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Description
It's Valentine's Day, I'm a single woman in her mid-twenties, and I'm sitting alone in my apartment drawing a bunch of old virgins who've been dead for over a thousand years. Bah humbug.

So, instead of “going outside” and “actually socializing with a woman”, I'm gonna find a land mammal to blame for all this. Who better to target than the man himself, Saint Valentine? Now if I can just figure out which one… because apparently the Catholic Church recognizes at least three saints named Valentine: a priest in Rome, a bishop of Terni, and a dude in Africa. Given the dubious historicity of saints in general, it's frustratingly pedantic to pin down which is the one whose feast day is celebrated on February 14 or how many of these Valentines were in fact different traditions about the same person. Honestly I could only find one biographical story anyways, and most people seem comfortable treating the priest of Rome and bishop of Terni as the same person because their stories are pretty much identical save for some minor details which don't really affect the story itself.

The legend is pretty straightforward. We find ourselves in either 269 or 270 CE, the internet can't make up its mind. According to the legend at least, Roman Emperor Claudius Gothicus came to believe that the reason military registration was at an all time low was because men were a bunch of sentimental pussies who “didn't want to leave their lives and families behind” boo fuckity hoo. The Emperor therefore initiated the greatest cock-block in history by banning all marriage so that young recruitable men would have no loved ones to moan about. Obviously, this was excessively unpopular, and well those pesky Christians weren't exactly in the habit of doing what the Roman Emperor said anyways, so our protagonist Valentine just kept on getting his flock hitched like any other Tuesday.

Naturally, this pissed off Emperor Claudius, who had the bishop arrested and flogged, and when Valentine refused to denounce Christ or stop sanctifying marriages, the Emperor condemned him to execution. Like a true chad, though, Valentine shacked up with his jailer's daughter after curing her of blindness. On the eve of his execution, Valentine is said to have drafted her one last passionate love letter, affectionately signed “your Valentine”, hence the term in modern English. On February 14, Valentine was promptly beaten, stoned, and beheaded outside of the Flaminian Gate. His body was buried on the Via Flaminia, though evidently some creep dug it up at some point given how many of his skeletal relics are collecting dust in basilicas today.

So okay, obviously Valentine's biography lends itself well to a holiday all about love, but I think we can go into a little more detail about the history of Valentine's Day more generally. While Saint Valentine is recognized as the patron saint of lovers, we actually don't get any direct written association between his feast day and romance until the 14th century. I've seen it often claimed that the holiday actually has its roots in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, but much like with Christmas, I think this is reeeally a stretch born more out of a desire to “reclaim” Christian holidays for paganism. Lupercalia was a fertility festival celebrating the lives of Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, every February 15th. It consisted of priests performing a good old blood sacrifice, stripping naked, and running drunkenly through the streets slapping women with goatskin whips to give their system a boost and lessen the pain of childbirth. I guess you could call that a love holiday? Like look I'm not here to kink shame, but I think we can agree that's at least substantially different from the modern notion of Valentine's Day. I will say there it is slightly more likely Valentine's Day was used to replace Lupercalia than Christmas, as Valentine's Day was sanctioned by Pope Gelasius I in 496 CE, exactly one year after he'd tried and failed to abolish the Lupercalia festival because obviously streaking drunkenly through the streets whipping women isn't very Christian. We don't have any direct evidence explicitly saying that this was in fact the intention though, and again any similarities between Valentine's Day and Lupercalia are extremely superficial. There's no such thing as “stealing” a holiday, there's just different names for our excuses to do the same shit we've been doing for generations. When alcohol is involved, ain't nobody gonna remember what the day is called the next morning anyway.

