Eros and Thanatos on Medieval Roads
ithin the vast repertoire that made medieval storytelling a brilliant marketing project lasting centuries and, curiously, still offering fierce resilience against modern narratives, the inclusion of themes that persist today among its legendary myths stands out. Among these, two completely opposite themes stand out for their enduring nature and because they are possibly deeply rooted in the depths of the Collective Unconscious—with apologies to Dr. Jung—yet they bear witness to an unparalleled dualistic model: love and war. Generally depicted by medieval stonemasons in sculptures that, in a way, like painting, became the forerunners of modern storytelling, it could be said that there was no church, hermitage, cathedral, or monastery that did not include them in its message. The clashes between knights, which continued not only on battlefields but also in the form of aristocratic duels that so inspired literary styles like Romanticism, contrast with the specter of love derived f...
