Chapter 3
The Heart Icon’s First Ancestors
THROUGHOUT MY RESEARCH INTO ANCIENT GREEK, ROMAN, Arabic, and early medieval civilizations, I was on the lookout for visual representations of the heart, hoping to discover the very first appearance of our familiar heart icon. It is one thing to find associations between the heart and love spelled out in poetry and prose and quite another to discover pictures of the two-lobed symmetrical heart symbolizing love. For many months a stubborn question pursued me: Did the heart icon exist before the high Middle Ages? The answer to that question is both yes and no. Yes, insofar as the shape of the heart icon could be found in the Mediterranean world as far back as the sixth century BCE on the Cyrenian coin shown in Figure 3. No, since that shape did not represent the human heart per se and was not equated with love.
In time I discovered several other “heart” figures on artifacts from the Mediterranean region. For example, a magnificent silver drinking vessel created in Persia (present-day Iran) during the sixth century CE carries motifs shaped exactly like our familiar, scalloped heart. At that time in Persia, before the Muslim conquest and the adoption of Islam, the Sassanian Empire was at the height of its power, with mighty kings and a luxurious court culture. The vessel pictured in Figure 4 is a highly sophisticated work embossed with four female figures—three musicians and one dancer—each encircled by vines and grapes and separated from the others by a row of “heart” decorations. But it is unlikely that these motifs were intended to represent human hearts and even less likely that they were connected to love. Perhaps they were related to wine, as this is a drinking vessel on which grapes, leaves, and vines are prominently displayed.
Another sixth-century “heart” motif, this time of European origin, made its appearance in Paris in the fall of 2016 as part of an exhibition titled “What’s New in the Middle Ages?” (Quoi de neuf au Moyen Age?) On a clasp that once belonged to a Catholic chaplain and somehow ended up in the tomb of a sixth-century nobleman, a small object resembling a heart icon had been placed dead center. Was this small “heart” merely a fanciful shape, or did it have a specific meaning?
The late Dutch neurosurgeon and publisher Pierre Vinken argued that such motifs from the early medieval period were not intended to represent the heart; rather, he saw them as merely decorative, more often than not inspired by ivy-like leaves. The examples pictured in his book The Shape of the Heart support that thesis. But other early artifacts not included by Vinken suggest that the bi-lobed shape may sometimes have had symbolic meanings, even if we don’t know what that meaning was. Some of the most intriguing can be found in the twenty-six Spanish manuscripts of a text known as The Commentary on the Apocalypse, dating from the late ninth through the early thirteenth centuries.
The Commentary on the Apocalypse was originally written in Spain by the eighth-century monk Beatus of Liébana, who believed that the world was about to come to an end. This belief was based on the last book of the New Testament—the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation—which describes in surreal detail the final destruction of the world when the righteous will be swept up into Heaven and all evil-doers destroyed by horrendous calamities. Beatus and his contemporaries had fixed the date of the Apocalypse at the year 800, but even when that date had passed, his Commentary continued to be reproduced in numerous monasteries in northern Spain, where Mozarabs had settled. Mozarabs were Christians who had held onto their faith without converting to Islam after the Muslim conquest of Spain in 711.
One of the Beatus manuscripts, from the mid-tenth century and now in the Morgan Library in New York, was made by a Spanish scribe and illuminator named Maius (Ms 644). Of particular interest are the rows of little “hearts” outlined in red so as to mark a separation in the text. According to the medieval manuscript expert Christopher de Hamel, they resemble “those in a love-sick teenage girl’s exercise book,” but they probably had nothing to do with love.
Moreover, elsewhere in the Morgan Beatus, an illustration of the Lamb of Christ is decorated with two small stylized “hearts” stamped on its body. Perhaps the illuminator of the Morgan Beatus had seen the “heart” motif, already employed among sixth-century Persians and Visigoth Christians, and thought it would make a useful embellishment to his work.
ANOTHER BEATUS MANUSCRIPT, THE GIRONA CODEX COMPLETED in 975, contains “hearts” that may have had symbolic implications. In a full-page miniature featuring the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the white horse is decorated from head to tail with what we today instinctively see as little red hearts. Why should this horse bear such decorations while the others do not? If we look into the Book of Revelation for the passage that inspired this illustration, we find a description of the four horses, each with its specific color and attributes:
“a white horse and he that sat on him had a bow.”
“another horse that was red:… and there was given unto him [the rider] a great sword.”
“a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.”
“a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.”
(Revelation 6:1–8)
The meaning of these four horses has been bedeviling theologians for centuries. The horses are clearly harbingers of doom, with the reddish one in the upper right symbolizing war, the black one in the lower left symbolizing famine, and the pale one in the lower right symbolizing death. The rider of the white horse is often identified with Christ, but some interpretations have presented him, instead, as the Antichrist.
In the Girona Beatus the rider on the white horse is clearly different from the others (Figure 5). Not only does his horse carry upbeat-looking “hearts,” but the rider himself faces backward, toward the other horsemen, perhaps aiming his bow at them. The “hearts” on the white horse may be marking its rider as a counterforce to war, famine, and death, a visual statement consistent with the view that he is a representative of Christ.
ANOTHER MANUSCRIPT FURTHER CONFOUNDS THE ISSUE. Known as the Facundus Beatus from the name of its scribe, it was commissioned by King Ferdinand I and Queen Sancha and dated 1047. It uses the “heart” decoration in several highly imaginative illustrations.
In the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” two of the horses—the one in the upper right and the one in the lower left—are branded with a single heart on their haunches. Why should these two horses be stamped with hearts, whereas the white horse in the upper left is covered with small circles and the horse in the lower right has no decorative imprints whatsoever on its body? This question is unanswerable, at least by me.
Another miniature from the Facundus Beatus, this one titled “Rider Called Faithful and True” shows six horses on three registers. The two horses at the top of the page are branded with a “heart” on their haunches, like a military insignia, whereas the four horses in the lower registers are not distinguished in this manner. Facundus placed “hearts” on animals in a few other illustrations, as well as in a picture of a palm tree trunk constructed from “heart” shapes lined up one atop the other.
All these Mozarabic “hearts” created in northern Spain during the tenth and eleventh centuries do not appear in later versions of the Beatus manuscripts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Why they disappeared is a mystery, and whether they had a direct connection to subsequent French and Italian illustrations of the heart—both religious and nonreligious—remains another mystery. Barring further discoveries, we have to conclude that the “heart” decorations from ancient Persia and early medieval Europe are probably not related to the heart or love. What we see is a pleasing form in search of a meaning or whose meaning has simply been lost or forgotten.
Stop for a moment to consider what might have happened to this shape. If it had become strongly associated with the silphium seed pod pictured on the coin from ancient Libya in Figure 3, it might have become the sign for contraception or abortifacients. Or, five or six hundred years later, when rows of “hearts” appeared on the ancient Persian drinking vessel shown in Figure 4, it may have become the sign of wine and winemakers. Or, in tenth-century Spain, given the evidence of the Beatus manuscript in Figure 5, it might have become a brand for horses. Why not? The double lobes do suggest haunches. But none of these meanings stuck to the scalloped figure we call a heart. It had to await the right set of circumstances to become a symbol of love, and those circumstances would first emerge in the high Middle Ages.