How a disgusting organ became the symbol of the romantic heart

A few years ago, Twitter decided that giving gold stars to favorite tweets wasn’t enough. That love had to make its way in the shape of little hearts. Regardless of the outcome, it got us thinking about the heart icon itself: ♥ How the hell a piece of meat designed as a blood plumbing pump became that clean shape? And at what point did we turn it into the symbol of love?

We have reviewed the history of the symbol and the organ, from the caves onwards, in search of love. The simplest answer? Human beings have a tendency to adopt our mistakes as symbols. Even when we have already discovered that they were errors.

The shape of the heart

The best example is Pandora’s Box. Since Erasmus of Rotterdam translated the Greek myth into Latin and screwed up with a word, the jar that contained all the evils of the world became a box. That was 400 years ago. And something similar happens with the heart.

Dutch neurosurgeon Pierre Vinken studied the history of the heart as a symbol in The Shape of the Heartwhere he reviews how our ancestors began to wonder what that thing was inside us. We’re talking about a couple of millennia before we discovered what it was for.

But the history of the symbol goes back even further: in three French locations, anthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger identified a recurring heart-shaped figure. And in more European caves he observed a few more symbols, in common use. For von Petzinger, symbols represent the first leap from representing specific figures (bison and other prehistoric rock art) to abstract ideas. Perhaps a proto-alphabet.

The first emojis come from cave times. Boom.

In this image from their research we can see the cordiform symbol (and a hashtag!) of those French caves. That is, heart-shaped. But that certainly did not represent one. Neither von Petzinger nor the rest of the scientific community yet knows what this symbol means. It certainly wasn’t anatomical. And the closest thing there was at that time to that figure – except perhaps leaves – were some ax heads. But hey, say what you want: what we use today as a heart is one of the original emojis. Get over that, thumb I like on Facebook!

The center of man

But let’s go back to the heart. The Egyptians, very fond of touching corpses to make mummies, had the habit of removing the viscera and preserving them in various ways. In canopic glasses, for example. But the heart remained inside: the intellect and emotions resided there, and the dead person needed that organ for their journey in the afterlife.

The Greeks also had similar ideas about the function of the organ, although for them the heart was rather the center of reason: Aristotle established that the heart was The Head, the most important thing in the body. He also described his form that way. And this is where it all begins.

For the philosopher, the heart was where movement, sensations and reason. And the brain was there to refresh it. But hey, the man tried. And we were in the 4th century BC, there was not much more to it, especially because testing crazy theories empirically was not very suitable for the philosopher. Fast forward four centuries and Galen appears, whose ideas guided “Medicine” for more than a millennium.

Galen disputed Aristotle about the importance of the heart, also anatomically: the heart was a more or less symmetrical thing divided into two in the shape of a pine cone. That is the basis of our romantic heart.

Because it was a pear! Well, no.

Not even the first time it was used as such, back in the 13th century. In a French romance called Novel of the PearDitto of the Pera. In the illuminated manuscript an allegorical love scene appears in which the man offers his heart to his beloved. It is, as far as we know, the first representation of the heart as a romantic symbol. And, although the heart still does not appear as the icon we know today, we do see it as something clean, without ventricles or valves or anything.

Since then, the giving of the heart became, in that and other romances, a symbol of love that has survived to this day. But this representation has nothing to do with the title of the romance (the beloved offers a pear that she has peeled with her own teeth to the beloved. Sexy), but with the usual anatomical representation of the heart at that time. More examples? The Charity that Andrea Pisano sculpted on the doors of the Baptistery of Florence in the 14th century. He held a heart in his right hand.

A more stylized representation than the one his teacher Giotto di Bondone had made a few decades before, which did represent the heart as an organmore or less.

However, during that same century (at least since 1320) several miniatures began to detail the heart with the slit: an iconography that, although erroneous, spread and also changed the position of the heart, with the point downwards. Its popularization spread throughout art, until it reached something more popular a century or so later. When playing cards appeared in Europe (last third of the 14th century), each country adapted the cards that came from Egypt in its own way.

And it was the French who, towards the second half of the 15th centurywhich included the heart with that split shape in one of the suits of the deck. From cups, golds, spades and clubs they went to hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. With the shape and color we know today.

And so on until you reach Twitter and all the heart tones on WhatsApp.

Image | Unsplash

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