Note: I am not historian or expert on these topic so If you find any mistake or referencing error please let me know in the comment below and this is about kissing, so it’s going to be a very long post — bear with me.

When did I have my first kiss? My first passionate kiss, I mean.

Rain hammered Kathmandu that October afternoon in 2011. My sneakers squelched on the pavement stones as I turned the corner into Sankhamul — and stopped. There it was: Metco, a nice restaurant. I parked my bike on the curb and entered. Our go-to place to hide out and date.

The first time I saw “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss”1 on the main entrance inside, next to the counter, it was huge and almost life-size. Now I imagine how much it must have cost to make that replica at the time — I frequently write about this sculpture in my posts. This massive thing glowing under spotlights like some kind of resurrection caught mid-gasp. Cupid’s got his wings spread, planting his lips soft on Psyche’s lips, and her fingers are digging into his hair like she’s clawing back from death itself. It looked surreal and beyond human feeling.

Antonio Canova’s “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss” (1787–1793), marble, Louvre Museum.

I thought of my girlfriend immediately. She was 21 then; I was 22. We were both ripe with youth. I circled my head to look for her around the restaurant. She wasn’t there yet. Seeing me somehow distraught, the counter guy said, “She’s in the back already.”2 I walked toward our favorite place, just outside the main lobby, outside of the main dining area. That place was specially established for smoking — you could call it a smoking zone, but with nice dining area, chairs, and beautiful wall paintings.3

When I went backyard, I saw her. She was wearing blue jeans, a bit washed, and a glowing black t-shirt with yellow double stripes on the hem and a windcheater. I still remember that windcheater. I hugged her for the first time, and I felt like divine intervention between two lovers. I almost cried, “Leave us alone,” but that windcheater came between us. Smooth. Smelling fresh… like rainwater4 and detergent, maybe a hint of her perfume underneath — something floral I could never name, and underneath it all, faint but unmistakable, her skin, her sweat, her particular warmth that no detergent could wash away. I still recall those smells. I can’t convert that divinity into any words, and that makes me fucking irritable. How could I not have words to describe those smells! Whenever I feel low these days, I try to remember her windcheater and the very first smell of her nape.

We’d just separated for a few hours after two months together. Brutal breakup, the kind where you can’t sleep and everything reminds you of their shampoo. Standing there soaked and heartbroken, lots of crying on expensive phone calls, now recalling 18th-century marble lips, something clicked. Amazing, right? Mixing everything — past and present. When did humans first kiss? When did we start obsessing over it enough to carve it, paint it, film it?

This isn’t Valentine’s card fluff. While I was reading The Art of Kissing, the following quote reminded me of our whole story. This is 11,000 years of archaeology, religious warfare, Renaissance perverts, and cinema breaking every rule. And for readers’ solace, I’ll let you know that after a few hours, like in cinema, I rushed to her with my mother’s ring to propose to her again. She’s with me to this day, while I’m writing this. That’s the story — but what about kissing?

Later. Just keep reading.

As we’re entering 2026, I got my hands on a book called The Art of Kissing5 last year, and it reminded me of my origin or history of kissing myself. In this book, The Art of Kissing (Rossiter, Will, 1867–1954), trying to dig up the history of kissing, we read as follows:

Dr. Stormuth says that the word kiss seems to have had its origin in the practice of feudal times of expressing homage to a superior by kissing the hand, foot or some part of the body or, in his absence, some object belonging to him, as a gate or a lock.6

So if we try to find the origin of kissing, one of the most reliable answers would be to honor someone with lips. Again, I find this interesting in this book — it says:

Then again, kissing has been called lip-service and has been defined as the prologue to sin; more often, let us hope, it is simply a sweetmeat which satisfies the hunger of the heart.7

The oldest kiss we’ve got isn’t some fairy tale. It’s a lumpy calcite pebble carved around 9000 BCE by Natufian hunter-gatherers — the Ain Sakhri Lovers,8 dug from a Bethlehem cave in 1933. The British Museum’s got it now. Two abstract figures basically melting into each other, hips fused, heads tilted, lips implied-brushing in what might be a fertility prayer or just two people saying “we’re still here” during the Ice Age. I’m getting bristles on my neck just remembering this devotion.

