The Amorous Heart Read online

  He spent the four years between 1309 and 1313 in France, where he made connections with the highest authorities, ranging from those at the pontifical court in Avignon to the royal court in Paris presided over by King Philippe le Bel. He stayed for the longest period in Provence, familiarizing himself with troubadours and the Occitane language. His residence there did not prevent him from traveling extensively throughout France, from the south and the center as far north as Picardy. His French connections obviously served him well because when he returned to his own country, he obtained a papal bull that allowed him to practice both civil and canonical law. Somehow, with all that traveling and a wife who bore him five children, he managed to complete the major part of two substantial literary works, Documenti d’Amore and Reggimento e costume di donna (Precepts on Love and Rules for Women’s Conduct and Clothing).

  Barberino’s Documenti, written in an unwieldy combination of Italian and Latin, presented a semireligious vision of love in praise of a lady, whose role was to elevate the lover’s soul. The more he loves, the more he deifies her, and the more he strives to be worthy of her perfection. Through his writing Barberino brought the songs of Occitane troubadours and the allegories of French storytellers back to his native soil, adding a strong dose of Italian erudition and Catholic morality. His love precepts do not spring from the heart but from a highly cerebral head.

  And yet his drawings in the Documenti manuscripts, specifically those showing the figure of Cupid, are surprisingly original (Figure 12). Cupid appears in full triumph standing on a galloping horse. He has his traditional wings, a quiver full of darts in one hand, a branch of roses in the other, and a leafy bandolier strung across his chest. And as in other fourteenth-century versions of Cupid, he also has talons, which Barberino saw as symbols of love’s firm grasp. Nothing particularly original so far. But look again: What do we see across the neck of the horse? A string of hearts! Red hearts painted in one manuscript, black and white hearts sketched in the other. It is true that these hearts appear from a distance more like triangles, but even without the aid of a magnifying glass, an indentation between two rudimentary lobes can be seen in each of the hearts. Cupid races off victorious with the hearts he has pierced, leaving behind a row of love-struck individuals, who appear beneath him.

  In a short treatise on love (Tractatus Amoris) at the end of the book the author tells us that Cupid’s horse does not need a saddle, a bridle, or spurs because “for Love, the absence of a bridle presents no inconvenience.… Love doesn’t risk falling off.” The text zeroes in on the darts, which are described as “little, numerous and evil like savage animals.” And if we still have any doubts about the items strung around the horse’s neck, we are told that the animal is obliged “to carry many hearts” (“site quor molti gli faccio portare”). I am by no means the first person to have discovered those amorous hearts carried off in triumph by Cupid. The great art historian, Erwin Panofsky, called attention to them as early as 1939, and other more recent observers have added their own insightful commentaries.

  Panofsky was also the first to link Barberino’s illustrations to another Cupid bearing a string of hearts, painted by Giotto and his associates around 1323. These later hearts are not hidden away in a difficult-to-access library but are found in a church fresco that can be viewed to this day: the “Allegory of Chastity” in the lower church of San Francesco at Assisi (Figure 13). In the fresco, although the motif of hearts strung on a rope is similar to Barberino’s, almost everything else is different. To begin, the hearts are worn by Cupid himself and not by his horse. They are slung across Cupid’s nude body as a replacement for the leafy bandolier in the Barberino version. But the hearts themselves do not show the indentations and rudimentary scallops of the Barberino hearts and look more like pieces of fruit hanging by their stems. Moreover, the adolescent Cupid with wings and darts, unambiguously identified by the word AMOR between his clawed feet, has the added feature of being blindfolded. This new development in the iconography of Cupid is meant to convey the idea that love is blind—that is, irrational and foolish.

  FIGURE 12. Francesco da Barberino, “The Triumph of Love” (detail), from Documenti d’Amore, ca. 1315. Illuminated manuscript illustration, MS Barb. Lat. 4076, Vatican Library, Rome, Italy.

