Choreographies of glowing hearts. 
An Essay by Sandra Ramos

"Devotion is love for that which astounds us.”
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics Demonstrated in Geometrical Order

(I)
FRANCESCA AND PAOLO

During his tormented journey through Hell, Dante is moved by the sight of a couple immortalized by his own verse: Paolo and Francesca. Upon entering the second circle of Hell, where those who succumbed to lust are condemned, Dante and Virgil encounter a tempestuous wind — desire, wielding the full force of the natural elements. The souls of the lustful are swept into a spiral, and amid this sublime storm, two entwined figures draw Dante’s gaze: Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini.

"Poet," he implores Virgil, "I would speak with those two who go together, borne upon the wind." What drives them is the love they bear each other — "doves called by desire." Doves were sacred to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, who, from the Middle Ages onward, would also be surrounded by hearts. Back in the Inferno, as the lovers draw near, Dante is filled with questions, and it is Francesca who recounts their tragic tale.

The Circle of the Lustful (ca. 1825–1827), William Blake

 Francesca had been promised in marriage to Giovanni Malatesta, Paolo’s brother — a typical arrangement of political convenience in the modern era. Before ever meeting her betrothed, Francesca was regaled with descriptions that exalted not Giovanni, but the beauty of his younger brother. Thus, before laying eyes on him, she had already fallen for Paolo, a man who, like Giovanni, was also married. Adultery was the predictable end to such bewitchment. “And how did love overtake you so?” Dante asks. The catalyst was a book recounting another tale of passion: that of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, King Arthur’s consort. Reading together the moment when the knight and queen kiss, Paolo and Francesca, overcome by passion, mirror the act. “That day,” she says, “we read no more.” 

In the center
there is fire
not earth
and life
undulates
around
jeweled tresses
by night
attentive
to the blinding
hand
of the riddle
to which
I
surrender
the chant
and incense
of my
devotion

Clara Janés, Kráter or the Search for the Beloved Beyond

As might be expected, Giovanni catches them in the act and runs them both through with his sword. This union — bodily and spiritual — is, in death, rendered eternal. Their final embrace becomes an iron-clad wound, a metal-bound testament of devotion. Since that moment, they remain shadows turned forever toward one another. 

I shall be a sword
and umbilical cord of the storm

Clara Janés, Kampa

The Shades of Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta
Appear to Dante and Virgil (1840), Ary Scheffer

 

 

(II). THE HEART

The heart is an interior.
A fragment of flesh.
A landscape.

Every life is immersed in density.
A fold.

And yet, what lies hidden beneath the skin
might be revealed,
Francesca might dare whisper to Paolo.

The yearning to know becomes the yearning to see.

And what if one could purge the language of bodily metaphors,
of those flexible membranes that appear to veil ultimate depth?

Before another holds one’s heart in their fist.
Before the heart flips or breaks.
To cease speaking of the heart.
Scalpel, sword, word —
to reach the final fold of the other’s viscera.

Magical gestures.

It is little wonder that one of the earliest known representations of a heart appears in the hands of an antlered anthropomorphic figure wielding two sickles — a cave-painting known as “The Sorcerer”: the one who glimpsed intimacy. 

"The Sorcerer" was painted in a cave. In Gottfried von Strassburg’s telling, the lovers Tristan and Isolde also hide in a grotto. The cave is fissure, inaccessible place — perhaps a symbol too of love’s wound, a heart pierced by longing.

“The Sorcerer,” cave of Los Letreros, Almería (6000–3500 BCE)

Not without a reason
is the cleft consigned
to that savage country.
This means
the place of love
is not on beaten paths
nor among human dwellings.

Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan

The heart, in the Western tradition, is the seat of life’s force — and later, of feeling. From the Middle Ages on, it came to represent carnal love. The now-familiar graphic heart would not appear until the 13th century.

“Devotion” derives from the Latin devotio — “vow,” “consecration,” “offering.” It is surrender: an active love, intent on changing the world.

"HEART. The word encompasses all manner of movements and desires, but what remains constant is that the heart becomes the object of gift — even if poorly received or refused.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

In giving ourselves, we offer others an interior. We shed something — yet something remains. A boundary. (A heart within the heart?) Christian iconography greatly popularized this vision through the mystical experiences of saints such as Mechtilde of Hackeborn. In her visions, hearts abound, sometimes appearing as little houses one might dwell in. In one such divine rapture, she offers her love to Christ:

"If you willed it, I would offer you the precious gift of my heart."

To which Christ replies:

"No gift would please me more than to have a house in your heart, where I might dwell and delight. This house must have only one window through which you will speak to men and receive my gifts."

She understood then that her mouth must be the only window — to administer God’s words, doctrine, and comfort to those who approached her.

A transparent, open heart signifies access to one’s innermost being. Here, Mechtilde’s declaration of love for God. Christianity linked the heart to the soul. In Islam, however, the heart was seen as a center of intellect, of knowledge. Our contemporary hearts echo both: we know, we feel, we love, and — from recordari (Latin for “to pass again through the heart”) — we remember.

Anne Wolf’s textile heart sculptures embody this layered resonance: created from scraps of jeans worn in her youth, denim becomes the organic matter of memory. The preserved fabric, saturated with remembrance and the grief of a lost child, forms fragile organs. Their threads chart our emotional states, delicate as flesh.

The pericardia drawn by Vesalius and other Renaissance anatomists resemble leaves shielding floral intimacy. In non-scientific contexts, the heart — like love — grows abstract, morphing into geometric form, into concept.

According to Barthes, the language of love is a language of devotion. Love cloaks the beloved in a textile of reverence — a fabric that extends to all they touch. Fascinated, senses heightened, we stretch the membrane of our universe and come to venerate a constellation of objects. We read the world from elsewhere.

