Essay 2.

A dissection of sacred hearts, feeling hearts and thinking hearts

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH reverenced the heart above all other organs. The ‘Sacred Heart’ of Jesus, often depicted pierced by an arrow, was an object of fervent devotion in Renaissance Italy. Representations of it adorned the walls of Padua’s churches, and public processions dedicated to the cult took place in the city on feast days during the year. ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus,’ the faithful prayed, ‘we place all our trust in thee.’

Catholics believed that saints’ hearts were miraculously engraved with images of Christ’s Passion, such as the crucifix and the crown of thorns. When a saint died his heart was removed, embalmed and put on display, where it could be prayed to as a miracle-working relic. St Anthony, the thirteenth-century Portuguese Franciscan who became the patron saint of Padua, was closely associated with the organ. According to hagiography, Anthony attended the funeral of an avaricious usurer, during which he experienced a violent inspiration. In the middle of the service he demanded that the corpse be buried outside the city walls rather than in hallowed ground, his reason being that the usurer’s body contained no heart. In accordance with Jesus’ saying ‘where your treasure is, there also is your heart’, Anthony declared that the man’s heart would be found inside his coffers rather than in his body. Friends and family left to search the man’s treasure; there they discovered a heart, still warm, among the cold coins. Surgeons were sent for to perform an autopsy on the usurer’s corpse; opening up his ribs they were unable to find his heart.

This extraordinary scene is depicted in a famous rectangular bronze relief inside Padua’s five-domed Basilica of St Anthony, which rises up out of the teeming alleyways and markets of the middle islet of the city. The relief, wrought by Donatello in the fifteenth century, adorns the basilica’s high altar.

Donatello’s bronze relief of the Miracle of the man with the avaricious heart.

Donatello offers an intensely dramatic vignette featuring an extensive cast of characters. The main protagonists are St Anthony, around whom members of the crowd prostrate themselves in prayer, and the anatomist, frozen in the act of opening up the thorax of the usurer with his knife. Some of the onlookers crowd around the surgeon, peering down eagerly at the corpse; others recoil in horror. The perspective, and the movement and momentum of the crowd, draw our attention to the very centre of the image, its heartless heart, as it were – the open and empty body prostrate beneath the anatomist’s hand. Donatello is said to have drawn inspiration from anatomies he attended at Padua University; if that is true then he was one of the first of many Renaissance artists to study anatomy in a bid to produce representations of the body which were more detailed than those of their medieval predecessors.

There are several other altars in the basilica, one of which houses relics of Anthony’s body. During Harvey’s time in Padua, a perpetual line of pilgrims would queue up to pray to these relics, which were believed to have the power of curing physical diseases (some of them associated with the heart), and of expelling evil spirits that had conquered the hearts of ‘demoniacal persons’. In the hushed Gothic gloom of the church’s candlelit interior, the possessed prostrated themselves close by Anthony’s relics in the hope of a release from their torments, a priest standing over them, muttering the prayers of exorcism, his hands joined together against his heart.

According to popular Catholic belief, during his life a man wrote on his heart, the organ being as it were a book where all his deeds were recorded. After his death, man ascended to the House of Judgement, where God would open up and read his heart. Having examined the volume the eternal judge would pronounce sentence on the man – a certain length of time in purgatory, or permanent residence in heaven or hell – as though appending a moral at the end of a book. The heart was thus both the symbol and the embodiment of man’s soul.

This idea is illustrated in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, situated to the north of the city, a single chamber twenty metres long, nine metres wide and nineteen metres high. In the fourteenth century, Giotto, the Tuscan painter who had formerly been a shepherd, decorated it with intensely dramatic frescoes celebrating the lives of Jesus and of the parents of the Virgin Mary. He dyed its vault in the deep blue of the dawn sky and studded it with golden stars. Giotto’s personifications of the virtues and vices stare at one another across the nave. Envy is a blind woman with a serpent for a tongue. Among her head garments she hides her sin-stained heart, emblem of her soul, from the searching eyes of God. Opposite her the beautiful woman Charity hands her pure heart up to God, who accepts the gift readily.

Giotto’s Charity. Her gesture is echoed in the representation of the Last Judgement, painted on the chapel’s west wall, where the figure of Enrico Scrovegni, who commissioned the building, can be seen presenting his heart to the Madonna.

Harvey was aware of the cult of the Sacred Heart, referring to an important aspect of it in his later lectures, when he discussed the wound in the side of the crucified Christ from which both blood and water had miraculously issued. He also absorbed the intense reverence for the heart so pervasive in the religious culture of the period, as he celebrated the organ in his writings as the ‘tutelary deity of the body’. The religious inflection here is utterly characteristic. Contemplating the blood that moved in and out of the heart, Harvey marvelled at ‘how sensitive it is to harm done to it by things that are hurtful, and to the comfort of things that cherish it’; this, he concluded, was because the liquid was the ‘primary’ and ‘principal’ residence of man’s immortal soul. Harvey may have been influenced by the Aristotelian notion that the rational or spiritual soul dwelt within the heart, but he is also likely to have been drawing on the Christian tradition.

