The Amorous Heart Page 9

  In all these cases the heart was understood as a partial substitute for the person whose body was buried elsewhere. But in the fifteenth century the heart sometimes superseded its status as a partial representative. It wanted to be more independent. It wanted to be the whole person. And so in literature the heart became an individual in its own right.

  Chapter 10

  The Independent Heart

  FIGURE 19. Barthélemy van Eyck, “Cœur et Désir arrivant chez Espérance” (detail), ca. 1458–1460. Illumination on parchment, from René d’Anjou, Livre du cœur d’amour épris, Austrian National Library, Vienna, Austria.

  WE HAVE ALREADY ENCOUNTERED RENÉ D’ANJOU, WHOSE heart was given such an elaborate burial in Angers in 1480. Now we will get to know him better as well as his cousin, Charles d’Orléans. Both were high-ranking members of royalty, and both composed verse in which the amorous heart acted like a person, with its own voice and story. For the first time in Western literature the heart assumed the role of an independent actor capable of thinking and speaking for itself. Once we accept the premise that the heart has a will of its own, it’s easy to be drawn into Charles’s compelling lyrics and René’s surreal plots.

  Charles d’Orléans—grandson of King Charles V, nephew of King Charles VI, and father of King Louis XII—was taken prisoner by the English in 1415 at the Battle of Agincourt and spent twenty-five years in captivity. While imprisoned he treated his heart as an intimate friend with whom he conducted ongoing conversations, set down in the form of songs, ballads, and rondeaux.

  The heart, representing the poet’s most vulnerable part, languishes in despair over an unattainable lady but perks up when the speaker addresses it directly in a more hopeful vein:

  The other day I went to see my heart

  To discover how it was faring.

  And I found Hope right beside him

  Sweetly offering him comfort.

  “Heart, you can now be joyful!…

  Since I can truthfully tell you

  That the most beautiful woman in the world

  Does love you with a loyal heart.”

  The poet continues to converse with his heart, always about love’s challenges. At one point he finds his heart desperately crying for help, having set fire to itself and everything around it. The poet vainly tries to put out the fire with his tears and begs his friends, if the heart should die, to have a mass said in its honor so it would be elevated to “the Paradise of lovers / Like a venerated martyr or saint.” The heart is saved, only to suffer still further.

  At another moment the poet expresses sympathy with his heart when he sees it writhing in sadness over the news that his lady “whom he has served most loyally for a long time / Is at present grievously ill.” He acts as the heart’s interpreter in their joint prayer for the lady’s recovery: “All mighty God, through your goodness, / Cure her! My heart begs this of you.” The lady, as well as the heart, recovers.

  Although Charles d’Orléans’s heart poems had their roots in an older literary tradition that allegorized emotions and personal attributes, such as Hope and Courtesy, they also prefigured the lyrical subjectivity of the Renaissance. During the next century Renaissance thinkers and poets, Montaigne and Shakespeare most prominently, would favor a more complex self, one whose parts could no longer be given such medieval labels as Sweet Looks and Mercy. Charles’s split personality, torn between his loving heart and his personal torments, has a distinctly early modern ring. In fact, his method of dealing with despair could even be seen as prefiguring Freud. By separating his heart from the rest of his being, he tries to understand his inner turmoil by analyzing discrete parts of himself—those that Freud would call superego, ego, and id.

  During the early period of Charles’s captivity he asked his heart to help him counter the pains of unrequited or distant love, but as the years passed and he became resigned to old age he instructed his heart to release him from desire. When Charles was finally allowed to return home, his beloved second wife, Bonne, had died, but he soon took another, twenty years younger, and apparently found love once more, even at the age of forty-six, which was considered old in his day. One of the three children issuing from that marriage became the popular King Louis XII.