"OBJECTS. Every object touched by the beloved becomes part of their body,
and the subject clings to it with passion.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

The Influence of Venus. Miniature from the Epistles of Othea
to Hector, Christine de Pizan, Paris, c. 1406

(III). THE SWAN

What sign do you make, O Swan, with your arched neck
as you pass the sad and wandering dreamers?
Why so silent, you who are white and fair,
tyrant of the waters and unmoved by the flowers?

Rubén Darío, Azul. Songs of Life and Hope

Unlike other birds, swans are rarely seen in flight. We imagine them gliding across calm lakes, in that state so often evoked by symbolist poets. Their ethereal presence transports us into an enchanted realm of pure fantasy. Sunlight reflects off the transparent surface, while the swan, silent, waits for the moment to sing. In this vision of grace, the bird refrains from singing until the farewell — now emitting melancholic tones, arrows from a shy Cupid aimed at the object of devotion.

Despite its fragility, despite its fleeting appearance when spotted on the lagoon, the swan remains one of love’s enduring metaphors — for that faithful love that seeks to become eternal.

I love delicacy,
and love, light, sun, and beauty
have been granted me.

Sappho, Hymn to Aphrodite

Svanen, No. 1 (1915), Hilma af Klint

 But this lagoon that now fills our mind signifies much more. Our swan becomes a guide in a spiritual quest. Consider the first painting in The Swan series by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint: we see two swans — black and white — facing each other in mirrored symmetry. Clearly, the message concerns the complementarity of opposites. The swans appear to seal their union with a kiss. To contemplate this canvas is to confront our dual nature — dark and luminous at once. Af Klint’s work has often been interpreted as a visual dialogue between pairs: life and death, light and shadow, masculine and feminine. Though glorified as a feminine symbol in Swan Lake, in Greco-Roman myth the swan carried a masculine charge — as in the tale of Leda and the Swan, where Zeus, taking swan form, rapes Leda. Here, Af Klint seems to remind us that beneath difference lies unity. Antithesis, then, becomes a point of contact. Plato’s ardent lover, inflamed by Eros, is also driven by such a quest. In the Phaedrus, Socrates describes the lover as possessed by enthousiasmos — a force that impels the soul to transcend itself and access a higher knowledge.

A devotee of spiritualism and well-versed in alchemical traditions that associated the swan with androgyny, Af Klint sought to reflect the swan’s mystical power of purification and elevation. From the perspective of the love discourse, the swan’s neck forms a curve — a question mark. As if bowing to the beloved, seized by desire. As if tracing the initial of their name across the black field of the sheets. Af Klint, too, dedicated years to drawing letters, believing that such undulations tied us to the natural world.

Swan No. 21, Hilma af Klint

IV. THE BRAIDED HAIR

The bodies of Francesca and Paolo entwine
as do the syllables penned by Clara Janés,
and the abstract swans imagined by Hilma af Klint.

Braids gather time, sediments of the past.
In alchemy, the knot is metaphor for infinite union.

Tresses knotted, arms lengthened in embrace —
in love one is willing to tangle, to coil into the other’s body.

Some say ivy is the plant most like hair.
We wait — and wait so long — our hair grows.
To unbraid: might it mean to access the secret?

“Once, braids were tokens of love. In old romantic serials,
women would shear their hair in homage to their beloved.”
Margo Glantz, The Wandering Hair

If we examine our own biographies, surely we can recall some woman in the family lovingly preserving a braid or lock wrapped in cotton cloth. Perhaps we might see these domestic relics as contemporary icons. Shrouded in white cloth or tucked into antique lockets, such preserved hair carries a ghostly, sacred aura: it evokes the absent other, makes them present. Lovers parted would often exchange locks of hair, sometimes perfumed and wrapped in sumptuous fabric, to awaken memory and stir the beloved’s senses. These curls become relic-remembrances — souvenirs d’amour worn close to the heart.

And in the darkness,
hearts aglow

Weyes Blood, Hearts Aglow

Victorian brooch made of hair in the shape of a bow with heart pendant

These practices, codified with sentimental value from the Middle Ages onward, find their origins in Pharaonic Egypt, where men and women would cut and braid their hair in mourning. If hair has become a form of memory, it is because it was understood as trace, as testimony, as something that outlives us. Back in the 19th century, Godey’s Lady’s Book, an American women’s magazine, drew a parallel between love (whether passionate or platonic) and hair, emphasizing their shared aura of eternity:

“Hair is at once the most delicate and lasting of our materials, and survives us like love. Its lightness, its softness, elude the idea of death. With a lock of a child’s or a friend’s hair, one almost looks into Paradise and whispers: I have a piece of you, and it is not unworthy of your being.”

Locks, whether loose or braided, become spirals and shells — symbols of evolution. They flirt with natural forms and with the geometric language of Hilma af Klint. Do they not recall the whirlwind of our ill-fated lovers, Paolo and Francesca, as drawn by William Blake? In 19th-century craftsmanship, hair became initials, garlands, bouquets, landscapes, cords. One cannot help but think of embroidery threads — especially considering the high esteem of hairwork in Victorian mourning jewelry.

“I bought her a tortoiseshell comb for her hair,
and she cut it to buy me a pure heart.”
Margo Glantz, The Wandering Hair

Group I, Primordial Chaos, No. 5 (1906–1907), Hilma af Klint

In the name of wonder, answering our radiant hearts, we give ourselves.
We tangle our tresses. We cut them. We adore the braid of another.

Essay by Sandra Ramos

Bibliographic references
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