They’re omnipresent in the jewellery world, a symbol of one’s undying love. But why?
When we were kids, hearts were bright red, symmetrical, puffy things. They sat smack in the middle of our chests, as bouncy as rubber balls and as taut as water balloons, pumping steadily away.
Hearts were symbols of what we felt for our mums and dads, grandmas and cousins, pet goldfish, dolphins and Billy Campbell from Melrose Place (or was that just me?) Hearts were for best friends, playground crushes, first kisses and Valentine's Day cards.
When we learnt that the heart was actually a muscle, slick and pulsing, asymmetrical and burgundy, and not even in the middle of the chest where it was meant to be, we were shocked.
What even was this thing we had been drawing, cartoonish and sweet, that was actually just another gross organ doing something vital inside our bodies?
The world’s largest flawless heart-shaped diamond, the Graff Venus, weighs 118.88 carats and was carved from a 357-carat rough rock mined in the tiny African kingdom of Lesotho.
It was bought by the London-based diamond jeweller in 2015 for nearly US$20 million, before being cut into a diamond the weight and size of a large hen’s egg.
The fictional blue diamond that featured as a silent character in Titanic, a 56-carat heart-shaped stone, was inspired by the Hope Diamond, a smaller blue stone found in India, but cushion-cut, as opposed to heart-shaped. Titanic's producers must have felt that the adjusted shape of their carbon character better enhanced the cinema-goer's experience.
Marketing squads would have us believe that the heart-shaped diamond, above all other diamonds, symbolises eternal love, and somewhere, someone is bound to purchase this enormous rock (too big, frankly, to be worn as a ring on any finger) as a symbol of their undying devotion to their other half, at a price for which most people would sell half their organs and limbs.
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Advertise with NZME.What do hearts have to do with love? Why is the heart so often attributed as the organ of love? (Quiet in the back, thank you.) We say we love ‘with our whole heart’, we talk about gestures being ‘heartfelt’, break-ups leading to ‘heartbreak’ and use the heart symbol as a placeholder for ‘love’.
It’s the brain, or more specifically the region known as the hypothalamus, that is responsible for our emotions, but ‘I [anatomical organ] you’ just doesn’t have the same vibe.
The Ancient Egyptians’ heart-shaped hieroglyph stood for memory, truth, understanding, and imagination. They carved tiny amulets from carnelian, a blood-red hard stone, in the guise of heart-shaped vases, which were buried with the dead alongside the actual heart, the only organ left inside Egyptian corpses. Jump forward several thousand years, and love hearts are everywhere.
They spring out of cartoon characters’ eyes and chests when they’re in love, they get drawn on steamed-up windows, and they’re always on the list of most-used emojis around the globe.
You’d be forgiven for thinking they were a modern invention, that the love heart was a modern phenomenon alongside K-pop, the metaverse, and the Kardashians. It’s odd to think they’ve been around in the modern form for over 750 years.
It’s believed that the first instance a heart shape was associated with love was in an illustration accompanying a medieval French poem, Le Roman De La Poire, written circa 1255.
There's a 15th-century tapestry in the Louvre, Paris, called Le don du Coeur (The Gift of the Heart) in which a man in tights proffers a tiny red heart to a woman in an ermine cloak, supposedly the very definition of courtly love.
Tiffany & Co.’s Return To Tiffany silver heart design, based on a keyring from 1969, is one of the most famous pieces of heart jewellery around, but by no means the earliest.
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Advertise with NZME.Wallis Simpson, the American socialite who married the former King Edward VIII (who gave up the throne to marry the divorcée and become the Duke and Duchess of Windsor), had a heart-shaped brooch made by Cartier to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary in 1957. Going back just a tad, there is a gold heart-shaped brooch in the Victoria & Albert museum in London that is dated to the early 13th century.
Jump forward, and the 1982 film Annie saw the feisty little orphan keep one half of a heart-shaped locket in the hope that her parents would return to reclaim her with the matching piece.
Even further forward, to 1994, and Hugh Grant's hapless Charles loses the groom's wedding ring in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and has to borrow his friend Scarlett's large, multi-coloured, plastic heart-shaped ring as a stand-in, eliciting gasps from the stiffly upper-lipped bride and groom.
Hearts were a common motif in the memento mori (Latin for ‘remember that you die’) revival in the late Middle Ages, when jewellery would often depict hearts alongside death’s heads, left by the deceased as mementos for family members. The heart-shaped diamond has been around at least since 1410, when a ring sporting one was gifted to Jean, Duc de Berry by Pope John XXIII.
Hearts as decoration are not, however, restricted to jewellery. Japanese label Comme des Garcons’ streetwear line Play is known instantly for its heart-with-eyes logo designed by Filip Pagowski in 2002, iterations of which are seen on collaborations between the brand and everything from Converse shoes to K-Way waterproof jackets.
Gucci recently sent out crystal-embellished clutches in anatomically correct heart shapes (aorta and all), while over the years, heart prints have appeared on the runways of Versace, Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gaultier and Rodarte, while Saint Laurent are currently going all Lolita on us with oversized LouLou heart-shaped sunglasses.
In te ao Māori, the heart, manawa, is the source of mana and whakapapa, but the liver ate is the source of love. You can see its shape in kotiate, the weapon that is said to be based on the lobed part of the liver. Contemporary Māori carvings called manawa are based on the European depiction of the heart.
In Edwardian times, pounamu (and deceitfully, Chinese or Canadian jade masquerading as pounamu) were carved into heart shapes by any old stone mason with tools and emblazoned with gold ferns, tiny kiwis, the phrase ‘Ake ake’ (forever more, everlasting) and served as colonial tourist trinkets.
Today, carved pounamu hearts by Māori artists have more heft and mana than their early 20th century counterparts, in keeping with the traditionally large format of other taonga worn around the neck.
In Christianity particularly Catholicism the Sacred Heart, that mystical-physical object of devotion is ripe territory for jewellery. The Brazilian jeweller Carla Amorim devotes much of her range to her faith, and sacred hearts in the form of gold-set pearls abound.
One of British bad-girl jeweller Solange Azagury-Partridge’s most famous designs is her On Fire ring, in emerald or ruby, depicting a central heart with seven baguette-cut stones flaring out from it, depicting the seven sorrows of Mary, Our Lady of Sorrow.
Dolce & Gabbana do an entire line of costume jewellery based on sacred hearts, boasting bows and other embellishments, while their Devotion range of handbags is adorned exclusively with gold-plated hearts all tied up with pearl-strewn ribbons.
Love hearts as we know them today may be most often associated with romantic love, sexual desire, crushes and Valentine’s Day. They’re seen as cheery, innocuous representations of love and/or lust.
They’re red and symmetrical, friendly and often in the form of cookies. But the heart, if it really is the physical seat of love, is so much more than that. It’s the seat of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, faith and the lack of it.
Next time you try and make a whole heart by making a half one with your index finger and thumb and joining it to a friend’s (or your dentist’s… Google it), remember that.
