The Amorous Heart Read online

  How are we to understand these amorous words placed on the tongue of the Christian Lord? Certainly Saint Gertrude was shaped by her times, when love was on the lips of anyone who could read and many more who could not. The letters of Saint Anselm to his brother monks are filled with comparable expressions, which in his case could be interpreted as homoerotic. But love as experienced and expressed by medieval mystics should not be reduced to sublimated sexuality; they loved God in a style that was in keeping with the religious culture of their times.

  How did Gertrude understand her own heart? At another point in the Herald, when speaking to Jesus, she turns to a traditional Christian interpretation: “I knew that, thanks to you, my heart is the home of my soul.” Since biblical times both Jews and Christians have conceptualized the heart as the dwelling place of the soul, and in that tradition Gertrude, like other mystics, understood her rapturous experiences as spiritual encounters with Jesus and God.

  In Gertrude’s other prayers, meditations, litanies, and hymns, collected under the title Spiritual Exercises, she called repeatedly upon the heart of Jesus to receive the burning love she felt in her own heart: “Stamp my heart with the seal of your heart.” “From my heart I long for you.” “Open to me the innermost recesses of your heart.” “May your love carry my heart into you so that I may cling inseparably to you as if by glue.” “My soul loves you, my heart desires you, my virtue cherishes you.” “You are what my heart thirsts for.” “My heart already burns for the kiss of your love.” “Show me the agreement of the nuptial contract that my heart now has entered into with you.” “Blessed the heart that senses the kiss of your heart.”

  In many instances Gertrude’s appeals to Jesus’s heart have a distinctly female tone. She sees herself as the bride of Christ, as his spouse, his lover, his daughter, his prisoner. Sometimes she articulates her love in a manner that recalls the outspoken female speaker in the biblical Song of Songs or certain lustful women found in medieval love stories. How could she have come to know those romances if she had entered the monastery at age five? What texts might she have discovered in the scriptorium, and what tales did she hear from other nuns who had entered the convent as adults? She was comfortable mentioning Venus several times in her writings, and she was familiar with the exchange of hearts as a literary conceit, which she appropriated as her own.

  Imbued with erotic significance from several sources—biblical, classical, and courtly—the heart became the object through which Gertrude established a love relationship with Jesus. Along with her sister nun Mechtild of Hackeborn, Gertrude helped sow the seeds for the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that would grow during the following centuries largely through the efforts of women.

  Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) was another female saint recognized for her devotion to the Sacred Heart. After a mystical experience when she was about twenty-one, she thought of herself as married to Jesus and even believed she wore an invisible marriage ring to symbolize their union. Catherine’s religious thoughts recorded in a work called her Dialogue and the many letters she dictated to persons as diverse as monks, popes, queens, and prostitutes attest to a fixation on the wounded side and blood of Jesus. Once in a vision, when she asked Jesus why he had wanted his side to be opened and pour out such a torrent of blood, he replied, “First of all, I wanted this because by having my side opened I showed you the secret of my heart. For my heart held more love for humankind than any eternal physical act could show.” Surrounded by devoted disciples, Catherine was highly influential in Catholic circles during her short lifetime, which led to her canonization in 1471.

  A SIMILAR DEVOTION KNOWN AS THE IMMACULATE HEART of Mary can also be traced back to Gertrude the Great and Mechtild of Hackeborn as well as to Saint Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373). Praying directly to Mary’s heart, these women revered it as the symbol of her love for God the Father, her maternal love for Jesus, and her overflowing love for all humankind. Devotees of the Immaculate Heart can point to the Gospel of Luke, in which a prophet named Simeon said to Mary that she, like her son, had great sorrows ahead of her, and that her heart would be pierced with a sword (Luke: 2:35). To this day many devotees of the Virgin Mary honor her daily by reciting the following Novena Prayer to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

  O Most Blessed Mother, heart of love, heart of mercy, ever listening, caring, consoling, hear our prayer. As your children, we implore your intercession with Jesus your Son.…

  We are comforted in knowing your heart is ever open to those who ask for your prayer. We trust to your gentle care and intercession, those whom we love and who are sick or lonely or hurting. Help all of us, Holy Mother, to bear our burdens in this life until we may share eternal life and peace with God forever.