Dr. Jill Cook at the British Museum says the figures are transforming, losing individual shape. I imagine this: Heavy little thing. Made me think about how your great-great-times-sixty grandparents probably felt exactly what you feel when someone breathes on your neck in the middle of the night. When you flip on your bed at night and feel the hands on your side, and you kiss that — desire’s older than language.

Photo: The Ain Sakhri Lovers (c. 9000 BCE), calcite pebble, 11 cm high, British Museum. The oldest known representation of a couple making love or kissing, carved by Natufian hunter-gatherers. Found in the Ain Sakhri cave near Bethlehem in 1933. Source: British Museum (1958,1007.1) / CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Link: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1958-1007-1

While I was hammering out these words, I’m now thinking of the most modern kissing — that The Kiss of Life.9 You must have heard of it. A kiss can and could change everything. When I was kissing my then-girlfriend, now wife, under the bamboo grove, that was unutterable, but yet I managed to write about it. I went home that same evening and wrote a poem10 about my first kiss. Remembering all of it now feels ancient, but the touch, the kiss itself, the skins’ brave entanglement can never be forgotten.

Will Rossiter, writing in 1902, said nature itself authored kissing, and it began with the first courtship. The Scandinavian tradition claims Rowena, beautiful daughter of Hengist the Saxon, introduced it to England at a banquet — pressing a brimming beaker to her lips, then saluting the astonished British king Vortigern with a little peck.11 That’s the legend anyway. Truth? Anthropologists think kissing evolved from prehistoric moms pre-chewing food for babies, the same way bonobos still do it.12 Somewhere in evolutionary murk, a survival technique became intimacy. The kiss weaponized itself to foster ultimate togetherness. A kiss could be our relationship-saving tool.

Let me jump to 79 CE. Vesuvius buries Pompeii under twenty feet of ash. When they excavated the brothel — the lupanar — they found frescoes frozen mid-action. The House of the Chaste Lovers (yeah, ironic!) has this one fresco: a guy pinning a woman against a wall, mouths open, tongues wrestling. Not romance. Advertisement. Do you think so? But no, misters.

Photo: Fresco from the House of the Chaste Lovers, Pompeii (before 79 CE). Preserved under volcanic ash, these images show the Romans’ casual attitude toward depicting intimacy. Source: Parco Archeologico di Pompei / Public Domain

Romans were lawyers about this. The osculum was a friend-peck. The basium for family. The suavium? That deep wet mess reserved for lovers and sex workers.13 Pliny the Younger, writing during the eruption, never mentioned these painted kisses. Too common, like complaining about traffic.

But check the Warren Cup14 — a silver goblet from the same era, British Museum. Shows a bearded man kissing a smooth-faced youth in full homoerotic detail that would’ve been totally normal at elite dinner parties where they recited Plato between wine courses. Mouth-watering, ah?

Photo: The Warren Cup (5–15 CE), silver drinking cup, British Museum. Shows explicit homoerotic scenes that were commonplace in elite Roman society. One of the most controversial acquisitions in museum history. Source: British Museum (1999,0426.1) / © The Trustees of the British Museum

Here’s the wild part: Romans kissed for politics. When Julius Caesar came back from Gaul, citizens lined up demanding the right to kiss his hand. Emperors used it as currency. Grant a kiss, you’re in. Withhold it, you’re exiled. Lips became power. Constantine even made a law: if a man kissed his betrothed, she gained half his effects should he die before marriage.15 A kiss among the ancients was the sign of plighted faith. Once, I had myself planted my faith in that monumental park for the first time when I kissed her under the bamboo grove. I must tell you the park is still there, referencing our first kiss forever.

