Flowers and chocolates could never say �I love you� like the best romantic art. Here�s a list of cultural treasures that will make your Valentine swoon

1 POEM Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer's Day? by William Shakespeare (printed 1609) One of the many intriguing questions relating to the Bard of Stratford is: to whom did he address his sonnets? For centuries, it was assumed to be a woman. Now, the pendulum has swung the other way. Does it much matter who was the recipient of such effusive, eloquent lines? What Shakespeare is professing here is love's endurance. Or, as Philip Larkin said: "What will survive of us is love." What's wonderful about this poem is its freshness and familiarity, and the fact that it gave titles to at least two comic novels, HE Bates's The Darling Buds Of May and John Mortimer's Summer's Lease.

2FILM Casablanca (1942) Michael Curtiz made this wartime romantic drama on a tight budget with low expectations - just one more Warner Brothers genre picture, adapted from a mediocre stage play. But somehow, as critic Roger Ebert put it, the film's black-marketing plot became "a trifle to hang the emotions on". Everyone who has seen it pictures themselves as Bogart or Bergman, and when relationships end we try to imagine our love was sacrificed to a higher purpose, like preserving the integrity of the French Resistance. This Valentine's Day, Casablanca is being re-released - catch it on the big screen, and pretend once again that your problems amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.

3SCULPTURE Venus de Milo by Alexandros of Antioch (c150 BC) Found by a peasant on the Greek island of Melos in 1820, this classic icon was in several pieces. Fragments included a left hand holding an apple - presumably the golden apple presented to Venus by Paris of Troy. Originally the goddess of love would have been painted in a blaze of colour, and bedecked in jewellery, but modern tastes prefer the purity of white marble. On buying the sculpture, the French state made much of her beauty, but a few decades later, the painter Renoir was unimpressed, describing her as a "big gendarme". See her at The Louvre, Paris.

4 BOOK Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) Despite Hollywood's best efforts there are, apparently, still some intelligent people who do not quite get Jane Austen. Grieve for them. P&P is Austen at her most romantic, a cobweb of a story involving the marrying off of the Bennet girls, in particular Elizabeth, whose on-off relationship with Darcy keeps the pages turning like a roulette wheel. Unlike its modern imitators, however, P&P ends happily, with marriage, which just goes to show how expectations have changed over the past 200-odd years.

5SONG Crazy In Love by Beyonce (2003) In the 21st century, the pop charts are filled with R&B love songs that seem to be written (and sometimes performed) by robots: sleek, skittering and sexy, but a little cold. When Justin Timberlake recently claimed to be bringing sexy "back", his voice was so distorted he barely sounded human. So thank goodness for Beyonce's blasting Crazy In Love, a thrilling confession to her partner Jay-Z that's the closest thing in modern music to the euphoric rush of finding yourself gloriously in love. It's also a fabulously affirmative reply to questions posed in the The Chi-Lites' 1970 hit Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So), from which the thumping brass hook was lifted.

6FILM Before Sunrise/ Before Sunset (1994/2004) Before Sunrise was a pleasant enough movie about two young strangers on a train - callow American Ethan Hawke and earnest Frenchwoman Julie Delpy - who agree to spend a day together in Vienna. It reminded you, possibly, of how quickly you could fall in love when you were young. But that memory becomes potent and urgent in the sequel, when the couple meet in Paris 10 years later, and realise it may not be too late 7PAINTING The Jewish Bride by Rembrandt van Rijn (1667) There are as many interpretations of this painting as there are books about Rembrandt, and although few believe that the woman is either a bride or Jewish, the 19th century name for the painting has stuck. One thing is agreed: this couple is very much in love. He places his hand tenderly on her fully clothed breast, and her fingers fall lightly on his. Far from being a quick grope, this is a timeless image of gentle, intimate love from an artist whose long-term mistress had recently beaten him to the grave. See it in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

8BOOK Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847) Pronounced Woothering Heights, Emily Bronte's only novel has influenced everyone from Stephen King to Kate Bush. On one level, it is pure, gothic shlock. On another, it is poetic perfection and way ahead of its time. Heathcliff - part Ted Hughes, part Gordon Brown - is its totemic hero, a brooding, mysterious, disruptive presence in the Earnshaw household to which he has been charitably introduced. The target of his passion is Catherine Earnshaw but fate transpires to keep them apart. Heathcliff, described by one pundit as "a gentleman psychopath", beats his own wife and tells Cathy in her husband's presence: "I wish you joy of the milk-blooded coward." In short, he is that ultimate of female fantasies, a bit of rough. "Wuthering", by the way, is Yorkshire for stormy weather.

