Like love itself, Saint Valentine, as it turns out, is something of a mystery. Way back when, in ancient Rome, several martyred saints were named Valentine, or Valentinus. And whichever individual or composite of them emerged to eventually become the Saint Valentine seems always to have been floating in the realm of myth. ARTKABINETT social network for fine art collectors has viewed the presentation of this myth in many artworks
One early writer, Jacobus de Voragine, refers to the saint in his book Legenda Aurea as a fellow who was beheaded because he wouldn’t deny Christ in front of Emperor Claudius — in the year 280, almost a thousand years before Voragine’s book became a sensation of the High Middle Ages.
This Valentine is revered for having restored the sight and hearing to his jailer’s daughter before getting his head lopped off.
How did Valentine become linked with chubby cherubs and love arrows, let alone chocolate and Champagne?
Again, no one’s quite sure. The Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, referring to possibly the same Valentinus as Voragine, suggests he was beheaded because he’d been caught marrying Christian couples at a time when Claudius II was busy persecuting pretty much any Christian his soldiers ran across.
The act of marrying people, of bringing lovers together, might be the seed of the legend.
Others suggest that the sentiment of the tradition was pretty much invented by Geoffrey Chaucer and his crowd in the process of mythologizing chivalry and medieval romance, and others yet argue that what Claudius and Chaucer might have begun, those frisky Victorians grabbed by the lacy undergarments and made wholly their own.
Exactly when FTD and the nursery industry of America entered the picture is not fully explained. Cy Twombley's work above might also fit the bill as a wonderful expression of devotion to your lover
How we got here is a puzzle, and yet, here we are, at the Valentine’s Day of modern times, with all of its traditions, temptations and demands. Not, all in all, a bad place to be, unless like a dope you forget all about it and schedule a poker game with the boys instead.