As we progress in history, Christianity slammed every door. Church fathers like Tertullian and Jerome preached that flesh-pleasure damned your soul. The kiss of peace during Mass got segregated by gender because clergy worried it sparked lust. By 1200 CE, kissing in art basically vanished. St. Augustine wrote about four kinds of kisses: reconciliation between enemies, peace exchanged during eucharist, love between souls showing hospitality, and — this mattered to him — they had to be “holy.”16 One writer mentioned kisses so loud “they resounded through the churches and occasioned foul suspicions.”17

Giotto di Bondone said screw that. His Scrovegni Chapel frescoes18 in Padua (1303–1305) snuck in two revolutionary kisses. The first one’s in Mary’s life cycle — a haloed couple, her hand cradling his bearded face, lips meeting tender. The first post-Roman romantic kiss in Western art. Giotto trained in Florence’s humanist scene. He figured divine love and human love could coexist.

But he also painted Judas kissing Christ’s cheek, torch flames casting shadows across that infamous pucker from Matthew 26:48: “Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; hold him fast.” Yellow cloak like poison wrap. Jesus looks resigned, like he saw it coming from day one. I sat in that chapel till guards kicked me out, staring at how one guy painted salvation and damnation with identical lips.

Giotto di Bondone, “The Meeting at the Golden Gate” (1305), Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. The first romantic kiss in Western art after the Roman era — Joachim and Anna embrace with tender intimacy. Source: Scrovegni Chapel / Public Domain

The Bible mentions eight kinds of kisses: salutation, valediction, reconciliation, subjection, adoration, approbation, treachery, and affection.19 David and Jonathan kissed and wept. Ruth kissed Naomi’s feet. Joseph kissed all his brethren. But that Judas kiss? Proverbs warned: “The kisses of an enemy are deceitful.”20

Judaism sealed covenants with it — God breathes life into Adam’s nostrils, which Talmudic rabbis read as the first divine kiss. Islam forbids public kissing but sanctifies private marital ones. Hadith records Muhammad kissing his wife Aisha’s lips, calling it mercy. Sufi mystics like Rumi wrote that lovers “don’t finally meet somewhere — they’re in each other all along.”21

Christianity went schizophrenic. Paul commands believers to “greet one another with a holy kiss” in Romans 16:16,22 spawning centuries of liturgical pecks. Then Augustine warned that even marital kisses could damn you if enjoyed too much. The kiss became theology’s test: can flesh worship without sin?

The Kama Sutra23 (written around 400 CE by Vatsyayana) catalogues thirty kiss types with scientific precision — the nominal kiss where lips barely graze, the throbbing kiss when the lower lip trembles, the fighting kiss where tongues wrestle for dominance. It treats kissing as sacred art and erotic technique simultaneously. As Rossiter notes, it describes “how a kiss on the forehead honors, on the eyes comforts, on the lips ignites.”24

Also, in Tibetan Buddhism includes ritual kisses between teacher and student, transferring spiritual energy through breath. The kiss becomes enlightenment technology.

The Renaissance didn’t just revive classical learning — it revived classical thirst. Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars”25 (c. 1485) shows Venus planting a sleepy kiss on Mars’s cheek while fauns steal his weapons. Post-sex exhaustion in tempera paint. Commissioned for a Medici villa bedroom.

Sandro Botticelli, “Venus and Mars” (c. 1485), tempera and oil on poplar, National Gallery, London. Post-coital exhaustion in Renaissance paint, commissioned for a Medici bedroom. Source: National Gallery, London / Public Domain

Bronzino’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time”26 (1545) goes full twisted. Cupid — Venus’s son — laps his tongue on his mother’s exposed nipple while she fondles his ass. An old hag representing Syphilis leers in shadows. The painting survived the Inquisition by being labeled “allegory,” but everyone knew. Incest porn for Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s private stash.

Photo: Agnolo Bronzino, “An Allegory with Venus and Cupid” (c. 1545), National Gallery, London. Incestuous eroticism disguised as allegory — commissioned by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici for his private collection. Source: National Gallery, London / Public Domain Warning: Contains explicit imagery

The technical shift matters here. Oil paint, newly refined up north, allowed translucent layering. Lips could glow wet. Skin could flush. Tempera kept kisses dry. Oil made them damp.

