Our longing for romance

In the month of February we celebrate Valentine’s Day, originally a feast day to commemorate a Christian martyr named Valentinus (d. 269) who is said to have served as a priest and to have secretly celebrated the Christian weddings of conscripts to the Roman legion against existing laws. Quite romantic!

In modern America we live in a culture that seems obsessed with romantic love—to the extent that all other loves seem eclipsed—even friendship and family bonds. When we use the word love, romance is what we usually mean. In Gustav Klimt’s famous painting The Kiss (1907–1908), we have a masterpiece of modern painting that “marries” abstract art to realistic figurative painting in service of romantic love. This painting is one of the most reproduced modern works—adorning everything from tee shirts and ball caps to handbags, bedspreads, coffee mugs, leggings, furniture, jewelry, and even oven mitts.

Though Klimt could never have foreseen the immense popularity of The Kiss and its extensive merchandising, he did enjoy a measure of celebrity in his lifetime. Despite his fame and the high prices that his work fetched, he leaned toward seclusion and avoided the popular café society of his time—preferring to spend time with his family and countless hours in the studio employing his fastidious painting technique. The idea that abstract decoration and romantic narrative could be fused with realistic rendering was a fresh idea at the turn of the 20th century, and his many other similar works explore this unique territory of realism and abstraction to great effect.

The Kiss isn’t Klimt’s only exploration of human love. He celebrates it in another large piece titled The Embrace (1905–1911), which is even more decorative and overwhelming in its patterning—with the figures seeming to be swallowed in the exuberant swirls and disks and golden tendrils that cover the canvas.

As an artist Klimt clearly touches something deep in our collective romantic psyche. Yet where exactly does romance fit within the Christian life? We know from Scripture and the traditions handed down to us that at least some of the Apostles were married. We know that early leaders of the church were often married women and men who lent their homes and their resources to the propagation of the gospel message—and we have an entire book of the Bible dedicated to romantic love, the Song of Songs. Romance is even an integral part of the creation narrative: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” The consummation of creation also points to love when God and redeemed humanity will be joined at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

St. Valentine, for whom our romantic holiday is named, served as a presbyter of the church in Rome in the third century—during the persecutions under Claudius II—healing people and overseeing a growing church. Supposedly, he sent a letter to the daughter of his jailer, healing her blindness, signing it, “Your Valentine.” A thousand years later, his feast day became associated with romance and couples began to express their love for each other by sending their own “valentines.”

But these days, romance often feels commercialized and commoditized. Just like modern-day valentines, Klimt’s works are robbed of some of their power by ubiquitous profiteering. But these images deserve a second look, in which we ponder our own longings for romantic love. In these paintings, Gustav Klimt has given us a powerful visual language in which the best of modern abstraction is wedded to Western art’s tradition of careful representation of the human form, providing two of the most breathtakingly beautiful valentines of all time.