The roots of love’s symbol
I dropped into a Hudson News at LaGuardia Airport the other day, grabbing a magazine to page through while I waited for my flight back to Milwaukee.
Milton Glaser’s I ♥ NY logo with its cheery, cherry-red hearts popped everywhere — on mugs, refrigerator magnets and T-shirts. Either it’s almost Valentine’s Day or this is New York, I thought. It was both, of course.
With two bumps and a pretty point, that cute and plump heart is one of the most recognizable symbols humankind has ever made.
This is the time of year when candies and cakes take its form, as do plush toys and pendants. Emoticon versions will carry affections to digital devices. Heart-shaped cards, handmade and drug storebought, will be shared with classmates, besties and lovers.
And yet, when we stop to consider it, the adorable symbol looks nothing at all like the fierce, muscular, fist-like organ pounding inside our chest cavities.
So where did the emo icon, recognized across cultures and centuries, come from?
In literature, art and philosophy the heart has been considered the seat of life force, love, faith and intelligence in ancient Chinese, Sumerian, Hindu, Egyptian, Hebraic, Greek and Roman cultures.
Long before Nirvana’s heart-shaped box, Aristotle called it the most important of organs, Edgar Allan Poe haunted us with one ceaselessly thumping beneath the floorboards, Frida Kahlo exposed hers in self-portraits and Blondie crooned about one made of glass.
“In fathomless space and changing time, hearts are churning out the blood of origins,” wrote Luc Norin in introducing “The Heart” (Esco Books, 1985), an effusive history of the symbol as told by Belgian cardiologist N. Boyadjian, who collected heart-related art objects.
“Everything is in the heart,” Norin wrote.
“It’s a strong, strong symbol,” said George Mireles, one of the owners of Café Corazón, where a collection of religious and folk art objects, many of them bearing a heart symbol, are on display. Mireles named his taquerias, one in Riverwest and another location about to open in Bay View, after a heart card in the Mexican Lotería game.
Origin a mystery
While love for the heart abounds in culture, the origins of the familiar graphic symbol, fashioned from two curved lines, is harder to pinpoint. I found few scholarly works about it, but theories and speculation with sketchy documentation course wildly through the Internet.
Some point to the Egyptian “Papyrus of Ani,” or a book of the dead, from the 13th century B.C. as one of the earliest depictions of the heart. The manuscript, filled with hieroglyphs and illustrations, depicts the weighing of the Tibetan scribe’s heart to see if he’s fit for the afterlife.
Others speculate the shape could be related to a now-extinct North African
plant that, while used for seasoning, had a secondary use as a form of birth control, giving it a connection to sex. The silphium plant’s seed, which appeared on 7th-century coins minted by the city-state of Cyrene, looks very much like the cheery heart we know today.
Many suggest the heart was an invention of the Middle Ages. “It has an early medieval origin, for sure,” says Laurie Winters, director of the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend and an expert on earlier European art, echoing other art historians.
“If the heart of an apostle or martyr was found in a religious reliquary, it was a very important part of the body to have . . . to be venerated,” Winters said.
“(The symbol) goes back to and relates to feudal familial lines in early aristocratic families,” Winters added. “I’ve seen it in medieval manuscripts denoting royal family lineages.”
An intriguing miniature of a kneeling lover presenting what looks rather like a dull corporate award to his lover in a 13th-century French manuscript is mentioned in several accounts, including Wikipedia, as the first known depiction of the heart as a symbol of romantic love. The crowned damsel, with her furrowed brows, looks terribly displeased to my eyes.
Decks of cards, dating to at least the 15th century and including heart-like suits, probably played a part in carrying the images to various cultures and classes, too.
The Sacred Heart
A few centuries later, Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is credited with popularizing the image widely among Christendom. The Sacred Heart dates at least to the 17th century and the writings of the French nun Margaret Mary Alacoque. The nun’s letters tell of mystical visitations from Jesus in which he presents her with a heart, surrounded in thorns, bleeding and aflame.