Bernini’s “Apollo and Daphne”27 (1622–1625, Galleria Borghese, Rome) captures the millisecond a kiss fails. Apollo lunges, lips parted, while Daphne’s fingers sprout laurel leaves, toes rooting into bark. Carved from a single marble block. You hear the whoosh of Ovid’s chase scene. Her mouth opens — scream? gasp? — as eternal rejection freezes. Rossiter got it right: “The sculpture proves absence can be more erotic than presence.”28

Photo: captioGian Lorenzo Bernini, “Apollo and Daphne” (1622–1625), marble, Galleria Borghese, Rome. The millisecond a kiss fails — carved from a single block of marble, capturing eternal rejection. Source: Galleria Borghese / Public Domainn…

Francesco Hayez’s “The Kiss”29 (1859, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) is the most misread painting ever. Everyone sees romance. Italians see coded rebellion. Woman in medieval dress bent backward over stairs, crimson cloak. Man’s boot positioned mid-escape, dagger visible on his thigh. Shadow angling toward exit.

Photo: Francesco Hayez, “Il Bacio/The Kiss” (1859), oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Not romance — rebellion. A coded message of Italian resistance against Austrian occupation during the Second War of Independence. Note the dagger and the escape-ready boot. Source: Wikipedia

1859, Italy’s in fragments — Austrians occupy the north, the Pope controls the center, Bourbons rule the south. Hayez painted this the year the Second Italian War of Independence erupted. The kiss isn’t romance. It’s a rebel stealing goodbye before fleeing to fight occupiers. Medieval costumes reference pre-invasion glory. When it debuted, Italians wept. They understood the kiss.

Rodin’s “The Kiss”30 started as part of “The Gates of Hell” commission in 1882. Paolo and Francesca — adulterous lovers Dante condemned to eternal wind-punishment in Inferno’s fifth circle — locked in pre-murder passion. Her husband caught them kissing over forbidden poetry, axed them both. Rodin carved them nude, her toes gripping his calf, his palm cupping her breast, cut from single marble so you can’t tell where one body ends. This I adore the most.

1887 Paris Salon, clergy screamed pornography. Rodin’s response? He hired working-class models who’d actually screwed, not aristocrats faking it. You can see it — chisel marks mimic goosebumps. Fingertips dimple flesh. Peasant bodies taught marble to moan. How could one create such glory?

He made multiple versions — marble, bronze, plaster — each over six feet tall. One sits in Musée Rodin’s garden.

Why are kisses pleasant? Why do we kiss in the first place? Rossiter, writing in 1902, quoted a scientist who said kissing generates electric current because teeth, jawbones, and lips are full of nerves. When lips meet, the current flows.31 Byron measured the strength of a kiss by its length. But there should be limits — Rossiter called out Mrs. Browning for talking about a kiss “as long and silent as the ecstatic night” in Aurora Leigh. “That, indeed, must be ‘linked sweetness’ altogether too long drawn out.”32

The dictionary says a kiss is “a salute made by touching with the lips pressed closely together and suddenly parting them.”33 Dr. Stormuth traced the word back to feudal times — expressing homage by kissing a superior’s hand, foot, or some object belonging to them. One poet called kisses “the fragrant breath of summer flowers.” Coleridge called them “nectar breathing.” Shakespeare spoke of them as “seals of love,” and Sidney said they tie souls together. Yes, I read them all, these polite-poetic-gentlemen in my older times.

Robert Herrick, the old English divine, nailed it:

It isn’t creature born and bred

Between the lips all cherry red;

It is an active flame that flies

First to the babies of the eyes;

Then to the cheek, the chin, the ear;

It frisks and flies — now here, now there.34

Martial, the old satirist, called his favorite’s kisses “the fragrance of balsam extracted from aromatic trees; the ripe odor yielded by the teeming saffron; the perfume of fruits mellowing in their winter repository.”35

Kisses have been called the balm of love, Cupid’s seal, the lover’s fee, love’s mintage, love’s tribute, the nectar of Venus, the stamp of love. Sam Slick said they’re like creation — made out of nothing and very good. Robert Burns:

Honeyed seal of soft affections,

Tenderest pledge of future bliss

Dearest tie of young connections.