  Amen.

  FIGURE 10. LEOPOLD KUPELWIESER, The Immaculate Heart of Mary, ca. 1836. Oil on panel with gold leaf, Peterskirche, Vienna, Austria. Photograph by Diana Ringo.

  The two devotions—the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart—arose around the same time and share some similarities but also differ in important ways. Devotion to the heart of Jesus is intended to produce an intimate encounter with Jesus through his divine heart. Devotion to Mary’s heart serves the function, as Mary often does, of mediating between the Christian believer and Jesus or God.

  Visual representations of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary began to appear from around 1400 onward. One of the most beautiful Sacred Hearts was painted circa 1452–1460 by the celebrated French painter Jean Fouquet for a Book of Hours that is now in the Louvre. Fouquet’s miniature shows Jesus’s heart with flames rising from it. Another striking Sacred Heart from a Book of Hours produced around 1490, now housed in the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, shows the heart affixed to the cross, pierced by four heavy spikes and encircled by a crown of thorns. The Immaculate Heart of Mary is often pictured pierced with a sword or with seven swords for her seven dolors and encircled with roses or lilies. Long before the present day, images of the Sacred and the Immaculate Hearts had become familiar symbols throughout the Catholic world.

  Chapter 7

  Caritas, or the Italianized Heart

  FIGURE 11. Giotto di Bondone, Caritas (detail), 1305. Fresco, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

  IN NORTHERN ITALY AROUND 1300 THE AMOROUS HEART WAS everywhere, a fashionable theme in literature and the visual arts. It could be found in the poetry of the dolce stil nuovo (the new sweet style), whose most famous exemplar was Dante; in the frescoes of the master painter Giotto; and in the texts and illustrations of a little-known jurist named Francesco da Barberino.

  The “new sweet style” was inaugurated by the poet Guido Guinizelli. His poem “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (“Within the Gentle Heart Love Always Dwells”) magnified the spiritual dimension of love and lauded the women who inspired it. Only the “gentle” or “noble” heart could feel true love, an experience Guinizelli interpreted as a kind of religious devotion. He suggested that by adoring God’s most perfect specimen—the angelic lady—the lover was simultaneously worshipping God. In the balance between sensual love (amor profano) and spiritual love (amor sacro) Guinizelli tilted the scale in favor of the latter.

  Following Guinizelli’s lead, Dante (circa 1265–1321) wrote a sonnet that captured the oneness of love and the heart as never before:

  Love and the gentle heart are one thing,

  As the sage [Guinizelli] declares in his poem,

  and one cannot be without the other.

  Dante decreed that the world is ruled by the lord of love and that the heart is love’s dwelling place once it is activated by the appearance of the right person.

  Then beauty appears in a virtuous woman,

  Pleasing the eyes so much that, within the heart,

  a desire for the delightful thing is born.

  And it dwells there [in the heart]

  until the spirit of love is woken.

  And a worthy man does the same in a woman.

&nbs
p; Dante’s lady embodies a form of sublime beauty that is both physical and spiritual. Of course, she enters into the heart through the eyes, following a trajectory that had been around since Plato, but she must also be saggia—wise or virtuous—if she is to reach the poet’s heart.

  Dante found this ideal woman in the person of Beatrice, a figure familiar to any student of literature. According to Dante, he saw her for the first time when she was almost nine and he barely a year older. Her image remained persistently in his mind even though he saw her only a few more times before her early death at the age of twenty-four. After her death Dante composed the work in her honor that eventually became La Vita Nuova (The New Life). In it he sought his personal happiness by writing words of praise for Beatrice and by elevating her to semidivine status:

  She is the best that nature can produce;

  she is the very exemplum of beauty.

