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Ain Sahkri Lovers, (c 10,000 BC)
Found in a cave near Bethlehem and now in the collection of the British Museum, this sculpture was made at the dawn of the age of agriculture – and is the oldest known depiction of sexual love. Though the couple have no faces, and though their genders cannot be determined, they are clearly kissing: two lovers, hewn from a single stone and fused for millennia. (Bible Land Pictures/Alamy)
Attic red-figured cup, (c 480 BC)
Classical Greek vases frequently depict kisses, but only rarely between men and women. While public displays of heterosexual love could be ethically problematic, affection between older and younger men – as seen on this well-preserved ceramic vessel, in the collection of the Louvre – was viewed as morally virtuous. This is not a kiss between two equal lovers: the bearded older man towers above his clean-shaven paramour, grabbing his hair as he pulls him close. (Wikipedia/1848: purchased from Lucien Bonaparte, Prince de Canino)
Hercules and Omphale, 1735
Depictions of kisses are surprisingly rare in Renaissance painting – you are more likely to see Judas embracing Jesus than two lovers pecking each other on the lips. But in the early 18th Century, with the rise of the Rococo movement, erotic love becomes a more frequent subject for ambitious painters. Here François Boucher, one of the most renowned French painters of the ancien régime, depicts the Greek superman in bed with Omphale, the queen of Lydia, to whom he was enslaved for a year. (Wikipedia)
Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, 1787-1793
The Venetian artist Antonio Canova was, by a long margin, the greatest sculptor of the Neoclassical period in Europe, and his marble sculptures display an unrivaled gift for simulating flesh out of cold stone. His masterpiece of mythological love, in which the god Cupid awakens Psyche from unconsciousness, displays his typical elegance and sophistication – a conscious emulation of Greek and Roman examples in the age of the Enlightenment. (Wikipedia)
From Poem of the Pillow, 1788
Eroticism was a fundamental theme of Japanese printmaking of the Edo period, and Utamaro Kitagawa concentrated specifically on depictions of love and sex in his art. This is one of the more chaste images from his overpowering Poem of the Pillow, a cycle of twelve prints of almost unparalleled sexual intensity. Later Western artists, notably Édouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, turned to Japanese examples like this one for their own frank depictions of lovers and courtesans. (Wikipedia)
The Kiss, 1882–89
It is one of the most iconic depictions of romantic love in Western art: a man and a woman in each other’s arms, carved from a single piece of marble, locked in an embrace. Too bad about what comes after – the embracing couple is the married Francesca da Rimini and her paramour, and the two are condemned to hell for all eternity, as Dante reveals in his Inferno. Auguste Rodin originally intended the pair to form part of his massive Gates of Hell, but the subject was so popular he eventually made it into a standalone artwork. (Reji/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
Pygmalion and Galatea, c. 1890
Though today he’s best known for his Orientalist tableaux of harems and snake-charmers, Jean-Léon Gérôme also made numerous paintings and sculptures on the theme of Pygmalion: the sculptor who falls desperately in love with his own artwork. Although the Pygmalion myth, made famous first by Ovid and later by George Bernard Shaw, endures as a pleasing fantasy of happily-ever-after love, it is also an allegory of artistic creation – and of the slippery, even dangerous border between the real and the ideal. (Gift of Louis C. Raegner, 1927/Courtesy of the Met Museum)
The Kiss, 1908–09
On the margins of art history for decades, Gustav Klimt has lately undergone a revival in reputation – not that he ever fell out of favour with the hordes of tourists to Vienna’s Belvedere Palace who swoon before this wildly decorative tableau. Like all of Klimt’s art from his so-called ‘golden period’, this one employs intense ornament on the embracing couple’s gilded clothing, so thoroughly intertwined that the two bodies seem to be one. (Wikipedia)
The Lovers, 1928
The shrouds around the lovers’ faces in this iconic painting recur frequently in René Magritte’s art, and they may have a personal derivation: when he was only a teenager his mother drowned, her nightgown covering her face. Whether the painting is meant to symbolise true love, frustrated love or the unknowability of love, Magritte isn’t talking – to the end of his career, he insisted that his surrealist compositions had no strict meaning at all. (The Art Archive/Corbis)
LiTer II, 2012
One of the foremost photographers in South Africa today, Zanele Muholi documents the lives of African lesbians, both as a means of activism against homophobic violence and as a celebration of a community too often excluded from public representation. In 2012 her apartment in Cape Town was burgled and her photographs destroyed – but this surviving image testifies to the endurance of love in the face of all attempts to suppress it. (Zanele Muholi/Courtesy of the Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town)