The Amorous Heart

by Marilyn Yalom

  AROUND 1600 A CIRCLE OF HUMANISTS AT THE UNIVERSITY of Leiden began to produce emblem books on the theme of love for the Dutch market. Surprisingly, though Leiden was known to be an austere Calvinist city, libidinous love poets, such as Ovid and Catullus, inspired their books. These sophisticated Dutch intellectuals were interested in exploring the nature of amorous love, how it began and developed, what kept it alive, and what destroyed it. They granted love a necessary role in natural law and lauded its virtues but also called for moderation as a means of warding off the destructive consequences of wild lust.

  The philologist Daniel Heinsius, a professor and editor of classical texts, is credited with having written the first Dutch emblem book on love, Quaeris quid sit Amor? (Do You Ask What Love Is?), published anonymously in 1601 and republished in 1606/07 under the title Emblemata amatoria (Love Emblems). This book paved the way for several similar publications, most notably, in 1608, Otto Vaenius’s Amorum Emblemata (Emblems of Love), which has been called “the most important of all love emblem books.”

  Vaenius enlisted a group of humanists and men of letters to contribute poems in various languages—Italian, Dutch, English, and French—each a loose translation of Latin texts taken mainly from Ovid. (Some later editions included German and Spanish translations.) He himself wrote some of the Dutch poems, but the unique strength of the book lies in Cornelis Boel’s 124 engravings. Each of these engravings, except one, features the figure of Cupid.

  As in a running comic strip or graphic novel, Cupid is engaged in a multitude of human activities. In the emblem pictured in Figure 20, two playful Cupids are shooting arrows into each other’s hearts. The accompanying poem tells us, “The woundes that lovers give are willingly receaved, / When with two dartes of love each hits each others harte.” In other emblems we see Cupid tenderly embracing another Cupid, walking with Hercules as his guide, covering his ears to the trumpet of fame, stealing a bite to eat, prodding a sluggish turtle, leaning upon a steady oak in a storm, mixing butter, hunting deer, reading a love letter, carrying a candle, plucking roses, crying tears of love, treading on the tail of a proud peacock, wrenching a sword from the hand of Mars, carrying fresh flowers in each hand, and, of course, shooting his arrows into the chests of numerous victims. Pictured in so many different guises, Cupid comes across as an indefatigable and mischievous emissary of amorous love.

  With the help of his contributors, his engraver, and his printer, Vaenius created a best-selling love manual. The epigram above each poem and the four-lined quatrains that followed not only proclaimed the power of love but generally lauded it. Consider the following exemplary headings:

  Nothing resisteth love

  Love is not to bee measured

  Love is the cause of virtue

  All depends upon love

  Love excelleth all

  Love is author of eloquence

  Love pacifyeth the wrathful

  Loves harte is ever young

  Specific advice for the male lover was spelled out in the poems under the following headings:

  Love grows by favour.

  Perseverance winneth.

  Fortune aydeth the audacious.

  Out of sight out of mynde.

  The chasing goeth before the taking.

  Loves ioy is renuyed by letters.

  Love enkindleth love.

  Amorous love is generally presented in this book as a beneficent universal force. The emblem titled “All depends on love” shows Cupid aiming his darts at a globe in the distant sky, a globe that has already been struck with numerous arrows. The text tells us that this little god of love pierces the heavens and earth with his arrows and establishes “musicall accord” throughout the world, “For without love it were a chaos of discord.”

  Relatively few of the poems in Amorum Emblemata focus on love’s sorrows. Among those that do, the emblem “No pleasure without payn” repurposes the old trope that all roses come with thorns. We rarely see gruesome pictures of Cupid’s victims, as in some other emblem books. Even when Cupid is pointing his arrow at a target placed on the chest of a young man, it looks more like a game than a killing. Yes, the heart is still the recipient of Cupid’s arrows—“Right at the lovers hart is Cupids ayme adrest.” But though it is mentioned frequently in the text, the heart itself is nowhere pictured in Vaenius’s collection.