  FIGURE 13. Giotto di Bondone, Allegory of Chastity (detail), ca. 1320. Fresco, Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi, Italy. Image credit: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

  The overall point of the Assisi fresco is different: whereas Barberino’s illustrations had celebrated the triumph of love, the fresco vilifies it. We see Cupid (Amor) and his similarly nude companion (Ardor) being chased away from the Tower of Chastity by a black skeleton with a scythe who represents death (Mors). Panofsky likened the bandolier across Cupid’s body to the string of a quiver “on which are threaded the hearts of his victims like scalps on the belt of an Indian.” In the Assisi church Amor is banished from the company of righteous-minded men and women and relegated to extinction among the damned.

  The rudimentary hearts drawn around 1300 by Francesco da Barberino and by Giotto around 1323 were followed in the 1330s by figures closer to our own familiar heart icon. Witness, for example, a miniature of the Virgin of the Assumption surrounded by a bevy of angels, now hidden away in a register of public documents belonging to the city of Siena (Figure 14). This colorful painting, circa 1334–1336, is signed Niccolò di Ser Sozzo, but no other works by him are known to exist. In the lower portion of the miniature a kneeling woman in flowing robes struggles to lift a huge golden barely indented heart—it is almost as big as she is—up toward the Virgin sitting placidly above. This extraordinary image is proof that the Italianized version had almost completely evolved into the heart’s ultimate iconic form by the fourth decade of the fourteenth century.

  Yet to equate Ser Sozzo’s heart with our own typical heart icon would be only partially correct. His heart image and the others that emerged in Florence, Siena, Padua, Pisa, and Assisi during the early fourteenth century were all religious in nature—hearts offered to God, Jesus, or the Virgin Mary. What we do not find in Italian paintings of this period are positive images of the amorous heart offered by one human being to another. For that we need to travel north into France and Flanders.

  FIGURE 14. Niccolò di Ser Sozzo Tegliacci, Assumption of the Virgin (detail), ca. 1334–1336. Illuminated manuscript illustration, Archivio di Stato, Siena, Italy. Image credit: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

  Chapter 8

  Birth of an Icon

  FIGURE 15. Jehan de Grise and his workshop, “The Heart Offering,” 1338–1344. Illuminated manuscript illustration, from The Romance of Alexander, MS. Bodl. 264, folio 59r, Bodleian Library, Oxford, England.

  THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY IN OXFORD POSSESSES A PRICELESS manuscript titled The Romance of Alexander, written in the French dialect of Picardy by Lambert le Tor and, after him, finished by Alexandre de Bernay. The scribe, Jean de Bruges, signed off with a flourish on December 18, 1338, and the illuminator, Jean de Grise, in 1344. With hundreds of exquisitely ornamented pages, The Romance of Alexander is truly one of the great medieval picture books. One of its illustrations has the distinction of being the first indubitable heart icon symbolizing secular love.

  Unlike the illustrations in The Romance of the Pear, those in The Romance of Alexander are not generally linked to the text. The scene containing the heart image appears in the lower border of a page decorated with sprays of foliage, perched birds, and other motifs characteristic of French and Flemish illumination (Figure 15). On the left-hand side a woman raises a heart that she has presumably received from the man facing her. She accepts the gift of his heart while he touches his breast to indicate the place from which it has come.

  On the right-hand side there is a very different scene: a lady turns away from a suitor who offers her a purse. The two couples present a graphic vision of how men and women should and should not relate to each other: one is pure and inspired by feelings from the heart, the
other is venal and based on material rewards.

  The Alexander manuscript is filled with pictures of young people flirting, kissing, playing chess, listening to various instruments. It’s practically a compendium of activities that took place at court and in towns throughout France and Flanders. In addition, there are phantasmagorical images of monkeys and exotic animals as well as a few earthy scenes where males show their bare asses in a spirit of defiance. Most of these scenes have absolutely nothing to do with the highly fanciful narrative concocted around the historical figure of Alexander the Great.

