Why do we draw the heart like this?

Drawing an organ of the body usually responds to a didactic need. Today, the medical illustration of the heart is very realistic, supported by current technology, from digital imaging to ultrasound. However, throughout the history of art, the way of representing the heart has undergone variations, between more naturalistic moments and others more conceptual. Why? A brief historical tour will give us some clues.

The realism of the Egyptian heart in mummification

In ancient Egypt (more than 5,000 years ago), bodies were mummified to preserve them. This process required the extraction of organs and fluids, but also allowed the body to be seen from the inside, providing very accurate anatomical knowledge. The heart was one of the few organs left inside the mummified body, since it was identified with consciousness, will and thought.

The most popular representation of the heart in Egypt is found in the Judgment of Osiris, a theme that shows how this god was helped by Anubis, the jackal, who weighed the heart of the deceased on a scale, along with a feather from Maat, goddess of death. truth and justice. If the organ was balanced with the feather, it was considered pure and the deceased was saved, but if he weighed more he was devoured by Ammyt, a hybrid of animals much feared in the Nile: the hippopotamus, the lion and the crocodile.

The hearts that appear on these scales are surprisingly realistic compared to what came after, and this is due to the medical knowledge achieved in Egypt thanks to mummification.

Greek numismatics creates a universal icon

In Greco-Roman antiquity, mummification as a funerary practice was lost, although with some notable exceptions in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. On the other hand, physicists, beginning with Galen (a Roman physician of Greek origin in the 2nd century), preferred animal dissection to human dissection. The Middle Ages inherit these Galenic ideas and maintain them at least until the 13th century, which has scientific, philosophical and religious foundations, in addition to the complexity that was and is involved in obtaining a human body to dissect it.

In both Greece and Rome there are few representations of the heart. However, between the 6th and 3rd centuries BCE, we have Greek coins from Cyrene (today Libya) that represent the seeds of a plant, the silphium –extinct around the 1st century CE– and which, curiously, have the shape of the icon of the heart at the that we are used to today.

Silphium, which had multiple uses (culinary, medical and veterinary) was associated, on the one hand, with fertility and, on the other, and, although it sounds contradictory, with contraceptive practice. For this reason, on some occasion it was associated with the goddess Aphrodite and this fact could perhaps be the origin of the heart shape that we recognize and use today and that is far from medical reality.

Arab and Latin hearts: the transition to realism

In the Middle Ages, at least two ways of understanding medicine should be highlighted. On the one hand, that which derives from science written in Arabic, frequently associated with the Islamic religion, which inherits Greek, Indian and Persian knowledge. And on the other hand, the one that is linked to Latin and that is widely developed in Western Europe, but whose apogee is after the Arabic one.

Arab medicine takes off from the 9th century, being Avicenna (10th century) one of its greatest exponents. Two centuries later, physicians such as Ibn Jumay al-Israeli (d. 1193) or Ibn al-Nafis (ca. 1210-1288) considered that human dissection would advance anatomical knowledge. Ibn al-Nafis is also the first to speak of the interrelation between the respiratory system and the circulatory system, indicating that the blood is purified in the lungs. This advanced three centuries to the discoveries of Miguel Servetus.

Scientific works by Arab authors sometimes included illustrations. Within the anatomical diagrams incorporated into scientific manuscripts, veins, arteries and hearts can be seen that, although closer to those made by the Egyptians, are located very high and centered, practically below the neck; position that does not correspond to the medical reality or the knowledge of the time.

All these perceptions of the Arab world pass to the Latin world and are incorporated into the universities from the thirteenth century, from where it begins to claim to implement dissection as a basis for anatomy studies.

One of the first universities that authorizes dissection with a teaching purpose is that of Bologna. There we find a paradigm shift, since bookish knowledge based on authority figures is replaced by the empirical study of the dissected body as the first step towards a good anatomical knowledge.

However, the images of the heart will continue to be schematic for a few more centuries, due to various factors, among which could be the fact that the artists were not usually present at the dissections; the practice of copying manuscripts that included text and image; or the taste for mental representations, where reality is ordered and isolated so that it is more easily understood by the reader.

From the rise of dissection in the Modern Age to the three-dimensional image

In the 16th century, already in the Modern Age, it has become clear that dissection has to be maintained in the university and be a teaching tool.

In order to represent human figures with anatomical accuracy, Leonardo da Vinci attended dissections because, although he did not paint the human body from the inside, he needed to know what was under the skin. For this reason, he goes to the hospitals where this practice was carried out in Florence, Milan and Rome, and draws from life what he sees. Parallel to Da Vinci, Andrea Vesalius, professor of medicine at the Italian universities of Padua, Bologna and Pisa, insists on the importance of the empirical method and learning from dissections.

Dissections became fashionable and from the end of the 16th century and throughout the 17th century, large anatomical theaters were built, such as those in Leiden and Bologna, among others, which have very large stages where they are performed before a large audience, including the educated elite of the moment is found quite frequently.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, anatomical crayons landed in scientific collections seeking a three-dimensional realism that painting could not provide. In the 20th century, photography does. In the face of new technologies, scientific illustration reinvents itself, with Max Brödel at the helm, to provide what photography did not do: mental, dynamic, didactic images, while being faithful to reality.

As can be seen, the evolution of the representation of the heart has not been linear; changes have occurred as medical knowledge has changed. But it is not only scientific progress that explains the mode of representation, there are many other factors involved. However, if he wants to tell his mother, his partner or his friend that he loves them, he will continue to send them the famous Cyrene coin icon: ❤️

This article was previously published by the Office for the Transfer of Research Results (OTRI) of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

Irene González Hernando, Professor of the Department of Art History, Complutense University of Madrid and María Milán García, Researcher of the project “Scientific Communication and Dissemination in the Transfer of Knowledge at the University”, Complutense University of Madrid

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.