The most famous kiss in the history of mankind is that of Judas to Jesus. A kiss of betrayal. But the World Kissing Day, which is celebrated tomorrow, certainly does not want to celebrate the heavy meaning that this gesture carries, but the simpler and more romantic one that recalls passion, love, friendship and affection. The kiss is a simple gesture, even a therapeutic one, which has always been celebrated in art, literature, music, cinema and dance. The first literary testimony of the kiss is found in an Indian Vedic text of the sixteenth century BC, but also in the Bible there are several kisses and in the Song of Songs a passionate one whose “tenderness is better than wine” is described.
For the ancient Greeks, on the other hand, the kiss was more of a greeting than an erotic-passionate one, as the historian Herodotus recounts, who provides a large catalog of the gesture in classical times, while for the Romans things change and two poets like Ovid and Catullus tell of passionate kisses between lovers. With the arrival of Christianity the kiss becomes “holy” and, obviously, chaste. But the most famous kiss in literature is perhaps the one between Paolo and Francesca as recounted by Dante in canto V of the Inferno: “When we read the desolate laugh / being basciati by such a lover, / these, that never be divided by me / the mouth all trembling was enough for me / Galeotto was the book and whoever wrote it: / that day we no longer read you forward “. How can we forget that Shakespearean between Romeo and Juliet, when he, before kissing her, says to her: “So don’t move until I gather the acceptance of my prayer from her lips”. And again ‘Anna Karenina’ by Tolstoy where Lenin kisses Kitty’s “smiling lips with caution”.
Without caution, however, is the kiss that the Italian painter Francesco Hayez paints in the famous picture of 1859 kept in the Pinacoteca di Brera, which has become an icon of the passionate gesture and manifesto of Italian romantic art. The two young lovers are placed in a medieval context and kiss with great passion. Equally passionate will be ‘The kiss’ by Gustav Klimt, made between 1907 and 1908 and kept in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna, where two young people, wrapped in long mosaic tunics, are clinging and kissing intensely, standing out against a background of gold. These are the years of the Viennese secessionist art of which this painting is the manifesto.
The kiss has always been the undisputed protagonist of music, both light and cultured. Absent in Italian melodrama up to Verdi, it appears in great shape in the romance-waltz that Luigi Arditi, a nineteenth-century Italian violinist, dedicated in 1859 to the famous Sienese soprano Marietta Piccolomini, entitled ‘Il bacio’, whose incipit is: “Sulle, on the lips, if I could, I would give you a sweet kiss … “. A riot of vocal virtuosity that made this romance the workhorse of the most reckless sopranos of all time. And again “one more kiss” that Othello begs from Desdemona after having strangled her in Verdi’s opera. And the passionate kisses between Tristan and Isolde in Wagner’s work of the same name, or those desperately evoked by Cavaradossi (“or sweet kisses and languid caresses”) in Puccini’s ‘Tosca’, up to Salome’s necrophilic kiss on the severed head of the Baptist in ‘Salome’ by Strauss and to the necro-Sapphic one of the Countess of Geschwitz to Lulu by now dead killed in the ‘Lulu’ by Alban Berg.
As for the song, the ‘bacistic’ repertoire is very vast, so much so that the late Ranieri Polese, critic and journalist, wrote a book published by Archinto with the eloquent title ‘Per un bacio d’amor. Kisses in the Italian song ‘. A journey through the sinful kisses told in the songs of café chantant, variety and tabarin, passing through the Thirties, when censorship forbids kisses and embraces in favor of petty-bourgeois desires such as a house, a thousand lire a month and happy marriages . Kisses return in the songs of the 50s and 60s, slowly and more and more explicitly transforming themselves into real sexual acts that now make even the boarders laugh.
Few, indeed, very few, kisses in the dance. Barely hinted at and fought in the mee-too era, like the one, very shy of the prince to awaken his Bella from a long sleep, passionate in ‘Carmen’, youthfully enthusiastic and fearful in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, uninterrupted like that of the ballet ‘Le Parc ‘di Preljocaj, the longest kiss in the history of dance, performed several times on stage at the Opéra Garnier in Paris by Eleonora Abbagnato, who Air France wanted to advertise its airline. In recent years there have also been more daring and explicit kisses, gay kisses like those of Calvin Royal II and Sergio Bernal protagonists of ‘Touchè’ which premiered last season at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome.
The longest kiss in the history of cinema until a few years ago, which ended up in the Guinness Book of Records, was the one between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in ‘Notorious – The lost lover’, a 1946 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock: three minutes. In 2010, however, it was overtaken by what the protagonists of the film ‘Elena Undone’ exchange. A sapphic kiss lasting 3 minutes and 24 seconds between Necar Zadegan and Traci Dinwiddie in the LGBTQ themed film by director Nicole Conn. Finally, it is impossible to forget the scene of the cut kisses of Giuseppe Tornatore’s ‘Nuovo Cinema Paradiso’ in which the protagonist Totò, now an adult, views a reel that his friend Alfredo left him as a last gift, containing the cut scenes of the most famous cinematic kisses .