“Here is that heart which has loved men so much . . . ,” she wrote of Christ’s words to her in one of her ecstatic visions. The Sacred Heart is embraced to this day as an image of passion and love for God, and some believe its origins predate Alacoque by centuries.
The depth to which the heart became embedded within Christian art and art objects is documented in Boyadjian’s book, which features the cardiologist’s collection of lace-edged holy cards, reliquaries, embroidered scapulars, holy water stoups, tapestries, hand-tinted engravings, paintings and other objects.
In his book, Boyadjian gives passing credit to the hippie movement for pollinating the planet with hearts, too. As a child of the “flower power” era, this rings true for me. I can attest to the potent iconography of happy faces, hitchhikers and hearts. It seemed to emanate even from the TV screens of my youth with “Love American Style,” “Love Boat” and “I Love Lucy,” even if the latter is a
product of the 1950s.
That was just a few years before Glaser’s logo for New York and the Big Apple proliferated. For a while, it seemed like Manhattan owned the heart, and Glaser’s logo became especially poignant after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
“The logo is powerful in its simplicity,” Phil Belair, a professor of communication design at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, said of Glaser’s little puzzle. “There is no greater symbol of the love of a people for its city.”
More recently, the heart became the first symbol to be entered into the Oxford English Dictionary, inducing heartburn for purist linguaphiles I’m sure. The OED nod confirms the heart’s 21st-century digital dominance.
Social media giants Facebook and Twitter have in fact recently ended their flirtations with the heart and entered into long-term commitments to the cutesy symbol. In November, Twitter got rid of the star used to “favorite” posts and replaced it with the heart, which turns a bright red when users “like” tweets.
For its part, Facebook will upend the reign of its “like” button, the driving engine of its News Feed algorithms, by introducing a range of emoticons users can click to respond to posts. The feature, called Facebook Reactions, was announced in the fall and is due to be unveiled any day now, according to Bloomberg. Might Valentine’s Day be the day, a natural moment to unleash torrents of feelings online?
Images on Instagram are liked with social media’s plumpest heart, which turns fire engine red with a quick touch. Human curators at the image-sharing site are bound to offer up creative heart images for Valentine’s Day.
The heart is at the center of what’s been called the “emojification” of the web — symbolic, visual embellishments to language that can be nuanced or nitwitted, depending on how they’re employed.
Artists ♥ the simple ♥
The heart as a simple, graphic form has also been a fascination for artists.
“It’s a landscape for everything,” Pop artist Jim Dine once said of the symbol that he returned to so often. “It’s like Indian classical music — based on something very simple but building to a complicated structure. Within that you can do anything in the world. And that’s how I feel about my hearts.”
In Philip Guston’s “Couple in Bed” at the Art Institute of Chicago, the bumps of the familiar heart appear as the heads of two lovers, curled against each other beneath the covers, one poignantly clutching his paint brushes.
In Paul Klee’s “Magic Mirror,” a tiny, black heart near the bottom of the canvas casts a pall over a figure, whose bright, thoughtful face is defined by a nomadic, red line. The painting is also at the Art Institute.
The Guston and Klee artworks were two of several examples pointed out to me in a lively Facebook query about favorite works employing the symbol. They were mentioned by Portrait Society Gallery owner Debra Brehmer and Shelleen Greene, an associate professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, respectively.
As I boarded my plane at LaGuardia to make my way home, glancing up at the Southwest symbol, a jaunty metallic heart with wings, I thought about how common and friendly the heart symbol has become. I wondered how many trees have been carved with its shape and declarations of love.
Still, as everyday as it is, perhaps more than any other manmade symbol, it serves as stand-in for who we are, too, a vessel to contain our mysterious selves.
“I don’t know, man, everything we do takes heart and soul,” Mireles said. “That’s what drives everybody.”