  STARTING IN THE 1340S, WHEN THESE ILLUSTRATIONS WERE created, the stylized heart quickly became ubiquitous. Love, amour, amore, liebe was the subject of innumerable poems, songs, and narratives in English, French, Italian, and German, among other languages. It was also the subject of innumerable Catholic prayers, hymns, and devotions in which caritas offered a religious alternative or supplement to amor. By the end of the fourteenth century there was even a special day for love, Saint Valentine’s Day, celebrated in both England and France. The culture of courtly love knew exactly what to do with a pleasing form that had once served merely as decoration.

  The heart icon became visible not only on the pages of manuscripts but also on numerous luxury items like brooches and pendants. Artisans in Parisian workshops carved ivory heart offerings for scenes on women’s jewelry cases and the backs of mirrors, which were subsequently copied in neighboring countries.

  A mirror case made in northern Italy around 1390–1400, now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, is a beautiful example. A gentleman offers a perfectly shaped, clearly indented heart to his lady, which she reaches up to receive with an arm draped in elegant cloth. The two figures stand surrounded by hummocks, in front of towers and trees, and all of this within a frame only three and three-eighths inches across.

  The heart also found its way into weavings and tapestries that not only had decorative value but also offered protection from the cold. A gorgeous French tapestry circa 1400, now in the Louvre, shows a lover holding his little heart between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were a piece of chocolate. He boldly steps forward, extending a well-shaped leg, while she remains seated and demurely casts her eyes downward toward a dog, the symbol of loyalty. Situated in a garden of love, where every other animal has symbolic meaning (the falcon represents nobility; rabbits stand for fecundity), the sumptuously dressed man and woman look less like lovers than actors in a fashion plate—yet his heart, however tiny, conveys his pledge of love.

  A large German tapestry in the Stadtmuseum of Regensburg offers an interesting contrast. Known as the Medallion Tapestry and dated 1390, it consists of six rows of medallions, with four medallions to a row and each one encircled with a German phrase. The pictures and phrases speak for love in its various guises: love’s entreaties, love’s joys, love’s torments. Though the craftsmanship is somewhat crude, the ensemble is impressive, and individually many of the medallions have great originality and charm. For our purposes the medallions with hearts are of special interest.

  In row four, devoted to love’s torments, there are two medallions that show Minnekönigin, the German goddess of love, who is shooting darts into the lover’s chest. In the first medallion Minnekönigin with enormous wings and a regal crown holds a bow from which an arrow has already reached its mark. The poor lad with an arrow in his chest lies, as though dying, in the lap of his beloved.

  The next medallion in the same row (Figure 16) shows Minnekönigin still wearing her crown, but her wings are now attached to the heart itself, which commands center stage. The winged heart seems to float in midair but is in fact held up, on one side, by the arrow extending from Minnekönigin’s hand and, on the other, by the lover’s fingers. To head off any confusion in interpreting this scene, the text around the medallion says, “My heart suffers… from love’s beam” (“Mein Herz leit Qual… vo(n) der liebe Stral”). The idea that love strikes you with the deadliness of an arrow aimed by a goddess can obviously be traced back to Venus and Cupid, though in this reincarnation Venus has acquired the hallmarks of courtly love and specifically German attributes, including her name.

  FIGURE 16. Artist unknown, Regensburg “Medallion Tapestry” (detail), ca. 1390. Tapestry, Regensburg Stadtmuseum, Regensburg, Germany.

  Compared to the French tapestry the German one is something of a country cousin, though it may have been created to celebrate the marriage of Kaiser Wenzel I with Sophie von Bayern in 1389. If so, perhaps they and their descendants and those who owned it in subsequent centuries enjoyed both the warmth it provided and its lessons in love.

  THE HEART BECAME ESPECIALLY POPULAR AS A LOVE MOTIF in jewelry. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the French jewelry industry produced numerous heart-shaped brooches and pendants inscribed with French inscriptions, including “de tout cuer” (with all my heart) or “mon cuer avez” (you have my heart). One beautiful gold pendant now in the British Museum is encrusted with tears on one side and the words “tristes en plaisir” (sadness in pleasure) on the other, in recognition of the fact that love is often bittersweet.

