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Español Beyond amorous intimacy, it is a visual translation—thus also a public declaration—of closeness and solidarity. Recognizing its therapeutic power, the human sciences highlight its importance for the definition of the self in relation to others and in social interactions.
Embraces between lovers: chaste or passionate, dreamed or remembered, practiced with surprising ease or shunned as a trap, shared or imposed, celebrated as joy of body and heart or denounced as sin.
Women and men holding children in their arms, depicted not in the ordinary but in exceptional or emergency situations that give their gesture a demonstrative or resolutive function. The most widespread example is that of the Virgin with the Child, in the iconographic typology that was both a theological figure and a maternal reference of consolation and aid.
According to the myth of the androgynous being, men and women originally formed a single entity that Zeus separated: for this reason, in continually seeking their other half, they are mutually drawn to each other. The embrace that recreates the lost unity is a gesture of love and of those who make love. In medieval literary and iconographic fiction, it is a demonstration and figure of loving and of love itself, taking on the various meanings of the Latin term amplector: from encircling with the arms to sexual intercourse, which it alluded to without explicit description of what was not appropriate to depict.
The beautiful widow who is the protagonist of a novella in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron did not hold back. Disappointed by the lover she awaited who did not appear, she replaced him with a robbed merchant, in shirt and barefoot, standing outside her house. Fed and clothed, she found him so handsome and courteous that she flattered him with her words. The man was not displeased and, pretending it was out of gratitude, offered himself. Thus, although badly begun, the evening ended more than happily.
While the devotees of pure love limited themselves to it also as a contraceptive precaution, in other narrative contexts and in certain images the embrace is a gesture that fertilizes.
In Bartolomeus Anglicus' Livre des propriétés des choses, written around 1414 and preserved in the National Library of France, the miniature illustrating procreation shows a man and a woman (the man positioned over the woman) holding each other and kissing atop a splendid bed not at all disarranged.
They have not removed their clothes, she not even her elegant yet cumbersome headdress. Concealing their legs, the heavy curtain censors what would be improper to display, delegating the representation of the sexual act to the embrace alone—perhaps preliminary or perhaps occurring during the act.
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Milone and Berta, sister of Charlemagne, were in love and met secretly. When Berta discovered she was pregnant, they fled. On the corner tower of Fidenza Cathedral, a 12th-13th-century relief succinctly illustrates their story.
The lovers appear close together: Milone encircles Berta with one arm and slips the other into her skirt; Berta raises one hand in a gesture of acceptance and with the other holds a flower, perhaps a reference to the birth of a new life. The bold embrace, which the woman again undergoes, depicts the conception of the future and valiant Ronaldino.