We don't see Saint Valentine’s feast day associated with our modern concept of romance until Geoffrey Chaucer of Canterbury Tales fame. He penned Parlement of Foules to celebrate the marriage of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. Apparently he thought that mid-February was the time when all the birds shack up and his poem advocated that therefore this is the perfect nexus for humans to get together too. Man I wish that was how it worked. If human relationships were directly proportional to how much action the dinosaurs get, I'd have a girlfriend by now. I looked it up because I wanted to follow this up with a joke about fossils caught in the act, but apparently no dinosaurs have ever been found in this position. We have however found nine pairs of turtles who died doing the nasty 47 million years ago, so yes there are still literal fossils getting nine times more action than I am. Have you heard the stupid sounds turtles make when mating? How does that math work out?

Chaucer really seems to be the true nucleus of modern Valentine's Day, not the saint himself. I mean hell, even the Catholic Church largely dropped Saint Valentine from their calendar in 1969 just because there's so little information about him and his feast tradition wasn't all that substantial to begin with. At the very least, Chaucer’s interpretation got popular enough over the next century for it to land in Shakespeare's head, and Shakespeare being Shakespeare any idea he puts to paper is destined to become ingrained in the English-speaking collective consciousness for the next five hundred years. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Egeus come across the main love quadrangle sleeping in the glade after all the mishaps placed upon them by fairies, and as a nod to Chaucer, quip that these love birds are only now coupling up even though Valentine's Day has past. Hamlet meanwhile assigns a heart-broken soliloquy to Ophelia about how she wishes it were true that Valentine's Day really did have some special sitcom superpower, because then maybe her passionate night with Hamlet (the… the guy, not the play, that'd be weird) would’ve actually resulted in a stable relationship. Hamlet of course also famously debuted Elton John's hit song “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”, which topped the charts in the UK and- wait. Wait no. That's Hamlet’s 1994 animated film adaptation The Lion King. Nevermind.

Despite what I'd originally figured, Valentine's Day cards actually predate the Hallmark company. Hallmark wasn't even the first to mass produce stale cardboard approximations of true affection. The Young Man's Valentine Writer was published in England in 1797, offering pre-written snippets of poetry to aspiring suitors who were too creatively bankrupt to think of their own expression of love like real men. With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the reformed Penny Post service, it became affordable and accessible for the common folk of England to buy, package, and ship Valentine's Day letters to whoever they fancied. This of course was to the exclusion of the American side of the pond, who needed to import the cards with fancy decorations and professional illustrations from Britain if they wanted to get anything better than plain ruddy cardstock. Massachusetts denizen Esther Howland became to first to cut out the middleman, setting up her own factory in 1847 to mass produce fancy cards made with lovely laces and imported materials. It's an outstanding success story, like it ended up making her $100,000 dollars a year during a time when only like 10% of women had a job outside of getting beaten by their shitty husbands in the kitchen. This is the industry that Hallmark first tapped into in 1916, and while they weren't the first, they've certainly become the most prominent producers in the industry and the ones most responsible for marketing the shit out of Valentine's Day consumerism, because as we all know, our love of money far exceeds our love for our fellow human beings in the empire of American capitalism. Maybe that's the real reason I'm doomed to be lonely. Well tough, I'm not purging my wallet for a dating app. They make me feel rejected enough without a paid subscription.

Design notes, my primary base for this piece was “Saint Valentine Baptising Saint Lucilla” by 16th century Italian painter Jacopo Bassano. Who is Saint Lucilla? Fuck if I know. I couldn't find any reference to a story where Valentine ever interacted with any other saints, let alone anyone named Lucilla. Trying to search the names just brings it back around to the painting, so if anyone has any insight on that, please let me know, it's been bugging the hell out of me. Regardless, I liked the shapes. I mean clearly Bassano dressed everyone up in outfits more appropriate for the 16th century than the 3rd, but I felt Valentine's robes were just vague enough that it would be easy to turn them into something more Roman. For additional minor details, I referenced an 18th or 19th century altarpiece dedicated to Saint Valentine in the Notre-Dame d’Altbronn Chapel in Ergersheim, France, and I also threw a crown of flowers on his head as a nod (ha) to a skull presumed to be Valentine's currently decorated at the Santa Maria in Cosmedin basilica in Rome. See, that was a pun. Puns are funny. That means I'm girlfriend material.