9song Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye (1973) If actual seduction sometimes seems like too much effort, Gaye kindly does most of the job for you with his timelessly persuasive hit. If a technologically superior and terrifyingly warlike alien race beamed down to Earth tomorrow, our best defence would be hooking up Gaye to every single PA system in the world and blasting out Let's Get It On. The lascivious sentiments transcend all language barriers and would undoubtedly create galactic harmony, once everyone had re-emerged from the bedroom.

11POEM The Daemon Lover by Anon (date unknown) When it was announced more than 30 years ago that Antonia Fraser was to publish an anthology called Scottish Love Poems, some cynically wondered if there would be enough to make a book. There was more than enough, it turned out. The Daemon Lover appeared in the section Doomed Love and is the ballad of a married woman and mother of a young son swept away by a man smitten by her. Though ancient, its theme is evergreen, revealing that love cannot always conquer all. Inevitably it all ends badly. Very badly.

12FILM Gregory's Girl (1981) "Tits, bums, fannies, the lot " For all its Scottish west coast coarseness and knockabout incidental details, Bill Forsyth's comedy remains adored because it puts such heart behind a young Cumbernauld man's oafish but absolutely genuine attempt to win a young woman's affection. He is considerably less eloquent than his famous ancestor in love-foolery, Romeo Montague, but much more deserving of success.

13PAINTING The Ecstasy of St Teresa by Gianlorenzo Bernini (1652) The quintessential image of Roman Catholic passion, St Teresa is in paroxysms of ecstasy when an angel appears to her. The sheer eroticism of this Baroque sculpture didn't go unnoticed by Bernini's contemporaries, and is still remarkable today. But it's no more explicit than St Teresa's own description of being speared by God's angel: "He left me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans, and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it." See it in the flesh at the Cornaro Chapel, Rome.

14BOOK Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984) Anita Brookner is the laureate of lonely, single women usually pining away in prim flats within spitting distance of Harrods. In Hotel Du Lac, however, Edith Hope, a romantic fiction writer with an uncanny resemblance to Princess Anne, has been exiled to the Swiss lakes. Financially well-off and as romantic as one of her own characters, it emerges that she has jilted her fiancé, a socially desirable but boring fellow, and retreated to the Alps to regain her senses. As she reviews her life, including her monthly meetings with her married lover, she confronts that age-old dilemma: whether to take second best or hang on for something better.

15SONG Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan (1969) These days, Dylan appears to delight in rendering his greatest hits almost unrecognisable when performing them live, turning melodies upside down and honking through lyrics. But captured on record, Lay Lady Lay is a swooning, beautiful love song. Of course, it might be that your intended hates the cult of Dylan, in which case you might want to substitute a cover. Recently, there was a dreamy reading by eccentric American singer-songwriter Magnet, but avoid thrash-metallers Ministry's version.

17FILM In The Mood For Love/2046 (2000/2005) If every love has a beginning, middle, and end, only the first and last of these suit Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai's gorgeous film-making sensibilities. In The Mood For Love imagines 1960s Hong Kong as a closed world of romantic tension, where the affair between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, whose spouses are cheating on them, is played out entirely in looks: exchanged through cigarette smoke, reflected by mirrors. The sequel, 2046, suggests that Leung's later pain over what might have been, is so exquisite that he prefers it to the love of several other beautiful women (including Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi).

18PAINTING The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1907-08) The climax of Klimt's "golden period", The Kiss is a remarkable combination of figure painting and pure decoration. The bodies of the two lovers disappear into a swirl of patterns, and many see this as a metaphor for that feeling of melting away in a moment of high passion. Although the woman is passive, she does look like she's thoroughly enjoying herself. It has been suggested that she is modelled on Klimt's lover, Emilie Floge. See it in the Osterreichisches Galerie Wien, Vienna.