Love’s first snowdrop, virgin bliss.36

Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss”37 (1907–1908, Belvedere Museum, Vienna) is 180 centimeters square — nearly six feet of oil and gold leaf. Two figures kneeling on a flower-cliff. Man wears phallic black-white rectangles. Woman wears floral gold ovals. He tilts her head back with both hands, lips meeting her cheek. Her knee resists, bent away. Eyes closed — ecstasy or endurance? Art historians still fight about it.

Klimt applied genuine gold leaf using Byzantine techniques — over a thousand fragments hammered into adhesive. Under lights, it glows like medieval manuscripts. Models were likely Klimt and Emilie Flöge, his lifelong companion who ran a radical fashion house, designed corset-free clothes, never married him, outlived him 34 years. That resisting knee reads different knowing she chose him but kept independence.

Painted during Vienna’s psychoanalytic boom — Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams eight years prior. That book — I devoured it in my youth, and the youth devoured me instead. Sexual psychology encoded: masculine geometry invades feminine curves, gold obliterates identity, cliff edge suggests post-coital death-drop. Eros meets Thanatos.

Austria bought it immediately for the Belvedere in 1908. Now it’s worth roughly $180 million, Austria’s Mona Lisa — overexposed, under-understood, perfect for tote bags. Is that so? But why? Why is art treated like that? Tote bags? Really?

Cinema changed everything. Sorry — I mostly in every writing add some fancy-absolute cinema allegory. “The May Irwin Kiss”38 (1896, Thomas Edison) was 18 seconds of two vaudeville actors pecking repeatedly. Newspapers called it obscene. Chicago clergy demanded censorship. Why? Projected large-scale, lips became landscapes. Intimacy invaded public space.

Video: “The May Irwin Kiss” (1896), directed by William Heise for Thomas Edison. The first kiss in cinema — 18 seconds that scandalized America. When projected large-scale, lips became landscapes. Source: Public Domain Video:

Hitchcock’s “Notorious”39 (1946) broke Hollywood’s three-second kiss limit through editing genius. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kiss in 2.5-second intervals across three minutes — technically legal, erotically devastating. Kiss while walking, while phoning, while discussing espionage. Taught directors: accumulation beats duration. I saw, I read, I digested everything about kisses. But what I missed was an absolute kiss, maybe.

“From Here to Eternity”40 (1953) cemented the beach kiss — Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in Hawaiian surf, waves crashing. Been parodied 500+ times because it made geography erotic.

“Brokeback Mountain”41 (2005) gave mainstream cinema its first raw masculine kiss — Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in a Wyoming tent, angry and desperate. Won Golden Lion at Venice, changed queer cinema, both actors died young. The kiss became elegy. You must admit this.

Rossiter collected kissing experiences. One young man described encountering a female cornetist he’d known in childhood:

Good heavens! I felt as though I had been hit with brass knuckles or smacked by a cast-iron image. Good playing on the cornet depends upon the amount of inflexibility which can be imparted to the upper lip. Hers had become fairly adamantine.42

A country damsel describing her first kiss told her friend “she never knew how it happened, but the last thing she remembered was a sensation of fighting for her breath in a hot-house full of violets, with the ventilation choked by blush-roses and tu-lips.”43

In 1497, when Erasmus was in England, he wrote ecstatically about the kissing culture:

If you go to any place you are received with a kiss by all; if you depart on a journey you are dismissed with a kiss; you return, kisses are exchanged; they have come to visit you — a kiss the first thing; they leave you — you kiss them all round. Do they meet you anywhere? — kisses in abundance. On my honor you would not wish to reside here for ten years only, but for life!44

John Bunyan, Puritan author of Pilgrim’s Progress, didn’t share the enthusiasm. He wrote over a hundred years later:

The common salutation of women I abhor; it is odious to me in whomsoever I see it. When I have seen good men salute those women that they have visited, I have made my objections against it; and when they have answered that it was but a piece of civility, I have told them that it was not a comely sight.45

Dominie Brown’s first kiss after seven years of courtship became legend. One evening he summoned courage: “We have been acquainted now for seven years, and I’ve ne’er gotten a kiss yet. D’ye think I might tak’ wan, my bonnie girl?”46

“Just as you like, John, only be becoming wi’ it.”