  WHILE CUPID DOMINATED VAENIUS’S AMORUM EMBLEMATA and similar works, a few emblem books did feature the heart symbol in his stead. Jean Jacques Boissard’s Emblèmes mis de latin en françois (Emblems Translated from Latin to French) (1595) updated the heart’s meaning, drawing on Greek and Roman classics. In a plate titled Libertas Vera est Affectibus non servire (One Is Truly Free Who Is Not Captive of His Passions), a helmeted man grasps a heart with a pincer while a woman holds scales to weigh it. The weighing of the heart, a measure of one’s worth going back to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the medieval German Medallion Tapestry, now had a new purpose: moderation. The heart must submit to decorum and good judgment. Boissard argued that you cannot be free if you are ruled by your passions—a sensible philosophy modeled on the work of Latin thinkers such as Seneca rather than the immoderate Ovid. Boissard warned that the person with a generous heart must avoid being carried away by “the force of voluptuousness.” Only one “who balances his affections, measures his thoughts, speech, and acts, and moderates the passions of his soul” will achieve contentment and wisdom. We are clearly far removed from the all-or-nothing cries of medieval lovers.

  Some emblem books were decidedly wary of the amorous heart. In such works the heart was shown pierced, burning, tormented—suggesting the perils of erotic love. The title page of Pieter Cornelisz Hooft’s Emblemata amatoria: Afbeeldingen van minne (Emblems of Love, 1611, 1613) has a picture of a flaming heart perforated from front to back by an unusually sharp-looking arrow.

  A more positive vision of the amorous heart appeared around 1618 in a little Dutch volume titled Openhertighe Herten (Openhearted Hearts). With sixty-two etchings and matching poems, the book became a publishing success not only in Dutch but also in French and German editions.

  The title page established the tone for the entire work. It shows a plump vessel or pitcher-type heart set above a heart-shaped scroll (a similar heart appears in every subsequent illustration). A loving couple stands on each side of the page. To the right there is a lower-class man and woman, she all but obscured by his large presence except for her head and shoulder. He holds his heart upright in his right hand. On the other side there is a fashionably dressed upper-class couple. She stands in front of the man, covering up most of his body. In her hands she holds a fan and a book while the man holds a large “pin” or “prick” above the lady’s book.

  This “pin” or “prick” was used in a popular party game, which followed a prescribed sequence: each participant would place the pin randomly in an emblem book, read the emblem, and then solicit discussion. The foreword to Openhertighe Herten recommended the game for “all young people and honest company, at dinners and on other occasions to pass the time and avoid irregularities.” To play, “one keeps the little book shut, another pricks into it, between the page, with a bodkin or needle, and if the latter does not find the inclinations of his heart, another member of the company may.” Such amusement may seem tame to us today, but four hundred years ago it had great appeal among Dutch burghers.

  FIGURE 22. J. van der Velde, title page, Openhertighe Herten, 1618. Engraving, Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature.

  All sixty-two emblems in Openhertighe Herten argued in favor of the “open heart” as the best approach to love and life, meaning that lovers should be honest and transparent with each other. Emblem number one of the French version shows a convex heart representing a house with a large latticed window at its center. The epigram tells us that the speaker’s heart, like an open window, “has never been false nor treacherous.”

  The heart icon and Cupid continued to have their followers among artist
s depicting amorous love. But increasingly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Christianity encroached on the terrain of the secular heart. Both Catholics and Protestants claimed the heart icon and found different ways of making it their own.

  Chapter 12

  The Reformation and Counter-Reformation

  FIGURE 23. Artist unknown, window with Lutheran rose (detail), ca. 1530. Stained glass, Cobstadt, Thüringen, Germany. Image credit: Claus Thoemmes.

  MARTIN LUTHER IS NOT A FIGURE ONE WOULD INSTINCTIVELY associate with a heart or a flower, yet this indomitable man constructed his personal seal from a red heart placed within a white rose, with a black cross set at the center of a heart icon (Figure 23). In a letter of July 8, 1530, he explained why these images were apt representations of his theology: “The first should be a black cross in a heart, which retains its natural color, so that I myself would be reminded that faith in the Crucified saves us.… Such a heart should stand in the middle of a white rose, to show that faith gives joy, comfort, and peace.”

