“To Give One’s Heart”

It can feel as if “heart = love” has always existed. Yet in European visual culture it is largely a late-medieval invention: first as a literary formula (“to give one’s heart”), then as an image, and only later as an autonomous sign—something that can be held in the hand, given, embroidered, and turned into an object.

The manuscript where a heart is first given. One key point of departure is the 13th-century French courtly romance Le Roman de la poire (“The Romance of the Pear”), preserved as BnF Français 2186. In a miniature (folio 41v), the allegorical figure Doux Regard (“Sweet Gaze”) presents the lady with the lover’s heart—the poet’s heart. This is not anatomical, but a symbolic gift within a courtly ritual: feelings are expressed through allegories, gestures, and signs, as courtly tradition requires.

When the heart becomes an “object,” not only a metaphor. The next step is when the heart moves out of the book and into space, looking almost like a thing: the tapestry L’offrande du cœur / Le don du cœur (c. 1400–1410, probably Arras), now in the Louvre. A man approaches a seated lady and offers her a small heart—the museum describes it as one of the most frequent themes of courtly iconography: the “gift of the heart” as a poetic metaphor of love, familiar from courtly romances (up to the Roman de la Rose). The staging matters: the falcon, sumptuous clothing, ermine fur—love here is not a private emotion, but a social ritual of aristocratic life, legible as clearly as status and title.

Why the heart turned red. For the sign to settle, it needed a color that could “carry meaning.” In medieval symbolism, red operates in two powerful registers: the religious (Christ’s blood, the fires of hell) and the secular (love, glory, beauty). Red is not “cute,” but forceful and conspicuous; it suits a gesture understood as public and irreversible: “the heart is given.”

How the heart became a cultural code and a thing. Over time the motif begins to live “outside the plot” as a standalone sign. Medieval culture often treats the heart as a bearer of text and memory: in The Book of the Heart, Eric Jager shows how the metaphor of the “book of the heart” spreads—saints’ hearts “record” divine words, poetry inscribes feelings, and art can even depict hearts as books; there were even manuscripts made in the shape of a heart. This is why the red heart so easily becomes an object today—a pendant, earrings, crystal, an accessory: the motif has a long lineage.

Sources:

Musée du Louvre (Collections) — tapestry L’offrande du cœur / Le don du cœur, c. 1400–1410 (description and context of courtly iconography).

BnF Gallica — manuscript Li Romanz de la poire (BnF Français 2186).

Persée (Histoire de l’art, 1993) — article by V. Guillaume on the Roman de la poire manuscript (including the note that on fol. 41v Doux Regard presents the lady with the poet’s heart).

Utpictura18 (Aix-Marseille Université) — entry for the miniature “La Dame livre son cœur à Doux Regard”(Roman de la poire, fol. 41v).

University of Chicago Press — description of Eric Jager’s book The Book of the Heart (the heart as a “book,” a medieval cultural metaphor).

Princeton University Press (catalogue, PDF) — blurb for Michel Pastoureau, Red: The History of a Color (red in the Middle Ages: blood/fire + love/glory/beauty).