The Love Symbol
What’s The Origin Of One of The Most Well-Known Symbols of Love In The World?
By Maria Fisher
From the first kindergarten ice-cream cone we drew, folded and cut out of red construction paper, that magic heart shape symbolized greetings of love on Valentine’s Day.
But it’s not really a heart, is it? A human heart doesn’t look like a valentine. It looks more like an upside-down mango − pointy at the bottom, wider at the top. A valentine heart shape looks like two ice cream scoops joined at the cones, hence the kindergarten fold-and-scissor hack. So why do we depict the heart the way we do?
According to PBS.com, the heart symbol is seen as far back as in Cro-Magnon times, where the European hunters used it in pictograms, although its meaning at that time is unknown.
Its association with the human heart goes back to Aristotle. He posed that, “The rounded end of the heart is at the top. It has three cavities. The largest being on the righthand side, the smallest on the left, and the medium-sized one in the middle,” in History of Animals.
Many historians attribute the heart shape to the silphium plant. It once grew in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene, in North Africa, and was likely a type of giant fennel, with crunchy stalks and small clumps of yellow flowers, according to Atlas Obscura.
Silphium sap may also have been used as birth control in ancient Greece and Rome, tying its origins to love and sex. The Romans were so enamored of Silphium that they stamped a heart shape into one of their silver coins.
By the Middle Ages, the heart shape found its way to popular art. According to the Columbia University Department of Heart Surgery, Francesco Barberino’s poem “Documenti d’amore” had an illustration of a naked Cupid shooting arrows and roses while standing on the back of a horse festooned in a scalloped wreath of flowers. Soon hearts showed up on tapestries, playing cards and other pieces of art.
An early 15th-century tapestry on display at the Louvre, “Le don du Coeur” (The Gift of the Heart) shows a man presenting a tiny red heart to a woman sitting in a field of greenery. The image was reportedly all the rage in aristocratic circles.
In 1440, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press and the proliferation of literacy did its part to spread the image of the heart as we know it to the masses.
The use of the heart spread to Christianity as well, according to Columbia. It became the image of the Sacred Heart of Christ and Martin Luther used it as part of the logo of Lutheranism in 1530.
By the 18th and 19th centuries, the heart was all over love notes and Valentine’s Day cards, as it is now in the 21st. It’s in our packaging, our emojis, on clothing and most importantly, on the homemade valentines we make and pass out in kindergarten.
