The dove: from Aphrodite's birds to the symbol of the couple

Long before it became an emblem of peace, the dove was the bird of the great love goddesses of the Near East and the Mediterranean. Its gentleness, its insistent cooing and its habit of living in pairs inspired poets, sculptors and sacred authors, who made it the image of tenderness and union. Its symbolic history is very long and many-layered, crossing different religions and languages.

The goddesses' doves

In Mesopotamia and the Levant doves were associated with Ishtar and Astarte, deities of love and fertility. The link passed to Aphrodite, whose sanctuary at Paphos, on Cyprus, was famous in antiquity. The sanctuary of Eryx in Sicily, dedicated to Venus Erycina, was also renowned for its doves: Aelian relates that on certain days of the year they were believed to fly off to Africa together with the goddess, returning some time later.

In Latin literature doves draw the chariot of Venus. Apuleius, in the Metamorphoses, describes the goddess rising to the sky in a golden chariot pulled by four white doves, in one of the episodes of the tale of Cupid and Psyche. The image was taken up countless times by Renaissance and Baroque painters, who included it in scenes of the goddess's triumph, often accompanied by flying cupids.

The dove in the Song of Songs

The biblical text that most closely tied the dove to love is the Song of Songs. The bridegroom repeatedly calls his beloved “my dove”, praises her eyes by comparing them to a dove's and invites her to come out from the clefts of the rock. In Jewish and Christian interpretation the book was also read allegorically, as the love between God and his people or between Christ and the Church, but its language remains that of a wedding poem.

Christianity added further meanings: the dove returning to Noah with an olive branch and the one descending over the Jordan at Christ's baptism, a figure of the Holy Spirit. These layers of meaning were superimposed without erasing the romantic one, which survived in poetry and secular art. In the Gospel of Matthew, moreover, Jesus urges his disciples to be as innocent as doves, reinforcing the idea of a gentle creature, free of malice and incapable of deceit, qualities that medieval moralists also recommended to married couples.

Pairs of doves in art

In Roman art, doves drinking from a bowl appear frequently. The dove mosaic in the Capitoline Museums, found at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli, is the best-known example and seems to reproduce a famous model by the mosaicist Sosus of Pergamon, described by Pliny the Elder. In later centuries the pair of doves became a frequent motif on jewellery, embroidery, greeting cards and wedding decorations, always signifying affectionate harmony.

From the goddess of Paphos to the chariot of Venus, from the verses of the Song to nineteenth-century cards, the dove has kept a meaning of loving tenderness that coexists with that of peace and purity. It is one of the clearest cases of a symbol that crosses different cultures, changing its nuances without losing its core.