“Surely, Janet, we’ll ask a blessing. For what we are about to receive, Lord make us truly thankful.”

The kiss was taken, and he rapturously exclaimed: “Oh! Janet, it is gude. We’ll return thanks.” The Rev. Sidney Smith said:

We are in favor of a certain amount of shyness when a kiss is proposed, but it should not be too long, and when the fair one gives it, let it be administered with a warmth and energy; let there be soul in it. If she close her eyes and sighs immediately after it the effect is greater. We have the memory of one we received in our youth which lasted us forty years, and we believe it will be one of the last things we shall think of when we die.47

The custom varies everywhere. In Arabia, women and children kiss the beards of their husbands; the superior returns the salute by a kiss on the forehead. In Egypt, the inferior kisses the hand of a superior. In Russia, the Easter salutation is a kiss — each member of the family salutes the other, chance acquaintances kiss, the General kisses his officers, officers kiss soldiers, the Czar kisses his court. The poorest serf, meeting a high-born dame, has but to say “Christ is risen,” and he’ll receive a kiss and the reply “He is truly risen.”48

In Norway, women after tucking you into bed “bend their fresh, fair faces, and kiss you honestly upon the beard, without a shadow even of shame or doubt.”49 In Finland, women object entirely — one Finnish matron declared if her husband dared kiss her, she’d give him a box on the ears he’d feel for a month.

In Iceland, penalties were severe. For kissing another man’s wife, the punishment was exclusion or its pecuniary equivalent. Even consensual kissing of an unmarried woman required every kiss be wiped out by a fine of three marks — equivalent to 140 ells of wadmal, enough to furnish a whole ship’s crew with pilot jackets.50

In Paraguay, you’re obliged by custom to kiss every lady introduced to you, though half are tempting enough to make you forget they all chew tobacco.

Under Connecticut’s notorious “blue laws,” no woman could kiss even her child on the Sabbath under heavy penalties.51

The custom of kissing under mistletoe is remote in origin. Hone tells us there was an old belief that unless a maiden was kissed under the mistletoe at Christmas, she wouldn’t marry the ensuing year. The Scandinavian tradition says Balder was killed by a mistletoe arrow given to blind Höder by Loki. Balder was restored to life, but mistletoe was placed under Friga’s care, never again an instrument of evil till it touched earth — Loki’s empire. Hence, always suspended from ceilings. When persons of opposite sexes pass under it, they give the kiss of peace and love.52

Quiet it hangs on the wall,

Or pendent droops from the chandelier,

As if never a mischief or harm could fall

From its modest intrusion, there or here!53

In Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York, good burghers with wives and daughters dressed in best clothes repaired to the governor’s house where the rite of kissing women a happy new year was observed. Antony the Trumpeter “was the first to exact the toll of a kiss levied on the fair sex at Kissing Bridge.”54

It was custom among Romans to give the dying a last kiss, to catch the parting breath. Spenser, in his elegy on Sir Philip Sidney’s death, mentions it as rendering the loss more lamentable that no one was nigh “and kiss his lips.” When Lord Nelson was dying, he took leave of Hardy by kissing him. “Kiss me, Hardy!” These were his last words. Sir Walter Scott, dying, kissed Lockhart saying “Be good, my dear! be good.”55

From the medical point of view there’s danger. The spread of diphtheria is largely due to kissing children. “I tell you it wasn’t Judas alone who betrayed with a kiss,” said one physician. “Hundreds of lovely, blooming children are kissed into their graves every year. There is death in a kiss. Princess Alice of Hesse took diphtheria from the kiss of her child, and followed it to the grave.”56

In politics, kisses have been bribes. When Fox contested Westminster, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire offered to kiss all who voted for him. Lady Gordon, when Scottish regiments were thinned by Badajoz and Salamanca, turned recruiting sergeant — placing the recruiting shilling in her lips, from whence who would might take it with his own.57

The famous “soulful” kiss described by Byron: “Such kisses as belong to early days, / When heart, and soul, and sense, in concert move.” Diagnosing such a kiss, he said the blood is like lava, the pulse ablaze, and each kiss is a “heart-quake.”58

An anonymous poet philosophized:

Philosophers pretend to tell

How, like a hermit in his cell,

The soul within the brain does dwell.