  In another sonnet found in the Vita Nuova the effect of Beatrice’s miraculous presence is felt by all who look upon her:

  So gentle and so honest appears

  my lady when she greets others,

  that every tongue, trembling, becomes mute.

  The sonnet ends with lines that follow the route of love to two different destinations within the lover’s person: “She sends a sweetness to the heart” and “a soft spirit full of love / that goes straight to the soul saying: Sigh.” This new concept of love is directed to both heart and soul, both matter and spirit, and produces a form of beatific contentment. As the Italianist Robert Harrison eloquently puts it, “the sigh that ends the poem… brings its subject to rest in aesthetic stasis. Here Beatrice no longer incites desire but placates it.”

  There is one very strange scene in La Vita Nuova that cannot be avoided in any discussion of Dante and the heart. In a dream Dante sees a frightening, high-ranking man who announces in Latin “I am thy master.” This man is holding in his arms the sleeping figure of Beatrice, naked but wrapped in a crimson cloth. What follows next is shocking: “In one hand he seemed to be holding something that was all in flames, and it seemed to me that he said these words: Vide cor tuum [Behold your heart]. And after some time had passed, he seemed to awaken the one who slept, and he forced her cunningly to eat of that burning object in his hand; she ate of it timidly.”

  In short, Dante portrays Beatrice eating his heart! Even softened by the Latin words suggestive of Catholic ritual, the vision is cannibalistic. The act of eating human flesh, however “timidly,” has savage overtones inconsistent with the sublime Beatrice. The scene ends suddenly with Beatrice carried away in the arms of the unknown man, “and together they seemed to ascend toward the heavens.”

  Dante’s vision of the “eaten heart” is surely related to other medieval tales in which an adulterous wife is served the heart of her lover and eats it unknowingly—all due to the machinations of her jealous husband. But this oneiric scene is more enigmatic and has confounded interpreters for seven centuries. The least one can say is that by eating Dante’s heart and then ascending to heaven, Beatrice prepares for their own reunion in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where she will ultimately appear as his guide to Paradise.

  DANTE AND THE STIL NUOVISTI POETS, ALTHOUGH DIRECT successors of the troubadours from Provence, diverged significantly from their view of love. The Italian poets rejected eroticism for its own sake and, in its place, embraced a love that does not aspire to sexual consummation. The figure of Beatrice carries us into the realm of the angels.

  Secular love, whether called amore in Italian, amor in Latin, amour in French, or Minne in German, continued to be viewed with suspicion in official Catholic circles. Caritas, the replacement offered by the Church, had a dedicated following among monks and nuns and others able to renounce pleasures of the flesh. For a layman Dante went as far as he could to subdue sexual desire and spiritualize love. Along with other Italian poets, he attempted to imbue amor with enough caritas to tone down its overt sexuality and effect a truce between those two rival visions of love.

  But in his literary imagination it was impossible for Dante to ignore eros. In The Divine Comedy he gave us the figure of Francesca da Rimini, placed in the flames of hell and destined for all eternity to remember the adulterous passion that had led to damnation. Francesca recounts how she and Paolo fell in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. This example of what René Girard has called “mimetic desire” speaks to the role of literature as an agent that incites passion. For hundreds of years, long before the advent of film and television, readers like Paolo and Francesca first learned about love from legends, romance, poetry, and drama. Dante suggested that such tales can have a pernicious effect on one’s soul. And yet he gave us the captivating figure of Francesca, whom women can identify with to this day, even if they don’t follow her adulteress path. It’s hard to say the same about the saintly figure of Beatrice.

  IN ITALY LITERATURE AND ART ENHANCED ONE ANOTHER. When we look at the visual arts from around 1300 we find an explosion of heart imagery related to the theological virtue of caritas, sometimes translated from Latin into English as “charity,” and sometimes as “love.” Caritas is mentioned in the Bible in a well-known passage from Saint Paul: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (I Corinthians 13:13). By “charity” Paul did not mean giving alms to the needy, as we use the term today, but rather love of one’s fellow man and kindness in general.