19BOOK Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres (1994) The Greek island of Cephallonia is the setting for this wartime romance which melted many hearts. A young Italian captain supplants a local fisherman in the affections of a doctor's daughter. So far, so inevitable, but war encroaches, havoc ensues, and love is tested. Can it survive man's inhumanity to man? Can anything?

20SONG Don't Look Back by Teenage Fanclub (1995) Even from their noisy beginnings, Scotland's Teenage Fanclub have always been hopeless romantics, and Don't Look Back - from their glorious, sunshine-packed album Grand Prix - is perhaps the closest they've come to crafting the perfect love song. It's also a good proxy for tongue-tied romantics struggling to find the courage to talk to the distant object of their affections, containing as it does the line: "If I could find the words to say ", guaranteeing it a place on lovesick mixtapes for all time. It was written and sung by bassist Gerry Love.

was notable for its acerbity, mordant wit and no-bullshit attitude towards relationships. It's humorous but also tender. The poet's lover is a Spurs-supporting, Arsenal-hating, old-fashioned kind of guy, with a sexy voice and an A-registration Vauxhall Astra estate, reminding us that what inspires love is often unfathomable, various and beyond logic.

23FILM Brokeback Mountain (2005) It took a century for mainstream American cinema to acknowledge that the love between two men was suitable, or even possible, material for widescreen romance. And it took a Taiwanese director (Ang Lee) to make it. For all its beauty and drama, Brokeback Mountain treats the cowboys played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal not as spokesmen for an issue, but real men whose passion is a serious problem in their world. The social impediments keeping Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte's lovers apart seem frivolously low-risk by comparison.

24PAINTING Francesca Da Rimini by William Dyce (1837) Like Rodin, Aberdonian William Dyce took his subject from Dante's epic poem The Inferno. The young Francesca, married to an old and deformed man, falls in love with his younger brother Paolo while reading to him. Dyce's original composition included the bent figure of the husband on the left, creeping in to murder the young lovers. But in 1882 the canvas was trimmed, leaving nothing more than a sinister hand to give the painting even more dramatic suspense. See it in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

25BOOK Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) "C'est moi," Flaubert is supposed to have said apropos his most famous creation, Emma Bovary. One has always wondered in what context he made that remark, Madame Bovary being a hopelessly limited woman who talks herself into marrying a decent but stupid village doctor only to rebel and commit adultery with disastrous consequences. Perhaps Flaubert, like Madame Bovary, dreamt in vain of romantic love, in which case he may well have had reason to say what he did.

26SONG I Will Always Love You by Dolly Parton (1974) Unfairly eclipsed by Whitney Houston's 1992 cover, Dolly Parton wrote and recorded the original during her break-up with record producer Porter Wagoner. Eschewing the vocal gymnastics of Houston, Parton delivers a heroic version straight from her damaged heart, and it's impossible to listen to it without welling up. Keep your beloved close so you've got something to hang on to.

27FILM True Romance (1993) "What you did was so romantic," sobs Patricia Arquette to her new husband Christian Slater after he shoots her vicious pimp in the head. In a twisted way, she's right: the point of the film is that the love between this young couple is so pure that it's bulletproofed from all the violence around them. Writer Quentin Tarantino had an unhappy ending in mind, but director Tony Scott was rooting for these kids, and let them get away. He was right too.

28PHOTOGRAPHY Made In Heaven by Jeff Koons (1989-91) More pornographic than romantic, Jeff Koon's notorious poster campaign featured himself and his new wife, Italian porn star Cicciolina, indulging in unambiguous sexual acts. Koons insisted that these photographs should be taken seriously as paintings, because they were printed with oil ink on canvas. He also claimed - tongue, as always, firmly in cheek - to have gone through a moral conflict which would take viewers into the "realm of the Sacred Heart of Jesus".