But I, who am not half so wise,

Think I have seen’t in Chloe’s eyes;

Down to her lips from thence it stole,

And there I kiss’d her very soul.59

From Ain Sakhri’s calcite prayer to random pecks at random parks, the kiss has been fertility ritual, political weapon, religious sacrament, artistic obsession, cinematic punctuation. Meant everything and nothing. Saved lives, damned souls.

First kiss ever captured? Depends. First carved: Ain Sakhri, 9000 BCE. First painted with context: Pompeii brothels, 79 CE. First romantic post-Christianity: Giotto, 1305. First that made me cry: Canova’s marble resurrection, which I circled back to in 2023, older and no longer heartbroken.

While I was kissing, my feeling was, like — The kiss endures because it’s the smallest revolution — two people creating a third entity that exists only while lips touch, then dissolves into memory. Artists chase it because it’s impossible to capture. The second you paint breath exchange, it becomes stone. But we keep trying.

Rossiter ended his 1902 book with Shakespeare:

Now let me say good-night, and so say you;

If you will say so, you shall have a kiss.60

Writing this on a Sydney bus, watching strangers kiss across the aisle, faces lit by phone screens. Same hunger as the Natufians. Same desperation as Paolo and Francesca. The same fervor under the bamboo grove.

Yes, this is the history of kisses.

Footnotes:

1 Antonio Canova, Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1787–1793), marble sculpture, Louvre Museum, Paris.

2 Because that guy knew us — we were regulars there.

3 The wall was made of bamboo straws, and the painting looked awful on that wall. I remember just once or twice we had sat inside in those whole two years.

4 I will write some other day about the nostalgia behind rainwater feelings.

5 Rossiter, Will. The Art of Kissing. Chicago: Will Rossiter, 1902.

6 Rossiter, The Art of Kissing, Part I.

7 Ibid.

8 The Ain Sakhri Lovers, c. 9000 BCE, calcite pebble, British Museum, London. Found in the Ain Sakhri cave near Bethlehem in 1933. Registration number: 1958,1007.1. British Museum 3D Model: Ain Sakhri Lovers (https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/the-ain-sakhri-lovers-british-museum)

9 https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/kiss-life-utility-worker-giving-mouth-mouth-co-worker-contacted-high-voltage-wire-1967/

10 Read poem: click here

11 The Art of Kissing.

12 De Waal, Frans. “Bonobo Sex and Society.” Scientific American 272, no. 3 (1995): 82–88. See also Hare, Brian, et al. “The Self-Domestication Hypothesis: Evolution of Bonobo Psychology Is Due to Selection Against Aggression.” Animal Behaviour 83, no. 3 (2012): 573–585.

13 Catullus provides extensive descriptions of these Roman kiss categories in his poems, particularly Carmina 5, 7, and 48. See also Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 28.

14 The Warren Cup, c. 5–15 CE, silver, British Museum, London. Registration number: 1999,0426.1.

15 Constantine’s marriage laws are recorded in the Codex Theodosianus (Theodosian Code), Book 3, Title 5. also in The Art of Kissing.

16 Augustine of Hippo, Sermones (Sermons) 227. See also De bono conjugali (On the Good of Marriage), c. 401 CE.

17 This quote appears in various historical accounts of medieval church practices. See Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

18 Giotto di Bondone, Scrovegni Chapel frescoes (1303–1305), Padua, Italy. The kissing scenes appear in “The Meeting at the Golden Gate” (Joachim and Anna) and “The Betrayal of Christ” (Judas’s kiss).

19 This categorization appears in various biblical commentaries. See Smith, William. Smith’s Bible Dictionary. 1863.

20 Proverbs 27:6 (KJV): “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.”

21 Rumi, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad. The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1995.

22 Romans 16:16 (KJV): “Salute one another with an holy kiss. The churches of Christ salute you.”

23 Vātsyāyana. Kama Sutra, c. 400 CE. See Burton, Richard F., trans. The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. 1883.

