Episode 84: Heartfelt History: Symbol of Love

This link will take you all the way back to the ancient Egyptians before even heading to the Greeks where we started. It focuses mainly on the medical side of why hearts are thought of the way they are.

This Time article does misstate that the heart didn’t mean love before the 13th century, which we know is wrong because the ancient Greeks knew the heart to be the seat of all emotion, including love, and linked the heart with reproduction and lust. But other than that, this is a good article for talking about how the heart was viewed in the Middle Ages and how it was represented in art.

This article also looks specifically at how the heart was represented in art through history, mostly after the Middle Ages, and it touches on how it was represented during early Valentine’s Day art. It does mention the myth that St. Valentine married lovers in secret as though it were fact, but if you listened to last week’s episode, you know this is just a myth that isn’t supported by documents of the time. Other than that, this is a good article to see the evolution of the heart in art through time.

And this History article talks about why the heart came to take the shape it did. It talks about the theories that I talked about in the episode, and the images that go with it are really interesting to look at.