  Luther argued that the black cross symbolizing Christ’s death, the red heart symbolizing faith, and the white rose symbolizing belief in the Resurrection all reinforced each other. Because the five-petaled rose encircling the heart is so dominant, the seal is usually referred to as “Luther’s Rose,” though a case could also be made for calling it “Luther’s Heart.”

  In the campaign to promote his revolutionary theology Luther’s seal enjoyed widespread prominence. It appeared on the title pages of his published works as early as 1524 and on medals and medallions that were made for him and his followers. A tile imprinted with his seal still hangs on the ceiling of the Lutherhaus in Wittenberg, and most recently I saw it on a history coloring book for children celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

  Whereas the Reformation destroyed many traditional Catholic symbols and images, Luther “was largely responsible for rescuing the heart from Protestant iconophobes,” according to one modern scholar. With Luther’s approval the heart appeared in various Protestant churches and publications, stretching from Germany, France, and Switzerland to the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Hungary, and England. The heart-shaped Colditz altarpiece made by Lucas Cranach the Younger in 1584 (now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg) is a remarkable example of the heart’s ongoing presence in Reformation circles.

  Many smaller hearts were also found in Lutheran and Calvinist emblem books. Georgette de Montenay’s Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes (Christian Emblems or Mottos), published in Lyon in 1567 and 1571, quickly made its way into Calvinist circles in France and Switzerland. Several of its fine plates, made by the French engraver Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey, contained striking heart images. One of them, titled Non tuis viribus (Not by Your Own Strength), shows a human heart drawn upward by a magnet, symbolizing Christ. Without the text it would be difficult to unravel the meaning of this bizarre configuration; fortunately the caption tells us that God, in the form of Christ, is the true magnet both for the material world and for the soul. Only God can effect human redemption—not man’s virtue, nor his work, nor his merit. “In short, he [man] has nothing except through [God’s] grace and mercy” (“Bref, il n’a rien que par grace & merci”). The Protestant doctrine of redemption solely through God’s grace, as opposed to the Catholic notion of good works, has rarely been stated more succinctly.

  Another fine engraving (Figure 24) shows a disembodied hand in the clouds holding the end of a piece of string attached to a large heart that is touching the ground. The French text tells us that “God sees everything, and penetrates the most subtle hearts / to their depths.” Through a combination of picture and motto, this emblem portrays the biblical bond between man and the divine. Like Jews, Catholics, and Muslims before them, Protestants believed that God sees into every person’s heart and that each heart is like a little homunculus containing the entirety of a person’s spiritual, psychological, and moral self.

  FIGURE 24. Jean Marcorelle (engraver), “Quas Iam Quaeras Latebras,” 1567. From Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes, Glasgow University, Glasgow, Scotland.

  A third engraving shows a large heart topped by a royal crown, which is held in the outstretched hand of a figure hidden behind clouds. And if one has any doubts as to its meaning, the poem below it begins, “The King’s heart is in the hand of God” (“Le coeur du Roy est en la main de Dieu”).

  Montenay’s emblem book is a fine example of how Protestants appropriated the heart and made it their own. Because Reformation thinkers made a sharp distinction between the realms of matter and spirit, they did away with the gaudy flesh-and-blood hearts of Jesus and Mary along with the material relics of saints. But they accepted the symmetrical heart icon because it was abstract enough for their sober style.

  THE GERMAN LUTHERAN WRITER DANIEL CRAMER TOOK up the heart in his Emblemata sacra (Sacred Emblems), published in Frankfurt in 1624. One of the emblems called “Probor” (“I am tested”) shows God’s hands emerging from the clouds and placing a heart within a sturdy, round oven. This literal trial by fire suggests that the Christian heart needs ritual purgation—deep personal introspection that may cause pain but will ultimately produce a purer heart and stronger faith.