  CHARLES D’ORLÉANS’S COUSIN, RENÉ D’ANJOU, WENT ONE step further in granting the heart autonomy. In his allegorical Book of the Love-Smitten Heart (Le livre du coeur d’amour épris), the protagonist, at the outset, is René himself, whom the reader finds writing a letter to his nephew, John of Bourbon. But after a dream in which Love tore out René’s heart and gave it to an allegorical character named Desire, the Heart replaces the narrator as the central character. The Heart is then transformed into a youthful knight with a body of his own and adventures typical of the quest narrative. Of course, the Heart’s quest was directed toward a “lovely, young, noble, and fair lady” named Sweet Mercy, who was desperately in need of release from her captors, Shame and Fear.

  Though The Love-Smitten Heart follows the allegorical conventions that had been set in place by The Romance of the Rose, it does not have the traditional happy ending. The Heart fails to unite with Sweet Mercy, who remains in the hands of Refusal. Instead, the Heart is guided to the Hospital of Love by Lady Pity, where he will “end the remainder of his days there in prayers and meditations.”

  As the last of the great French love allegories, The Love-Smitten Heart offers a window into the mentality of its time, one that is suffused by pessimism. Love, the most powerful of forces, is often presented as the cause of man’s undoing. One truly original section of the book describes the coats of arms hung by famous lovers and losers outside the Hospital of Love: Theseus, Aeneas, Achilles, Paris, Troilus, Tristan—each a mighty warrior and each vanquished by love.

  War and love were dominant themes in the life and literature of René d’Anjou. His was a bloody century riven by the Hundred Years’ War between France, England, Burgundy, and René’s own Anjou as well as other European kingdoms. When he set out to write The Love-Smitten Heart, he had already known the horrors of warfare, imprisonment, murderous plots, political intrigue, and the complications of inheritance.

  He was also a husband, father, and lover, with four legitimate children and three born out of wedlock. As a young man of nineteen, when he married Isabelle of Lorraine, he honored her by inscribing on his coat of arms the words “D’ardent désir” (With ardent desire). Years later, nearing fifty, he included himself in the section of famous lovers who hang their coats of arms outside the Hospital of Love. Starting with the words “I am René d’Anjou, who present myself as Love’s beggar,” he went on to boast of the many maids, town ladies, and shepherdesses who had thrown themselves at him both in France and Italy. The great number of “bastard” children recognized by their powerful fathers attested to the medieval belief that a ruler’s virility was to be measured as much by his sexual prowess as by his courage in battle.

  In addition to his accomplishments as a man of arms and prolific lover, René d’Anjou was one of the first French secular humanists known for his command of several foreign languages and his knowledge of world literature going back to the Greeks and Romans. The historical and literary names, allusions, and quotations included in The Love-Smitten Heart and in René’s other literary works would fill a fat scholarly monograph. And, as with the better-known Dukes of Burgundy, he was a great patron of the arts, credited with commissioning several illuminated manuscripts that survive and delight to this day.

  The manuscript of The Love-Smitten Heart now in the Vienna National Library has highly imaginative heart imagery created by the Flemish painter Barthélemy van Eyck, who was in René’s service from 1447 to 1469. In van Eyck’s illustrations the character of Heart is shown completely encased within shining armor, and his head is hidden within a huge helmet so we never see the human face inside (Figure 19). But we have no doubt that the character inside is Heart because of the bright-red hearts with golden wings that adorn his cloak, sprout li
ke a plume from the top of his helmet, and decorate the cloth covering over his horse. A bevy of winged hearts appear in illustrations with such labels as “Heart and Desire at the Home of Melancholy,” “Heart and Desire at the Home of Hope,” and “Hope Carrying Help to Heart.”

  René’s heart, for all its independence, is ultimately defeated by outside forces. At the end of the narrative it submits to a fate devoid of any amatory satisfaction. In retreating from the world into a sanctuary for prayer and meditation, it is suggested that Heart will ultimately find solace in the love of God.

  ALONGSIDE RENÉ D’ANJOU AND CHARLES D’ORLÉANS THERE is another fifteenth-century poet, François Villon, who must be mentioned in any account of the independent heart. Villon (1431–1463?) was a far more talented poet than René and at least the equal of his contemporary Charles d’Orléans. Unlike Charles, who received him at the Château de Blois for a poetry contest, Villon was a commoner well known to the police for criminal acts and only saved from hanging by royal amnesty.

