Follow your heart. Give your heart. Break a heart. In all these sentiments, one probably imagines that familiar symbol rounded at the shoulders and pointed at the end.
It wasn't always that way.
In the western world, for nearly 1,500 years, the physical heart was considered to be shaped more like a pinecone. That was thanks to second-century Greek physician Galen, who evidently never looked at a real one. Since Galen believed it, so did everyone else, according to Marilyn Yalom, Clayman Institute scholar.
But in the 1300s, the modern shape of the symbolic heart began to take form, preparing the way for real knowledge of the physical heart.
In the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, the theological virtue of charity is depicted in work dated to 1305 as a woman holding a pear-shaped heart to God.
By 1340, that heart shape changed. In a French manuscript of that year, the symbolic heart was depicted in the modern form we recognize today.
Perhaps that was a good time for the symbolic heart to detour from the physical one. By the 1500s, Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius and Leonardo da Vinci overcame centuries of taboo against studying the dead human body and were able to describe the actual, physical heart.
Meanwhile, in symbolism, the stylized heart we recognize today became the standard. It has been used ubiquitously in items as diverse as Martin Luther's personal seal in the late 1400s to Milton Glazer's famous 1976 logo: I (Heart) NY.