Description
It's Valentine's Day, I'm a single woman in her mid-twenties, and I'm sitting alone in my apartment drawing a bunch of old virgins who've been dead for over a thousand years. Bah humbug.

So, instead of “going outside” and “actually socializing with a woman”, I'm gonna find a land mammal to blame for all this. Who better to target than the man himself, Saint Valentine? Now if I can just figure out which one… because apparently the Catholic Church recognizes at least three saints named Valentine: a priest in Rome, a bishop of Terni, and a dude in Africa. Given the dubious historicity of saints in general, it's frustratingly pedantic to pin down which is the one whose feast day is celebrated on February 14 or how many of these Valentines were in fact different traditions about the same person. Honestly I could only find one biographical story anyways, and most people seem comfortable treating the priest of Rome and bishop of Terni as the same person because their stories are pretty much identical save for some minor details which don't really affect the story itself.

The legend is pretty straightforward. We find ourselves in either 269 or 270 CE, the internet can't make up its mind. According to the legend at least, Roman Emperor Claudius Gothicus came to believe that the reason military registration was at an all time low was because men were a bunch of sentimental pussies who “didn't want to leave their lives and families behind” boo fuckity hoo. The Emperor therefore initiated the greatest cock-block in history by banning all marriage so that young recruitable men would have no loved ones to moan about. Obviously, this was excessively unpopular, and well those pesky Christians weren't exactly in the habit of doing what the Roman Emperor said anyways, so our protagonist Valentine just kept on getting his flock hitched like any other Tuesday.

Naturally, this pissed off Emperor Claudius, who had the bishop arrested and flogged, and when Valentine refused to denounce Christ or stop sanctifying marriages, the Emperor condemned him to execution. Like a true chad, though, Valentine shacked up with his jailer's daughter after curing her of blindness. On the eve of his execution, Valentine is said to have drafted her one last passionate love letter, affectionately signed “your Valentine”, hence the term in modern English. On February 14, Valentine was promptly beaten, stoned, and beheaded outside of the Flaminian Gate. His body was buried on the Via Flaminia, though evidently some creep dug it up at some point given how many of his skeletal relics are collecting dust in basilicas today.

So okay, obviously Valentine's biography lends itself well to a holiday all about love, but I think we can go into a little more detail about the history of Valentine's Day more generally. While Saint Valentine is recognized as the patron saint of lovers, we actually don't get any direct written association between his feast day and romance until the 14th century. I've seen it often claimed that the holiday actually has its roots in the Roman festival of Lupercalia, but much like with Christmas, I think this is reeeally a stretch born more out of a desire to “reclaim” Christian holidays for paganism. Lupercalia was a fertility festival celebrating the lives of Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus, every February 15th. It consisted of priests performing a good old blood sacrifice, stripping naked, and running drunkenly through the streets slapping women with goatskin whips to give their system a boost and lessen the pain of childbirth. I guess you could call that a love holiday? Like look I'm not here to kink shame, but I think we can agree that's at least substantially different from the modern notion of Valentine's Day. I will say there it is slightly more likely Valentine's Day was used to replace Lupercalia than Christmas, as Valentine's Day was sanctioned by Pope Gelasius I in 496 CE, exactly one year after he'd tried and failed to abolish the Lupercalia festival because obviously streaking drunkenly through the streets whipping women isn't very Christian. We don't have any direct evidence explicitly saying that this was in fact the intention though, and again any similarities between Valentine's Day and Lupercalia are extremely superficial. There's no such thing as “stealing” a holiday, there's just different names for our excuses to do the same shit we've been doing for generations. When alcohol is involved, ain't nobody gonna remember what the day is called the next morning anyway.

