A history of love

It was not until the 1930s that brides began to get mar­ried in white. A decade ear­lier dresses had often been pink or yel­low. Be­fore that they were black. Until the sec­ond decade of the 20th cen­tury most women had only one good dress to wear for spe­cial oc­ca­sions, and that was usu­ally the dress they would be buried in. It is un­usual to learn such things from vis­it­ing an ex­hi­bi­tion, but until May 22 the Museu d'Història de Catalunya has T'es­timo? Una història de l'amor i el mat­ri­moni (Do I love you? A his­tory of love and mar­riage).

The mu­seum's new di­rec­tor, Jusèp Boya, promised a change of air at the mu­seum when he ar­rived and this ex­hi­bi­tion is an ex­am­ple. Boya's strat­egy is to turn the mu­seum into a forum where dis­ci­plines can in­ter­act, re­flect­ing Cat­alo­nia but also rel­e­vant to the wider world, and deal­ing with the past but say­ing some­thing about today.

The ex­hi­bi­tion is an overview of how love and mar­riage have changed since an­tiq­uity. The two con­cepts have not al­ways gone to­gether, and cu­ra­tor Xavier Roigé says that in Roman times, for ex­am­ple, “mar­riage was a bu­reau­cratic process, an agree­ment be­tween fam­i­lies.” In such so­ci­eties, love and sex were an­other thing en­tirely: “It was some­thing to­tally nat­ural. The idea of sin did not exist,” he says. In those times, every­day life was im­preg­nated with erotic sym­bols, and this ex­hi­bi­tion has many ex­am­ples, from lanterns and drink­ing glasses to a tintinnab­u­lum, an amulet in the shape of a phal­lus that was hung over the front door to bring good vibes to the house­hold.

The clas­si­cal world was one com­pletely open to sex –al­beit far more for men than for women– which was crushed by the ad­vent of Chris­tian­ity. Under the con­trol of the Church, mar­riage be­came a sa­cred in­sti­tu­tion that was en­tered into for a life­time. The ar­rival of the con­cept of broth­erly love at the heart of Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy brought an end to the sex­ual free­dom of the an­cients. How­ever, his­tory goes on and courtly love soon ap­peared, adding a fur­ther layer to the par­a­digm of love: “Trou­ba­dours did not sing for their wives, but for their lovers,” says Roigé.

The ex­hi­bi­tion ded­i­cates a good sec­tion to pas­toral love, a style to which Cat­alo­nia's rural so­ci­ety made a sig­nif­i­cant his­tor­i­cal con­tri­bu­tion. It is here that mar­riage re­turns as a tool to re­in­force fam­ily and fi­nan­cial in­ter­ests, al­beit with other pe­cu­liar­i­ties, such as the ma­li­cious re­ac­tions of the com­mu­nity when­ever some­one stepped out­side of the rules. A bell from Val d'Aran, which makes a great im­pres­sion on the ex­hi­bi­tion, was used to poke fun at wid­ows who were forced to seek refuge in the fam­ily home or for women of du­bi­ous rep­u­ta­tion who man­aged to find a hus­band: “The coun­try peo­ple would spend all night out­side their houses mak­ing a racket,” says the cu­ra­tor. In the rural world, love and mar­riage did not nec­es­sar­ily get on, com­pletely the op­po­site to the ideal of ro­man­tic love, which began with the upper classes and spread to the rest of so­ci­ety. At this point, the two con­cepts be­came in­dis­sol­u­ble.