Art is the Solution

Sacred Love and Profane Love Source: Wikimedia Commons Today is Valentine’s day, the day most often associated with love in the Western world. Although Valentine’s day usually focuses on the idea of Romantic love, today I want to share a painting that explores a different sort of love. Sacred Love and Profane Love is the masterpiece of Italian artist Giovanni Baglione (who is best known in modern times as the artist who took Caravaggio to court for libel). In this piece, Baglione explores two different types of love: the sacred and the profane. By the seventeenth century, sacred love had long been a topic of philosophical and theological discussion. The ideas of the Greek philosophers were rediscovered in Europe in the fifteenth century, leading Christian scholars and theologians to examine the idea of Platonic love and agape , a concept usually used to describe the love between human beings and God. Sacred love was generally seen to be a pure sort of love: selfless, charitable, and u...