The wedding ring: from the vena amoris to the diamonds of Burgundy

A small circle of metal, without beginning or end, has become in much of the world the visible sign of a promise of love. The wedding ring has a long and well-documented history behind it, passing through Roman customs, the anatomical beliefs of antiquity and medieval and Renaissance jewellery. Retracing it helps us understand why we wear it on that particular finger and why in Italian it is called fede, faith.

The finger that leads to the heart

The habit of wearing the ring on the fourth finger of the left hand was already explained by ancient authors. Aulus Gellius, in the Attic Nights, and Macrobius, in the Saturnalia, report a belief attributed to Egyptian sages: from that finger a fine nerve was said to run straight to the heart. For this reason, they explain, it was the most suitable finger for a ring. In modern times this supposed pathway came to be called the vena amoris, the vein of love.

This is of course a belief with no anatomical basis: the veins and nerves of all the fingers follow the same course. But its success was enormous, because it offered a poetic explanation for a custom that was already widespread. It should also be remembered that the choice of hand has not been uniform across time and place: in several European countries the wedding ring is still worn on the right.

The ring in the Roman world

Among the Romans the ring was linked above all to betrothal, the sponsalia, rather than to the wedding ceremony itself. Pliny the Elder records that, according to an ancient custom, an iron ring without a stone was sent to the future bride at the time of the promise. Over time gold rings became common, sometimes decorated with two clasped hands, an image of the agreement between the families and of harmony between the spouses.

These clasped hands lie at the origin of the Italian word fede: the medieval rings that took up the Roman motif were called fede rings, because they represented mutual trust and the given word. The name remained even when the decoration disappeared and the ring became a simple smooth band, the form most people wear today.

Gimmel, posy and diamonds

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gimmel rings enjoyed great success, from the Latin gemellus, twin: two or three slender hoops that fit together to form a single ring. During the engagement each of the betrothed wore one part, and at the wedding the pieces were reunited. In the same period posy rings spread in England, rings engraved with short mottoes of love, often on the inside, visible only to the wearer.

An episode often cited in the history of the engagement ring is the gift from Maximilian of Habsburg to Mary of Burgundy in 1477: a ring set with diamonds, regarded as one of the earliest documented examples of this practice in princely circles. The mass diffusion of the diamond as the engagement stone is much more recent, however, and belongs to the twentieth century, when it was also promoted by major commercial campaigns.

From the Egyptian belief reported by Macrobius to the iron ring of the Romans, from the joined hands of the medieval fede to the twin hoops of the Renaissance, the wedding ring sums up centuries of the history of marriage. Its simple shape, with no starting point and no end, has continued to express the idea of a bond meant to last.