30BOOK The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915) Sub-titled A Tale of Passion, The Good Soldier, written and published in the midst of the first world war, has one of the best first lines in literature: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Ford - the author of more than 70 books - considered it his finest hour. At its core is Edward Ashburnham, who the novel's narrator discovers has been having an affair with his wife for nine years. A beautiful tragedy.

31SONG The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack (1972) The first time many people heard The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, it was in Clint Eastwood's stalker thriller Play Misty For Me, soundtracking a bedroom scene. That particular relationship didn't end so well, but Roberta Flack's smoky, sensuous reading of Ewan McColl's original (which the folk legend wrote for his wife Peggy Seeger) shucked off any negative connotations to become a favourite for lovers. If you have to have "our tune", there are few better.

32POEM In Paris With You by James Fenton (2003) Last year James Fenton compiled The New Faber Book Of Love Poems, jam-packed with all the usual suspects - Burns, Byron, Shakespeare, Donne, Marlowe, etc. Rightly eschewing modesty, Fenton included several poems of his own, including In Paris With You, a hymn to love and lust and to their spiritual capital. "Don't talk to me of love," he writes. "I've had an earful / And I get tearful when I've had a drink or two."

33FILM Brief Encounter (1945) Times have changed so much since this film was advertised as "a story of the most precious moments in a woman's life!" that it might now seem an amusing historical curio, as Celia Johnson's unhappy housewife agonises over the choice between her very husband (Cyril Raymond) and the "attentive" doctor (Trevor Howard) with whom she's having a chaste yet passionate affair. It was, however, so perfectly framed by David Lean, so carefully written by Noel Coward, that it still says a lot about how we live our lives to train schedules, and dream of something - or someone - better on the commute.

34SCULPTURE Cupid And Psyche by Antonio Canova (1787-93) The Goddess Venus, on hearing that a beautiful young woman called Psyche was being hailed as the new Venus, sent her son, Cupid, to make her suffer. But Cupid fell deeply in love with the young woman and, risking his mother's wrath, he saved her from death. Canova captured this moment in marble, creating a perfect harmony of interlocking bodies. The two perfect youths are wrapt in total concentration on each other, the whole composition radiating from the intensity of their gaze. After trials and tribulations, Psyche became immortal and her mother-in-law gave up the fight. See it at the Louvre, Paris.

35BOOK The Progress Of Love by Alice Munro (1986) Love in all its guises - filial, platonic, sexual, parental, imagined - is covered in this stupendous collection of stories by the Canadian mistress of the form. The setting is small town and rural; the characters drawn from what passes for ordinary life. But, as ever with Munro, there is an undercurrent of sexuality and violence, of frustration and unfulfilment and disintegration. For those without rose-tinted specs.

36SONG She's The One by Robbie Williams (1999) Of course, Angels is the Robbie song that's played most at weddings (and funerals), but is it really all that romantic? Isn't Williams singing about "loving angels instead"? Far superior is the deceptively simple She's The One from 1999, a Robbie Williams song that's suspiciously a million times better than the rest of his musical output - perhaps because it was written by World Party's Karl Wallinger and not Guy Chambers. "I was her, she was me," it begins, encapsulating in one line how a relationship can alter your entire being. It's not all romance and flowers, though; apparently Wallinger hates the fact that Williams turned the track into a megahit.

39FILM Harold And Maude (1971) Hal Ashby's film was a spectacular failure on its release, coming just a year after Love Story. Audiences who had happily wept for the doomed romance between Ryan O'Neal and his pretty, dying girlfriend Ali McGraw were repulsed by the very idea of Harold (a suicidal young death-fetishist) and Maude (a life-loving collector of bizarre art 60 years his senior). As it happens, that relationship seems entirely natural on screen, the characters - as played by Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon - being literally perfect for each other. Ashby's instinctive non-conformist thrust makes this one of the great movies about two lovers against the world.

40SCULPTURE The Kiss by Auguste Rodin (1888-89) For Rodin, The Kiss was "a large sculpted knick-knack following the usual formula", which he extracted from his epic work, The Gates Of Hell. The couple (Dante's doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca) were clearly far too blissful for his apocalyptic bronze, and they were replaced on the gates with a stretched and struggling pair. The original figure group was commissioned in marble by the French state, but its eroticism was too much for some; at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, it was hidden from public view, with admission only by personal application. See it in the Musée Rodin, Paris.

