What lies inside the human heart? Any simplistic notions of love and hate are obliterated in art critic and curator Francesca Gavin’s collected artwork for The Book of Hearts, featuring varying interpretations by Noma Bar, James Joyce and Julie Verhoeven. For the London-based writer, it's the capacity of the symbol that is striking. “It’s incredible how broadly the heart can be visually played with. It can be whole, paired, cracked, broken, pierced, burning, locked, torn, cute; the perfect metaphor of the gamut of human emotion.” Gavin’s whistle-stop history of heart-shaped symbolism plots pre-historic cave drawings to ancient Egyptian burial rites and Medieval Christian cults. “It's so ubiquitous and accepted in everyday life that it is almost invisible. Inserting <3 into a text or email is almost second nature,” says Gavin, an editor at Dazed & Confused, Artsy and French Harper's Bazaar. “It has its own amazing heritage and sense of self. No other symbol quite packs the same punch.”

The Book of Hearts by Francesca Gavin is published by Laurence King on January 16.