Sacred Heart: a comment on the heart of management

The literary and artistic image of the Sacred Heart is well known within Roman Catholic iconography and more generally. It is the object of a special devotion and symbolizes love and compassion. In the context of the special issue, this article is concerned with some aspects of the imagery of the heart. It briefly traces the history of the symbolism of the heart from ancient times and then gives specific attention to the imagery of the Sacred Heart. It looks at the ways in which this image has been used in both religious and secular art and to the political uses of the symbol. In particular, the study gives attention to the iconography of the Sacred Heart in contemporary imagery including representations of Elvis Presley, tributes to Princess Diana and the way that the image has been employed by the Australian political artist Deborah Kelly, who on Good Friday 2002, produced an image of Jesus with barbed wire around his heart as a complex symbol of Jesus’s status as a refugee from Herod. This article considers the appeal of the image of the heart and its significance, both political and psychological. It considers the way that the heart has been used as a symbol in management, its significance in terms of emotional labour and, by recursion to the Sacred Heart, its role in the restoration of the body to the management text.