We don't see Saint Valentine’s feast day associated with our modern concept of romance until Geoffrey Chaucer of Canterbury Tales fame. He penned Parlement of Foules to celebrate the marriage of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. Apparently he thought that mid-February was the time when all the birds shack up and his poem advocated that therefore this is the perfect nexus for humans to get together too. Man I wish that was how it worked. If human relationships were directly proportional to how much action the dinosaurs get, I'd have a girlfriend by now. I looked it up because I wanted to follow this up with a joke about fossils caught in the act, but apparently no dinosaurs have ever been found in this position. We have however found nine pairs of turtles who died doing the nasty 47 million years ago, so yes there are still literal fossils getting nine times more action than I am. Have you heard the stupid sounds turtles make when mating? How does that math work out?

Chaucer really seems to be the true nucleus of modern Valentine's Day, not the saint himself. I mean hell, even the Catholic Church largely dropped Saint Valentine from their calendar in 1969 just because there's so little information about him and his feast tradition wasn't all that substantial to begin with. At the very least, Chaucer’s interpretation got popular enough over the next century for it to land in Shakespeare's head, and Shakespeare being Shakespeare any idea he puts to paper is destined to become ingrained in the English-speaking collective consciousness for the next five hundred years. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Egeus come across the main love quadrangle sleeping in the glade after all the mishaps placed upon them by fairies, and as a nod to Chaucer, quip that these love birds are only now coupling up even though Valentine's Day has past. Hamlet meanwhile assigns a heart-broken soliloquy to Ophelia about how she wishes it were true that Valentine's Day really did have some special sitcom superpower, because then maybe her passionate night with Hamlet (the… the guy, not the play, that'd be weird) would’ve actually resulted in a stable relationship. Hamlet of course also famously debuted Elton John's hit song “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”, which topped the charts in the UK and- wait. Wait no. That's Hamlet’s 1994 animated film adaptation The Lion King. Nevermind.

Despite what I'd originally figured, Valentine's Day cards actually predate the Hallmark company. Hallmark wasn't even the first to mass produce stale cardboard approximations of true affection. The Young Man's Valentine Writer was published in England in 1797, offering pre-written snippets of poetry to aspiring suitors who were too creatively bankrupt to think of their own expression of love like real men. With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the reformed Penny Post service, it became affordable and accessible for the common folk of England to buy, package, and ship Valentine's Day letters to whoever they fancied. This of course was to the exclusion of the American side of the pond, who needed to import the cards with fancy decorations and professional illustrations from Britain if they wanted to get anything better than plain ruddy cardstock. Massachusetts denizen Esther Howland became to first to cut out the middleman, setting up her own factory in 1847 to mass produce fancy cards made with lovely laces and imported materials. It's an outstanding success story, like it ended up making her $100,000 dollars a year during a time when only like 10% of women had a job outside of getting beaten by their shitty husbands in the kitchen. This is the industry that Hallmark first tapped into in 1916, and while they weren't the first, they've certainly become the most prominent producers in the industry and the ones most responsible for marketing the shit out of Valentine's Day consumerism, because as we all know, our love of money far exceeds our love for our fellow human beings in the empire of American capitalism. Maybe that's the real reason I'm doomed to be lonely. Well tough, I'm not purging my wallet for a dating app. They make me feel rejected enough without a paid subscription.

Design notes, my primary base for this piece was “Saint Valentine Baptising Saint Lucilla” by 16th century Italian painter Jacopo Bassano. Who is Saint Lucilla? Fuck if I know. I couldn't find any reference to a story where Valentine ever interacted with any other saints, let alone anyone named Lucilla. Trying to search the names just brings it back around to the painting, so if anyone has any insight on that, please let me know, it's been bugging the hell out of me. Regardless, I liked the shapes. I mean clearly Bassano dressed everyone up in outfits more appropriate for the 16th century than the 3rd, but I felt Valentine's robes were just vague enough that it would be easy to turn them into something more Roman. For additional minor details, I referenced an 18th or 19th century altarpiece dedicated to Saint Valentine in the Notre-Dame d’Altbronn Chapel in Ergersheim, France, and I also threw a crown of flowers on his head as a nod (ha) to a skull presumed to be Valentine's currently decorated at the Santa Maria in Cosmedin basilica in Rome. See, that was a pun. Puns are funny. That means I'm girlfriend material.