Antonie de Saint-Exupéry’s novel, The Little Prince, highlights the human error with which we transform love into something else. Mimicking our partner in the wrong way, we believe we find the perfect duality by taking possession of the person. In the chapter “The Little Prince and the Rose”, the flower and the protagonist have a conversation in which they differ about what they feel for each other: love and affection, love and want. According to the author, who projects his worldview in the dialogues of both characters, these two feelings are not the same.
Loving is not about seeking others who fulfill the personal expectations that our affection demands, much less about forcing what is not ours to be ours. We do not own what we desire, nor do we need it to complete us. Already by the effect of being born, we are complete beings who invent lacks to justify our attachments, those that we base on our needs, which, if in a certain case, they are not covered reciprocally, bring suffering, frustration, and disappointment. These last three words are derived from the expectations that were not fulfilled when the other person, whom we hope to have, decides to act according to other motivations that are not related to our own.
Just as we can be so mistaken when it comes to understanding what real love is in real life, some tropes or symbols in art have deceived us as well to think that some important art pieces are unique portrayals of true love. But besides the affection they might appear to represent lies some not-that-romantic stories.
The Bride of the Wind – Oskar Kokoschka
Far from a passionate romance, what these two lovers represent is the tragedy of a love that vanished with the wind, Kokoschka paints a couple that lies after the only thing that momentarily united them, sex, which is not at all a synonym for love. On the contrary, their faces show anguish at the knowledge that their romance was swept away along with the storm. That is why the artist never crosses the gazes of those who still seem to be together physically, but not united by a real feeling.
Susana and the Old Men – Tintoretto
Being one of the Italian painter’s best-known paintings, Susanna is a work that represents the Greek version of the Book of Daniel, in which a beautiful and fearful woman is spied on by two old men, who force her to intimacy by threatening to divulge that she has been left without her maidens to be with a young man with whom she is cheating on her husband Joaquin. They corner her under the promise of telling everyone this lie if she does not agree to be abused by the two men. At first glance, Susana and the old men seem to be a picture of peace in which, while she is reflected in the mirror, the man hidden behind watches her with admiration, undoubtedly another idea born of poetic love.
Leda and the Swan – Michelangelo
Swans are considered beautiful and elegant animals; in the painting Leda and the Swan, we see this figure accompanied by a naked woman, with whom she seems to have some intimate and beautiful encounters. The true legend that inspired this painting is based on the day Zeus descended from Olympus in the form of a swan to meet Leda while the maiden was walking along the river Eurotas. The ability to transform himself into any animal gave Zeus the power to seduce any woman he wished, whom he first deceived in a game of caresses and then dominated and raped them. He did the same with Leda, whom he impregnated with four children that the maiden had to beget by laying two eggs.
The Swing – Jean Honoré Fregonard
Although the flowers, colors, and expressions of the painting refer us to a highly romantic landscape in which the beautiful lady went for a walk with the man to whom her heart belongs, The Swing is rather a decadent allegory of romanticism. The woman who optimistically sees the young man lying on the flowers is the naughty wife of the man who pulls the swing towards him; the only thing that is captured in Fragonard’s painting is adultery, sin, and the aristocratic world in which everything revolved around an almost always economic interest, everything, even love.
Salome – Lévy Dhurmer
What seems to be a vivid portrait of a puerile kiss of love, is in reality the morbid kiss that Salome gives to the head of the decapitated John the Baptist, whom she had executed because of a promise that Herod Antipas had made to her about giving him on his birthday whatever she wished. When the day came, Salome asked him for the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter, as it appears in Dhurmer’s painting.
The Kiss – Gustav Klimt
Although this dreamlike conception of love always leads us to perceive two beings that seem to be interpenetrated as proof of love, Klimt was referring to a sad farewell between Daphne and Apollo that takes place just before she becomes a laurel. The process of metamorphosis that Apollo’s beloved is about to undergo, leads him to take her in his hands to prevent the earth from snatching her away. Daphne, more than in love, defeated, kneels to give herself to what will now be her home, the earth. That is why in the painting, in a very organic way, we see how on her feet appear some roots that emerge from the soil.
If you also thought, mistakenly, that these paintings encompassed everything about love, now you know that it is more about wanting: wanting to possess a body, revenge, abusing the weakness of others, and stopping what is no longer for one. Therefore, as The Little Prince explained to that flower, love does not exhaust love, it increases it, and the only way to achieve this is to open one’s heart to let oneself be loved and to do it in the same way.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
