Look carefully at a small anonymous panel painting from the late fifteenth century, housed in Leipzig. A naked girl with long blonde hair has placed a bleeding heart in a small box. With her right hand she scatters sparks of love over the heart, while simultaneously extinguishing this fire of love with drops of water from a sponge.
Specialists have called this painting The Enchantment by Love. But a closer look at what surrounds this woman — and what symbolic grammar she inhabits — reveals something darker: this image stands, arguably, at the beginning of a line that leads directly to the stake.
The Garden of Symbols and What Grew There
By the late Middle Ages, the symbolic vocabulary of love had been elaborated for centuries. Animals, plants, objects, gestures — all of it formed a dense, layered language that medieval audiences could read fluently, even if we have now forgotten how.
On the panel painting, all the previous themes are present. Love that heats up and cools down. Boxes and hearts and dogs and birds and flowers and mirrors — all their symbolic forces are now bound together in a transparent web of painted reality. The entirely naked object of desire stands by the hearth — the place of female power and control. Her translucent garment serves more to reveal her sensual body than to conceal it.
Like a parody of the Annunciation — of which we often forget that it is a depiction of sacred love in which the Virgin Mary is impregnated with Christ — the girl gazes modestly downward. But the one who desires, the young visitor in the background, has no wings and must open the door to be able to look inside.
Rabbits, Dogs and the Words Hidden in Plain Sight
The anonymous painting participates in a long tradition of deliberate concealment. Throughout medieval love art, animals served to hide — or euphemise — the sexual act. The rabbit was associated with the woman, the dog with the man. In Old French, the rabbit was called con — the exact spelling of the word for the female genitalia. Three rabbits woven into a tapestry of lovers were not innocent. They were a joke that required literacy to read.
Equally, the small hairy creatures — lapdog, squirrel, ermine — kept as pets by ladies and woven into countless images of courtly love, were common symbols of male desire. On a fifteenth-century French gold ring with a sapphire, a squirrel is engraved on the inside — one of those small hairy house pets that belong on the lap of a woman. The French word for squirrel appeared in the fabliau L’Esquiriel, in which Robin searches in his beloved’s “belly” for the nuts she had eaten the day before, and when asked to explain the bulge in his breeches, answers that it is the squirrel coming out of its hole.
The symbolic language was double at every level. What appeared to the uninitiated as charming decoration was, to those who could read it, explicit.
The Painted Woman and the Pornographic Gaze
What distinguishes the Enchantment by Love panel from earlier imagery is the new medium: oil paint, which makes every spark and drop, and every fold of the body, visible and tangible in a new way.
The blank, almost empty facial expression of the young man in love in the background is perhaps the first example in Western art of what might be called the pornographic gaze — particularly because we, the outsiders, must identify with him, seduced as we are into staring into this mirror as his double. His gaze is intended to reflect that of the male observer who is supposed to be drawn toward this embodied image, ostensibly being pulled to it by her love spell, but in reality by the new magic of oil paint.
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As usual, the male desiring subject — apparently captured by the image of the desired object — is both the commissioner and the intended viewer of this panel. Here is a woman depicted not putting on clothing to cover the imperfections of her body, but scattering a series of spells around herself so that it can remain uncovered.
The author of the Ménagier de Paris, the household book written around 1394 for the instruction of a young wife, uses the telling term ensorclere — “to bewitch” — to describe how a woman brings her husband under control. This painting is better named “The Young Witch” because it seems to express the beginning of those disturbing and dangerous associations that, during the following two centuries, would lead to the persecution, torture and execution of thousands of women.
When the Language of Desire Became Evidence of Evil
The connection is not accidental or far-fetched. The same symbolic vocabulary — fire and water, heart and box, the woman controlling the fire at the hearth, the woman in possession of hidden knowledge and power over men’s desires — migrated from love art into witch trial imagery with terrible efficiency.
The woman who held the falcon held power. The woman who held the man’s heart held power. The woman by the hearth scattering sparks — she held power too. And power, in the imagination of the late medieval and early modern periods, was something women were not supposed to hold.
The witch hunt — that murderous form of institutionalised misogyny in the Early Modern period — drew on precisely this reservoir of imagery. The woman who could enchant, who could use hidden forces to control men’s desires, who had access to a secret language: she was the same figure who had appeared for centuries in tapestries and ivory carvings and illuminated manuscripts as the lady of courtly love. The admired had become the accused.
What had been a refined art of desire became, in the hands of the Inquisition and its manuals, evidence of a pact with the Devil.
The Symbol and Its Shadow
The symbolic language we have been tracing across three articles — falcon, heart, rose, rabbit, dog, fire, flower — was never innocent. It was a language of power, negotiation, concealment and desire, elaborated by and for the educated nobility, contested by women writers who recognised exactly how it worked, and ultimately turned against the women who had inhabited it as objects and subjects both.
The small anonymous panel in Leipzig is a hinge. Behind it: centuries of refined, beautiful, layered symbolism in which the power of women over men’s desires was celebrated, coded, and shared among those literate enough to read it. Before it: two centuries of persecution in which that same power was declared diabolical.
The ashes are still there, if you know where to look.
Primary sources include the anonymous Rhenish panel “The Enchantment by Love, late fifteenth century, oil on wood, 24 x 18 cm (Leipzig, Museum der Bildenden Künste); the Ménagier de Paris (ca. 1394); and the French gold ring with squirrel engraving, fifteenth century (London, British Museum).