  A common inscription on jewelry made in England, France, and Italy was the Latin motto “Amor vincit omnia” (Love conquers all), words from Virgil that turn up on the brooch worn by the Prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written around 1390. Also, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida the two lovers exchange a brooch described as containing a ruby in the shape of a heart.

  Rings, too, were sometimes made with heart-shaped stones or settings and carried similar inscriptions. One from fourteenth-century Italy bears a heart-shaped ruby in a golden frame engraved with clinging ivy—the symbol of fidelity—and the inscription “Corte Porta Amor” (Courtship Brings Love). Another, in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has a heart-shaped wolf’s tooth, which may have been intended to ward off danger. I well remember a silver ring with two dangling little hearts, given to me by a boy in my class when I was all of thirteen.

  DURING THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY THE HEART ICON CONTINUED to proliferate in a variety of unexpected ways. It turned up in coats of arms, playing cards, combs, rings, jewelry cases, ivory carvings, wooden chests, sword handles, burial sites, woodcuts, engravings, and printer’s marks. The heart icon was adapted to practical and whimsical uses, with most—but not all—related to amorous love.

  One of the most imaginative items was a heart-shaped songbook made in 1475 for Jean de Montchenu, who would become Bishop of Agen two years later. The book, consisting of seventy-two parchment folios within a leather binding, opens out to form two hearts united at the seam. It contains fifteen French and thirteen Italian love songs by well-known composers of the time. Two Italian heart-shaped manuscripts have also been preserved from the sixteenth century as well as a Danish collection of eighty-three love ballads made for the court of King Christian III (Figure 17).

  A Frenchman named Pierre Sala contributed to the history of the amorous heart with a little book titled Emblèmes et Devises d’amour (Love Emblems and Mottos), prepared in Lyon around 1500. His collection of twelve love poems and illustrations was intended for Marguerite Bullioud, the love of his life, although she was already married to another man. She eventually wed Sala after her husband’s death.

  Sala’s tiny book was meant to be held in the palm of one’s hand—it is only four-by-three inches—and contains two miniatures with remarkable hearts. One of the miniatures shows Monsieur Sala dropping his strawberry-like heart into the cup of a daisy, called a marguerite in French. When capitalized, both marguerite and daisy can be used as names for girls, as in the case of Marguerite Bullioud. The first line of the text reads, “My heart wants to be inside this marguerite.” It is unlikely that medieval readers would have ignored the sexual implications.

  FIGURE 17. Artist unknown, The Heart Book, ca. 1550. Thott 1510 kvart. Ballad manuscript with leather cover. Published with the permission of the Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen, Den
mark.

  Another fanciful illustration shows two women attempting to catch a bevy of flying hearts in a net stretched out between two trees (Figure 18). The winged heart, borrowing the appendages of angels, had already appeared in the fourteenth century as the sign of soaring love. In our own time it is, among other things, the symbol of the Sufi Order, a mystic branch of Islam founded in the early twentieth century, as well as a favorite tattoo for free-spirited lovers.

  A number of Pierre Sala’s contemporaries, more interested in love’s torments than its pleasures, devised novel ways of expressing inner turmoil. Fifteenth-century Italians developed the theme of “cruel love,” showing mutilated hearts either inside or outside the body. In an engraving by Baccio Baldini, an elegantly clad lady has plucked the heart from the chest of a slender youth tied to a tree; she holds it up to his face, while he leans stoically back like a sacrificial victim resigned to love’s torture. This same theme was reproduced in colorful maiolica plates made in the town of Deruta, which produces world-famed ceramics to this day. One shows a woman in court dress drawing her bow to aim an arrow at a young man bound naked to a column; between them his heart, pierced by two arrows, stands upright on a pedestal. Another dish shows a well-dressed woman holding a trophy containing a heart pierced by two arrows with an inscription behind her that reads, “El mio core e ferito p[er] voe” (My heart is wounded by you).

  FIGURE 18. Master of the Chronique scandaleuse, “Miniature of Two Women Trying to Catch Flying Hearts in a net” (detail), ca. 1500. From Pierre Sala, Petit Livre d’Amour, MS 955 folio 13r, British Library, London, England.