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What shape is your heart?

Heart beat

What shape is your heart?

The human heart is a fist-sized muscle with a rounded bottom, smooth sides, and a thick arch of blood vessels at the top. So how did it come to be represented around the world by the pointy-bottomed, smooth-sided, cleft-topped icon drawn by doodlers, artists, and greeting card makers?

No one really knows. But neurosurgeon turned publishing executive Pierre Vinken has some ideas. In a fascinating little book, The Shape of the Heart, he traces the evolution of the heart’s image.

How did this… become this?

The ancient Egyptians, who believed that a dead person would need the heart in the afterlife, usually embalmed it in a special jar. So in Egyptian hieroglyphics, a jar or urn became the symbol for the heart. Since then, it has been represented as a pine cone, a hazelnut, a pear, a pitcher, and a flaming vase, among others.

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the shape we’re familiar with began to appear in paintings, tapestries, and medical illustrations. The cleft at the top probably entered the picture as the result of Italian illustrators’ efforts to draw a human heart without having seen one — dissection of the human body being outlawed at the time. Instead, they relied on conflicting descriptions of the heart by two of the most famous ancient Greek physicians, Aristotle and Galen. Their descriptions were sometimes more fanciful than accurate, and so were the later drawings based on them.

Why did the “heart shape” persist even when human dissection had become public theater and everyone knew what the heart really looked like? Dr. Vinken chalks that up to psychological and even spiritual forces.

Think about that the next time you draw a heart or get a valentine.

Last updated:	August 21, 2006