  In a long poem titled “The Legacy” (“Le Lais”), Villon portrayed his heart as “broken” after a love affair that ended badly. He felt obliged to flee from “the prison of love” and leave Paris for the provincial city of Angers. In the testament he wrote before leaving he bequeathed his amorous heart—“pale, pitiful, dead, and done for”—to the woman who had ensnared it. Although she was not a woman of high rank but a commoner like himself, he gave free vent to the bitterness he experienced as a “martyr” for love. Villon’s down-to-earth portrayal of the lover’s deception seems closer to the anguished voices of our own times than the affected conventions still common among most late medieval poets.

  Villon’s short poem titled “The Debate of the Heart and the Body” (“Le Débat du Coeur et du Corps”) is the most famous French incarnation of the independent heart. In the poem his heart is given a voice and becomes his conscience, upbraiding his corporeal self for its debauched existence. This is not so different from Freud’s division between the superego and the id: here the heart has assumed the role of the superego trying to tame the id’s cravings. Heart and body spar like two antagonistic friends, with one trying to persuade the other to change its lifestyle. The body, spokesperson for Villon’s past self, attributes his bad luck to Saturn, the planet believed to have an evil influence on people’s lives. The heart calls such thinking foolish and admonishes the body, already aged thirty, to take responsibility for its actions. Each stanza ends with a refrain expressing the weariness of both parties:

  I’ve nothing more to say. That suits me fine.

  (Plus ne t’en dis. Et je m’en passeray.)

  Although God is mentioned only once in this poem, Villon’s heart is imbued with a message that comes straight from the Bible. It calls for repentance before it is too late, advice the body does its best to ignore. Here the heart has wandered far beyond the boundaries of romance and crossed over into the realm of religion. Competing claims on the heart coming from romance and religion were increasingly characteristic of the late Middle Ages.

  During this period the heart was accorded greater complexity, especially by the best poets of the age. It also achieved a level of prominence unknown before in the visual arts. As a symbol of love it would endure until our own time, but not without challenges to its supremacy that began in the sixteenth century.

  Chapter 11

  The Return of Cupid

  FIGURE 20. Otto Vaenius (artist), Cornelis Boel (engraver), “Optimum amoris poculum, ut ameris, ama,” 1608. From Amorum Emblemata (Emblem 5), Emblem Project Utrecht.

  RENAISSANCE PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS, UNLIKE THEIR MEDIEVAL predecessors, looked to the Greeks and Romans for their artistic models. When illustrating the subject of romance, artists resurrected the figures of Venus and Cupid, who soon shunted the heart icon to the side.

  Cupid’s mother was Venus, the goddess of love, but his paternity was less certain. Usually it was ascribed to Mars, the god of war, or Mercury, the god of merchants and messengers, and less frequently to Vulcan, the god of metalworking, who was Venus’s cuckolded husband. It was understood that Cupid took after his mother and that they were the primary catalysts of desire. With his trusty bow and arrow he sent darts of love into the hearts of young and old. In classical antiquity he was represented as a strong, winged, naked youth. In Renaissance art he became even younger, a child or baby. Why settle for the heart symbol when artists could represent the erotically charged flesh of Venus and Cupid?

  Hearts were not pictured on objects produced in Renaissance Italy to celebrate betrothals and weddings; instead, mythological or biblical scenes were painted or carved on the obligatory cassone (marriage chests) given to a bride at the time of her wedding and permanently on display in the bed chamber. Family arms, not hearts, decorated maiolica plates and bowls; some carried images of couples in profile facing each other or clasped hands with the inscription fede (faith). The heart was notably absent from the magnificent oil paintings that became the hallmark of Renaissance and baroque high culture. For some artists it was only a pleasing shape, to be used among other decorative elements.

  Raphael and his assistants, for instance, included small hearts among cupids and other mythological figures, birds, owls, snails, and various grotesques on the spacious surface of the Loggetta, a small washroom made for Cardinal Bibbiena at the Vatican in 1519. Within such mixed company the heart’s amatory message was definitely diminished.