  The seventeenth century saw the growth of the heart icon in both Protestant and Catholic emblem books and sometimes in highly original formats. For instance, the engraver Antonius Wierix made a series of eighteen plates featuring the heart in the hands of a playful infant Jesus. Jesus is shown piercing the heart with his arrows and forcing Profane Love to flee from within. In another image Jesus knocks at the door of the heart, enters, and drives away slimy creatures. In another, Jesus takes up a broom and brushes out a cascade of filth from the heart. Beginning with a French edition (Le Coeur dévôt, Paris, 1626), Wierix’s plates made their way into several different European emblem books, all of which portrayed interventions Jesus made into a Christian heart.

  The Schola Cordis (The School of the Heart) written by the Benedictine priest Benedictus van Haeften in 1640 was also very inventive in its heart imagery. In one illustration the heart is weighed on a scale; in another it is reflected in a mirror; in others it is crowned with thorns, crushed in a press, and tied with knots. Haeften’s influential book intended for Catholics had a second life a generation later in the Protestant world when it was transformed by the English clergyman Christopher Harvey into a verse treatise titled The School of the Heart, or, The Heart of It Self Gone Away from God (1676). Harvey presented the old theme of exchanging one’s heart with Jesus’s heart in the following manner:

  The only love, the only fear thou art,

  Dear and dread Saviour, of my sin-sick heart.

  Thine heart thou gavest, that it might be mine:

  Take thou mine heart, then that it may be thine.

  In comparison with the heart exchanges envisioned by Gertrude of Helfta five centuries earlier, here one finds absolutely no trace of sensual intimacy. Harvey, a Puritan, offers his own “sin-sick heart” to Jesus and receives the heart of his savior with fear and trembling. Though the heart is featured prominently in the book’s title, only one illustration actually depicts it. An eye-catching engraving for Emblem 18, “The Giving of the Heart,” shows a woman offering her heart to God before a mirror held by a winged youth (Figure 25). Both the woman and the youth are fully clothed. The man across from her is neither a lover nor God, as he would have been in illustrations from a medieval romance or Catholic text; instead, a mirror held by an ambiguous creature—half angel, half Cupid—reflects her heart back to her. Protestant theology asks the Christian to turn inward, to examine his or her own heart, to recognize its sins and hope for God’s grace.

  During the Reformation when Protestants destroyed many Catholic images, they shunned the wounded, bleeding Sacred Heart but allowed for the heart icon to survive as a symbol of man’s connection to God. God could read the entire moral history of a person inscribed upon his hear
t. Puritans in particular were ever conscious that “Gods eye is principally upon the heart,” as the pastor Thomas Watson told his flock.

  FIGURE 25. Christopher Harvey, “The Giving of the Heart,” 1676. From The School of the Heart, or, The Heart of It Self Gone Away from God, and Instructed by Him (Embleme 18), Stanford University Special Collections, Stanford, California.

  IN RESPONSE TO PROTESTANT UPHEAVALS THROUGHOUT Europe as well as its own internal reform movements, the Catholic Church initiated what became a century-long Counter-Reformation at the Council of Trent in 1545. New orders, such as the Ursulines for women, the Discalced Carmelites for both women and men, and the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for men promoted the Sacred Heart, which was placed in their churches and on the title pages of their books. Spanish and Portuguese conquerors carried the Sacred Heart with them to Mexico and Brazil and other New World colonies. In short, whereas Protestants invented new roles for the heart, Catholics held on to earlier ones already familiar to Europeans and increasingly available to devotees in the New World.

  Catholics drew from their medieval predecessors the theme of surrendering one’s heart to God. They also perpetuated images of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts, both in symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes. As medical science advanced, some pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary were made to resemble the plates found in anatomical studies. There was no attempt to deny the corporality of Jesus’s heart. On the contrary, the more it resembled a human organ, the more credible its capacity to be wounded, to suffer, and to feel compassion for all men and women, even sinners. At the same time Catholic men and women, fixating on the wounded heart of their savior, were moved to experience compassion in their own hearts.