  This passage was singled out by the thirteenth-century religious philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas in his encyclopedic Summa Theologica. In that text he devoted a section to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, with a decided preference for charity, which he understood as the love of God and other human beings. His interpretation of charity encompassed misericordia, the virtue that calls for empathy with others and actions that alleviate suffering. What we would today call compassion was for Aquinas a consequence of loving God.

  What does the theological virtue of charity have to do with the amorous heart? Around 1305, when Giotto painted the figure of Caritas among the panels of Virtues that adorn one side of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, he was probably inspired by secular images of the “heart offering” made in France. The monumental figure of Charity lifts her heart to a haloed, bearded figure, who is presumed to be Christ (Figure 11). This scene clearly recalls the amorous heart offering found in The Romance of the Pear, at least in style. Once again the heart is pinecone shaped, with its narrow end pointed upward and its wider, lower part held within a human hand. From a distance one would mistake it for a piece of fruit or a vegetable, perhaps a pear or eggplant, but on closer inspection the aorta can be seen issuing from the bottom of the upside-down heart. In her other hand Charity holds a basket of fruit to give to the poor.

  Giotto’s Caritas influenced subsequent Italian painters and sculptors, whose works still grace the churches and museums of northern Italian cities. These include the relief sculpture made by Andrea Pisano around 1337 for the bronze door of the Baptistery next to the Florence Duomo, with Charity holding a heart in one hand and a torch in the other. Siena, too, boasts a Caritas fresco painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti around 1340 for its Palazzo Publico.

  Caritas is always represented as a woman. Undoubtedly the veneration of the Virgin Mary, which reached new heights in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was at work here. Mary’s image, carved into stone on the facades of gothic churches, shining through gigantic rose windows and even graciously portrayed in miniature ivory pieces, imbues Caritas with the female ideal of maternal love.

  One rare work placed the Virgin Mary and Caritas together. In Madonna with Caritas, painted by the master of the Stefaneschi Altar during the early fourteenth century and now in Florence’s Bargello Museum, a seated Mary holds the baby Jesus in her lap while a standing Caritas stretches out an elongated arm to offer him her heart.

  All these Italian works, following the example of Giotto’s Caritas, show the heart in its pinecone sh
ape. The symmetrical, bi-lobed heart icon, which would become our familiar “valentine” heart, had not yet appeared on the scene.

  THE ARTISTIC HISTORY OF THE AMOROUS HEART, LIKE THE evolution of animal species, has its strange mutants, unique creations that arise suddenly and subsequently disappear or persist as more permanent species. We come upon such a creation around 1300 in Italy on the pages of a text written and illustrated by one of Giotto and Dante’s contemporaries who called himself Francesco da Barberino.

  Whereas Giotto was already famous in his lifetime for his paintings and Dante for his poetry, only a very small number of Italians living around 1300 would have recognized the name Francesco da Barberino. Even today he is known only to specialized scholars. And yet in a roundabout way he contributed significantly to the heart icon now enjoyed globally by hundreds of millions if not billions of people.

  Francesco di Neri di Ranuccio was born in the Tuscan town of Barberino in 1264, one year before Dante. As an adult he would take on the name of his birthplace and present himself as Francesco da Barberino. He studied the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) in Florence and pursued judicial studies at the prestigious University of Bologna, obtaining the title of notary in 1294. Between 1297 and 1304 he lived in Florence and exercised the function of Church notary for two bishops. He also came into contact with the chief Florentine poets of his age, among them Dante, before that great poet was forced into exile in 1301. Like the other poets of his age, Barberino took up the pen to praise a lady, in his case a woman named Constanza (Constance). Along with poetry he also took up drawing, possibly under the tutelage of Giotto or a member of Giotto’s workshop. Barberino was clearly familiar with the works of the early Renaissance’s most revered painters, namely Cimabue and Giotto.