The idea that the heart was God’s citadel, and the residence of man’s soul, was by no means exclusive to Catholics. A preacher of the seventeenth-century Church of England declared that ‘there is no veine in mee, that is not full of the blood of God’s Son’; while an English religious poet of the period implored God to ‘batter’ his heart, in order to ‘break’ into his life. The heart was also reverenced as a sacred organ by radical English Protestants such as John Bunyan. In an early episode in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the most famous Protestant allegory of the seventeenth century, the protagonist, Christian, finds himself in a parlour filled with dust. A man enters the chamber with a broom and vainly attempts to clean it. Some time later a ‘damsel’ arrives with some water, with which she successfully cleanses the room. The Interpreter, who stands beside Christian throughout, elucidates the symbolism of the scene: ‘the parlour is the heart of the man, that has never been sanctified by the sweet grace’ of God; the dust ‘original sin’. The man who ‘first swept is [human] law; she that brought water and did sprinkle it is the gospel’.

In the words of the Renaissance Italian prayer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus ‘feels all, knows all, and thinks of all’. The notion that man felt with his heart was commonplace in the seventeenth century. The organ was regarded, in Harvey’s phrase, as ‘the seat and organ of all passions’ – the stage where the emotional action of man’s life unfolded.

Traditional Galenic physiology confirmed and encouraged this popular belief. A super-sensitive organ, the heart was said to be activated by the emotions and thereby transformed into a furnace which heated the blood. The hearts of men excited by powerful feelings would beat quickly and become instantly and intensely hot. In some cases, such as that of the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, ‘extremes of passion, joy and grief’ might even ‘burst’ the heart, an exploded heart often being given as the cause of death by physicians who carried out autopsies. In contrast, the fire that burned inside the hearts of lovers produced beneficial effects: it gently heated the entire body, invigorating men and inspiring them to bold acts, and rendering even the most shrewish women warm, tender and impulsive.

If the heart moved to the rhythm of man’s feelings, then it could also make the emotions dance to its music. Certain movements of the heart were believed to stir up particular humours: a vigorous beating of the organ producing choler, gentler motions, melancholy. The way a man’s heart beat thus influenced his character. Naturally vigorous hearts produced irascible, choleric people, while those who possessed hearts effective in cooling the blood down were invariably slow to anger or panic, and thus generally closer to the phlegmatic or melancholic personality type.

Physiological ideas permeated everyday language. In evoking a man’s character people invariably referred to his heart, describing him as ‘frozen’ or ‘empty’ hearted, and as having either a ‘loving’ or a ‘poor’ heart. Men could either be ‘iron-hearted’, ‘lion-hearted’, or ‘generous of heart’. When King Lear is appalled and bemused by the cruel behaviour of his daughter Regan, he asks his surgeons to ‘anatomize’ her so that he can ‘see what breeds about her heart’. Only then will he understand the essence of her sadistic character, as well as the cause.

While the idea of a feeling heart no longer makes physiological sense, it nevertheless survives in everyday language and so remains familiar to us. We continue to speak of ‘tender’ and ‘stony’ hearted people; we can still ‘take’ heart, or ‘lose’ heart at a sudden turn of events, and hearts will be melted, wounded and broken as long as the English language endures. The notion, however, that the Sacred Heart of Jesus could, in the words of the Italian prayer, ‘know all, and think of all’ is utterly alien to our culture.

Yet in the seventeenth century people believed that the heart was capable of thought. The King James Bible (published in 1611) reveals that it was seen as the thinking organ par excellence, the ‘mind’ being named much less frequently in that regard. In the Old Testament, God gives Solomon ‘a wise and understanding heart’, while Job returns the compliment by praising God as ‘wise in heart’. The Gospel of Luke describes the heart as the home of the ‘imagination’; in Matthew man can even commit adultery in his heart. For the evangelist John, too, it is in the heart that men ‘understand’ and where they can be corrupted. When the Devil wants Judas to betray Jesus he puts the evil idea into the apostle’s heart rather than into his head.¹ These New Testament references may have been partly inspired by Roman culture, in which the act of memorizing was described as ‘learning by heart’, and in which literature was believed to express the ‘thoughts of the heart’. It was in this context that a contemporary poet described someone as having a ‘naked thinking heart’, and that Edmund Spenser could evoke the distress of one of the heroine’s of his The Faerie Queene by writing that ‘her faint heart was with the frozen cold / Benumb’d so inly, that he wits nigh fail’d’.

In Harvey’s time, the heart occupied an exalted place in the hierarchy of the organs because of its spiritual, emotional, and intellectual significance, as well as its physiological importance. When we later try to understand why a natural philosopher or anatomist might select the heart as the subject for his investigations, we must bear in mind the organ’s cultural prestige. For this was a culture in which men believed, in the words of one preacher: ‘How little of a Man is the Heart and yet [it] is all by which he is.’

1 These beliefs continue to inform Catholic liturgy. During the confessional prayer, at the moment when a member of the congregation confesses that he has sinned ‘in his thoughts’ as well as in his words and actions, he beats his breast as though pounding his sinful heart.