  YET THE HEART’S CONNECTION TO LOVE NEVER COMPLETELY disappeared, and during the Renaissance it manifested itself in unexpected places. A woodcut made early in the sixteenth century during the reign of the French King Francis I celebrated two kinds of love in a single heart—the amorous love implicit in the union of a royal couple and the king’s religious love for the Virgin Mary. To honor the king’s engagement to Eleanor of Austria, the woodcut shows Francis and Eleanor on each side of Mary and the infant Jesus, asking for their blessing. Francis holds a neatly drawn heart in his hand, and Eleanor holds flowers. Though the marriage never took place and Francis eventually married another, the woodcut continued to be popular in France. Because he looks directly at Eleanor and lifts up his heart in the familiar pose of a lover, he seems to be offering it to her as much as to Mary. Here the heart simultaneously represents both sacred and profane love.

  Two Italian editions of the poet Petrarch’s sonnets, one from 1544 and the other from 1550, carried hearts on their title pages; these hearts, resembling pitchers, contained busts of Petrarch and his beloved Laura facing each other. Sometimes in Renaissance illustrations Venus herself held a flaming heart in her hand, but for the most part she stood or reclined on her own or was accompanied by her playful son Cupid.

  A more unlikely use of the heart occurred in maps. Heart-shaped maps of the world, called cordiform by cartographers, appeared in Europe early in the sixteenth century. Those surviving from this period are exquisitely detailed and often show the latest geographical discoveries, including America. Maps of a heart-shaped world may have been related to the concept that personal emotions, most notably love, can even affect the physical world.

  FIGURE 21. Giovanni Cimerlino, Copperplate reproduction of Oronce Finé’s single cordiform map, 1566. Daniel Crouch Rare Books, London, England.

  The map labeled as Figure 21 was made by the Veronese artist Giovanni Cimerlino in 1566. It is encircled by the gods of love—four nude putti or cupids at the bottom and two Venus-type figures at the top. As I stare at this map and think of a world imbued with love, the words of a twentieth-century song keep circling in my head: “It’s love that makes the world go ’round, world go ’round, world go ’round.” Would that it were so!

  THE PROMINENCE OF CUPID AS A RIVAL TO THE HEART IS especially noticeable in the emblem books that began to appear during the 1530s. A new literary form that brought together short texts with illustrations, emblem books were intended to convey a moral truth. They typically contained a motto, a picture, and a poem. The text often a
ppeared in both Latin and the vernacular, and some editions were polyglot, which made for a truly pan-European phenomenon. Many emblem books took love as their overall theme, but it was a new kind of love. Instead of heartfelt fervor, emblem books praised temperate love in marriage, advised wives to be faithful, and counseled the love of one’s children. They took a dim view of unbridled passion, replacing it with the steadfast virtues of conjugal affection.

  Thus, in the very first French emblem book, Andrea Alciato’s Livret des Emblèmes of 1536, we find an emblem titled De morte et amore (On Death and Love) showing an old man lying on the ground with an arrow in his chest, obviously the work of Cupid, and the skeletal figure of Death hovering beside him. The moral is clear: this is what happens to an old man who has the misfortune of being struck by Cupid’s arrows. In contrast to these frightening pictures, emblems extolling marital fidelity and parental love were accompanied by scenes of happy couples with flowers, dogs, and birds.

  Emblem books reflected the new values promoted by Renaissance humanists and religious reformers. Turning their backs on the all-or-nothing passion characteristic of medieval romance, they looked to certain Roman writers, such as Horace, Virgil, Seneca, and Cicero, for more sober models. They aimed at convincing young people that carnal love is perilous and that only conjugal love can result in long-term happiness.

  Instead of offering one’s heart to another in a gesture of selfless abandon, the would-be lover was advised to be wary of Cupid. However cute the winged cherub appeared to be, his defining attribute was his deadly bow and arrow. Hardly a benign creature, Cupid aimed his darts to inflict desire into the hearts of the unwary. If it didn’t literally kill you, unrestrained passion could bring about psychological, moral, and spiritual death.