24 Rossiter, The Art of Kissing, Part II.

25 Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars, c. 1485, tempera and oil on poplar panel, National Gallery, London.

26 Agnolo Bronzino, An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (also known as Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time), c. 1545, oil on wood, National Gallery, London.

27 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622–1625, marble, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

28 Rossiter, The Art of Kissing, Part III.

29 Francesco Hayez, Il Bacio (The Kiss), 1859, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Multiple versions exist; the most famous is the 1859 version.

30 Auguste Rodin, Le Baiser (The Kiss), originally created 1882, marble version 1888–1889, Musée Rodin, Paris. Multiple versions exist in marble, bronze, and plaster.

31 Rossiter, The Art of Kissing, Part I. The “scientist” referenced was likely drawing on contemporary theories of bioelectricity popular in late Victorian science.

32 Ibid. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), Book I.

33 Rossiter quoting from Webster’s or similar dictionary of the period.

34 Robert Herrick, “What Is a Kiss?” from Hesperides (1648).

35 Martial, Epigrams, Book XI.

36 Robert Burns, attribution uncertain. This appears in various 19th-century collections but may be misattributed.

37 Gustav Klimt, Der Kuss (The Kiss), 1907–1908, oil and gold leaf on canvas, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

38 The May Irwin Kiss (also known as The Kiss), directed by William Heise, produced by Thomas Edison, 1896. Film length: approximately 18 seconds.

39 Notorious, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, RKO Radio Pictures, 1946. Starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.

40 From Here to Eternity, directed by Fred Zinnemann, Columbia Pictures, 1953. Starring Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr.

41 Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, Focus Features, 2005. Starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Won Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival and received eight Academy Award nominations.

42 Rossiter, The Art of Kissing, Part IV (anecdotes section).

43 Ibid.

44 Erasmus, Desiderius. Letter to Faustus Andrelinus, 1499. From The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1 to 141, 1484 to 1500, translated by R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974.

45 Bunyan, John. Quoted in various biographical accounts. See Offor, George, ed. The Works of John Bunyan. Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1854.

46 This anecdote appears in Rossiter and various 19th-century Scottish folklore collections. The story of “Dominie” (schoolmaster) Brown was widely circulated in Scottish oral tradition.

47 Rossiter, The Art of Kissing, Part IV, quoting or paraphrasing Rev. Sydney Smith (1771–1845), English wit and essayist.

48 These customs are documented in various 19th-century travel writings and anthropological studies. See also Rossiter, The Art of Kissing, Part V.

49 Ibid. Quote from 19th-century travel literature about Scandinavia.

50 This appears in medieval Icelandic law codes. See Grágás (Gray Goose Laws), the medieval Icelandic legal code. An “ell” was a unit of measurement; wadmal was coarse woolen cloth.

51 The Connecticut Blue Laws were a series of rigid Puritan regulations. While many “blue laws” are apocryphal, restrictions on Sabbath activities, including displays of affection, were documented. See Peters, Samuel. A General History of Connecticut. London, 1781 (though this source is known for exaggerations).

52 This Norse mythology is recounted in the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson (c. 1220). The Balder story appears in Gylfaginning.

53 Author unknown. Appears in various 19th-century poetry collections about Christmas customs.

54 Irving, Washington (as Diedrich Knickerbocker). A History of New York, 1809.

55 These deathbed accounts are from various historical sources: Spenser’s elegy is from “Astrophel” (1595); Nelson’s famous last words are documented in numerous naval histories; Scott’s deathbed scene is recounted by John Gibson Lockhart in Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (1837–1838).

56 Medical concerns about kissing were common in late 19th-century public health discourse. Princess Alice of Hesse did indeed contract diphtheria from her children in 1878 and died. See medical journals from the 1880s-1900s for similar warnings.

57 Both anecdotes are historically documented. Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, famously campaigned for Charles James Fox in 1784. Lady Gordon’s recruiting efforts during the Napoleonic Wars are mentioned in various military histories.

58 Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Don Juan, Canto II (1819).

59 Anonymous poem, 17th or 18th century. Appears in various poetry anthologies.

60 Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida, Act IV, Scene 4.