Kay Nielsen’s illustration for The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body has always felt like a dream I half-remember. The blue cathedral arches, the attenuated figures, the jewel-like restraint of line and color. Even now they speak to me in a language of elegance and ache. I’m drawn to Nielsen’s fusion of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, where ornament becomes emotion and precision becomes grace. His worlds are immaculate and haunted, as though beauty itself is holding its breath.
The story that inspired it is one of the strangest and most resonant of the old Norse tales. A giant, terrified of being hurt, hides his heart outside his body. He locks it away through layers of distance — an island, a chest, a duck, an egg — until he is safe from harm and also from feeling. In this way, the story externalizes something profoundly human: our instinct to protect what is most tender in us, even at the cost of becoming less alive.
What makes the tale strange is precisely what makes it true. The heart is not stolen or broken, it is hidden. And in that hiding, life becomes mechanized, powerful but hollow. The prince’s quest to find it is not a battle but a process of empathy. He shows mercy to a raven, a fish, and a wolf, and each act of compassion later opens a way forward. His triumph is not achieved by force but by alliance with feeling, instinct, and nature. By allying with the very things the giant has exiled.
When the prince finally finds the heart, enclosed in its absurd chain of containers, he must crush it to free those the giant has turned to stone. In that moment, the fairy tale touches something sacred: the truth that to recover the heart often means to break it open. There is no restoration without wounding; no wholeness without the return of pain. The death of the heartless giant is also the rebirth of life and love.
Nielsen captures this psychic architecture with visual psychology. The scene is both sanctuary and mindscape. The prince kneels before a distant, illuminated figure. We dont know precisely who, perhaps the captive princess, perhaps the heart itself made human. The vaulted arches rise like ribs; the chandelier burns like intellect above emotion. The entire composition is a meditation on separation and the longing to bridge it.
I recognize myself in both figures. The giant who hides his heart to avoid being hurt; the prince who dares to recover it. There are times I have lived as one and times I have struggled toward the other. The story feels personal because the journey toward feeling always is. To live fully means to risk, to ache, to let the world touch you again after disappointment or loss.
That is also where I see the quiet power of art therapy and art itself. Art becomes a way to move toward the heart without demanding we tear it open all at once. Whether we are creating or simply looking, art allows us to approach feeling through form, to give shape to what we cannot yet say. Each of us finds that differently, and different in each moment. Sometimes I am the maker, sometimes the viewer; in either case, art gives me permission to be whole again.
When I gaze upon Nielsen’s image, I am reminded that beauty is not decoration but a doorway. It us a way back to the self we once hid. The fairy tale tells me that to find the heart is to risk breaking it; the art shows me that even in breaking, there is light and hope.