europe and America also co-opted the heart. Freemasons used it as one of their primary occult symbols along with the Masonic Eye, symbol of God’s all-seeing presence.
The Shakers, a religious sect that emigrated from England to northeastern America in the eighteenth century were devotees of the heart-in-hand symbol, following the words of their founder, Mother Ann Lee: “Put your hands to work, and your hearts to God” (fig. 12). Known for their work ethic, cleanliness, and simple lifestyle, Shakers made drawings of their ecstatic visions, consisting of minuscule writing and multiple symbols, including numerous hearts. Another American religious sect, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, also assimilated the heart into their iconography, owing to a scriptural passage in which the prophet Elijah predicted that the Lord “would turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of their children to their fathers” (Malachi 4:6).
Fig. 11. Birth and Baptismal Certificate (Geburts und Taufschein) for Maria Catharina Raup, 1810, laid paper, watercolor, and ink, Free Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Nineteenth-century American folk artists embraced the heart motif as never before. They made everything in the shape of a heart, from muffin molds and cookie cutters to butter presses, hat boxes, snuff boxes, keepsake boxes, pin cushions, mirror frames, metal trivets, and locks. Hearts were painted on dower chests and cupboards, carved into cradles and chair backs, stamped into stoneware jugs, pressed into glass, sewn into quilts, and hooked into rugs. They also were and remain popular on horse bridles. Many hearts were expressions of friendship, especially female friendship, which was valued in nineteenth-century American culture almost as much as romantic love. Hearts that spoke for one’s loving feelings appeared on the pages of diaries, memory albums, invitations, holiday messages, and, of course, Valentine’s Day cards. American cemeteries also began to feature hearts. By adorning a plethora of everyday items with hearts, Americans from colonial times to the present democratized this symbol of deepest emotion.
Fig. 12. Heart-in-Hand Carving from an Odd Fellows lodge, 1800s, wood and paint, art market.
In 1977 the heart icon became a verb: the I ❤ NY logo was created to boost morale for a city in crisis, with trash piling on the streets, the crime rate spiking, and bankruptcy imminent (fig. 13). Hired by the city to design an image that would increase tourism, Milton Glaser’s famous logo has since become both a cliché and a meme. And finally, at the end of the twentieth century a graphic form appeared that disseminated the heart icon as never before. In 1999 the Japanese provider NTT DoCoMo released the first emoji made specifically for mobile communication. Among the original 176 emojis there were five hearts. Today our online messages are regularly punctuated by heart emoji in various colors and combinations—and even without these, any person with a typewriter or computer can press down on two keys to create this common heart emoticon: <3.
The heart may be only a metaphor, but it serves us well, for love itself is impossible to define. And when words fail us, we fall back on signs, and so the heart, perhaps because it represents the best of human nature, endures.
Fig. 13. Milton Glaser, I ❤ NY, 1977.
Fig. 7. Raphael, Fresco in the Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 1516–17, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.
Fig. 8. Lucas Cranach the Younger, Colditz Altarpiece, 1584, oil on panel, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.
VIRGINIA BRILLIANT
represents Robilant+Voena, one of the world’s leading Old Master and modern galleries, in New York. She obtained her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2005, and held curatorial positions at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco until 2018.
