The coronavirus is stealing so much of our humanity. In recent days we wrote about FirstOnLine on the embrace as an iconic, symbolic, essential manifestation in human relationships. Two people who approach each other, who intertwine their arms and bodies represent the vastest palette of feelings ranging from friendship to love. "Keeping distances" like measuring the physical separation between individuals in centimeters is, and perhaps will be for a long time to come, the hard price to pay for this drama that we are all experiencing. The Embrace therefore as a symbol, sign and meaning of a moment in our history which risks becoming epochal if we do not soon return to its "normality".
But there is another equally iconic and symbolic behavior, which is also at very high risk and threat: the kiss. In the social sciences, in anthropology in particular (Desmond Morris), the kiss seems to originate from when ancient prehistoric mothers chewed food and then passed it through their mouths to their little ones. Subsequently, the kiss underwent various "mutations" and in different areas of the world it has different meanings and symbolic codes. In the West, on the other hand, it has established itself as a manifestation of a strong relationship between two people, whether they are linked by a simple affective system or by a love and sexual relationship drive.
Art, in all its representations and throughout its history, could not fail to grasp this moment so significant in human nature. In the Roman Villa in Piazza Armerina there is a mosaic with a beautiful figure of a "Roman" kiss (historians have written of "ius osculi") and, also from the Roman era, the beautiful kiss taken from the frescoes of Pompeii (now in the Archaeological Museum of Naples). It is then necessary to arrive at Giotto, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, around 1300 to observe what is considered the first "kiss" in the history of art where Anna and Gioacchino, the parents of the Virgin, exchange the most important gesture of Love. The kiss that Dante receives from Virgil and writes in canto VIII of the Inferno will arrive after a couple of centuries: "Lo color then with his arms he encircled me; kiss me his face, and said: « Alma disdainful, blessed is she who was incised in you!". It is a gesture that does not seem to have received an artistic "transcription" but has certainly marked an important step in the social "reading" of the kiss.
To arrive in the modern era, sculpture and painting have shown the kiss in masterpieces of art history. We mention only a few of the most famous: we have already written about Auguste Rodin with the embrace and no less is his work on the kiss; before him still Antonio Canova with his masterpiece Love and Psyche; finally, the very modern Bacio di Constantin Brâncusi and Jeff Coons' provocative marble kiss. Painting, on the other hand, has given us perhaps more iconic images, more solid in memory: that of Francesco Hayez, preserved in Brera, could be the best known and used in a thousand variations. But maybe it is The Lovers by Rene Magritte the one that brings us back to the present day, with the two figures covered by a veil at the moment of kissing, just as it could now happen with the use of antivirus masks. Don't forget Picasso's The Kiss.
Finally, the kiss in the history of cinema deserves a separate paragraph. From the first "The Kiss" which was projected on a large screen in 1896, arousing great scandal and disapproval, to the best known of the last century. We mention a few: in the almost absolute first place Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca" is the inimitable sequence ever shown on the big screen. Following a kiss for the world of children (but not only), that of the Prince to Sleeping Beauty, the famous animated masterpiece of Disney like the one between "Lady and the Tramp". How can we forget Gertie's kiss to the alien in “ET”. Mandatory to cite "Gone With the Wind" with Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh.
To stay with the symbolism of the images, the photograph taken in Times Square in 1945, at the end of the Second World War, between a Red Cross nurse and a sailor deserves one last mention. It was the end of a universal drama and what but a passionate kiss could best illustrate it?
