Virgin Mary Sacred Heart Frame
3D box frame with a real preserved rabbit heart on a back drop of the blessed Virgin Mary.
No need to worry about odour or decomposition as the heart is perfectly preserved although best kept out of direct sunlight to prevent colours fading
Frame Dimensions
245cm x 19.5cm x 3.5cm
HANDMADE WITH LOVE AND PROFANITY
Have you ever wondered why the heart became the universal symbol of love, grief, and devotion? Today, hearts are mostly symbols we print, wear, and exchange, especially on Valentine’s Day. Yet beneath this gentle symbolism lies a history steeped in the intensity of human suffering and longing.
Historically, the heart was treated as materially and symbolically significant. In medieval and early modern Europe, it was understood as the seat not only of love and loyalty but of longing, ambition, and sorrow so sharp it could feel almost unbearable. Emotions were not abstract; they were embodied experiences, pressing upon the chest as a physical weight. Cultural practices such as the removal and preservation of hearts after death reveal how profoundly these feelings were felt. The heart was preserved in reliquaries or urns as a repository of desire, devotion, and unfulfilled ambitions, a tangible vessel for emotions that could not die with the body.
Physical remains including hair, bones, and occasionally preserved hearts were kept close to the living as anchors of memory and consolation. Extreme sorrow was believed to threaten life itself, particularly for women, and these preserved hearts were thought to steady the bereaved, containing grief that otherwise might consume them. These objects were not decorative. They functioned as lifelines, offering a fragile form of emotional survival in the face of loss.
From a cultural-theoretical perspective, such practices reveal how societies have historically negotiated the interplay of pain, desire, and mortality. The heart became a locus for both the most intimate ambitions and the most wrenching affections, a place where longing, devotion, and grief coalesced into palpable intensity. Perhaps this persists today because the experience itself endures. Love, ambition, and sorrow are still felt in the chest, insistent, pressing, and often unbearable. Modern Valentine’s hearts, keepsakes, and memorial tokens are the symbolic descendants of this long tradition, preserving not just affection but the ache of attachment.
And yet, amid all this agony, the heart has also become the emblem of union. Two hearts intertwined bear their joys and sorrows together. Even in the weight of longing and grief, connection transforms pain into something bearable. It is love, shared and felt deeply, that gives our lives their meaning and makes the world worth carrying in our hearts.