41BOOK Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877) The eponymous Anna falls in love with Vronski, a handsome young officer, for whom she abandons her husband and child. Believing Vronski has tired of her she leaps under a train. Thus a novel running to nearly 800 pages is condensed into two sentences. Apparently, Tolstoy got the idea for the book after he viewed the body of a young woman who had committed a similar suicide. Daft lists of 100 things to do before you die never seem to suggest reading it. Do. Do!

42SONG You Shook Me All Night Long by AC/DC (1980) Bawdy and more than a little gaudy, AC/DC's deathless hard rock anthem probably isn't the best song to employ as a seduction tool, as it's entirely concerned with the aftermath of an earth-shaking romantic liaison, and reads like an uncharacteristically heartfelt compliment to a biker chick from a cynical Hells Angel who thought he'd seen everything in the sack. Analysts still aren't entirely sure what Brian Johnson means when he growls about "knocking me out with those American thighs" - how do they differ from British ones, exactly? - but the air-punching, celebratory sentiment can help cement a one-night stand into lasting union.

43BOOK The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915) Like all the best writers, Lawrence is easily parodied. This, his best novel, concerns three generations of the Brangwen family, focusing in particular on Ursula Brangwen and her emotional and sensual life. She is that most maligned of creatures, a New Woman. When originally published, The Rainbow was denounced as obscene, which, though always a boon to publishers, is hard to fathom in these more explicit times. That said, Ursula is probably the first woman in English fiction to have the need for and courage to grab a sex life. Not that she is alone in The Rainbow; Anna Victrix, another liberated woman, scandalised prudes with her erotic, pregnant dance (p169). "She danced in secret before the Creator," wrote Lawrence, "she took off her clothes and danced in the pride of her bigness." Saucy or what!

44FILM Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) The relationship is over from the beginning, as Kate Winslet has had all memory of her ex-boyfriend (Jim Carrey) erased by a team of maverick scientists. Outraged and heartbroken, Carrey takes advantage of the same service, but begins to suspect that even lost love is too precious to be forgotten. Even sadder, yet thrilling, is the final proposition: you would relive every moment, including the bad ones, if you were given that choice.

47PAINTING The Defence Of Guenevere And Other Poems by Frances and Margaret Macdonald (1897) Recently discovered, the 21 watercolours on vellum illustrate the chivalric poems of William Morris. Margaret and Frances Macdonald were later to marry and go their separate artistic ways, but in 1897 they were still inseparable. The Glasgow sisters chose to skip the action sequences, instead revelling in tales of courtly love and tragedy. They conjure up a misty land of luminous ladies in voluminous robes, bedecked with jewels and flowers. Men make only rare appearances, in a world where tragic virgins mourn their heroic knights. See them in the State University of New York at Buffalo.

48POEM A Subaltern's Love Song by John Betjeman (1945) When it was recently revealed that John Betjeman had for years kept a secret lover, many were the expressions of wonderment. Goodness knows why because his poems reek of lust if not love, albeit often expressed with boyish, Pooh-ish enthusiasm, and none the worse for that. A Subaltern's Love Song, addressed to the gorgeous tennis-playing Miss Joan Hunter Dunn - "Furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun" - brings unbidden to mind Serena Williams.

49FILM Cyrano De Bergerac (1990) Edmond Rostand's story, and particularly this red-blooded adaptation by Jean-Paul Rappeneau, will never stop giving hope to the hopelessly romantic. Gerard Depardieu fills the role of the gigantic-nosed hero with physical panache, his love for Roxane (Anne Brochet) so magnificent that its unrequitedness is almost beside the point. Watching this film together is a perfect test of compatibility - you cannot love someone who does not love Cyrano. But you can challenge them to a duel.

50SONG Are You Lonesome Tonight? by Elvis Presley (1960) Perhaps the most beautiful-looking man in the history of pop music - in the early days, anyway - Presley has already seduced most listeners after the first verse of this wronged-lover tale, set against the spare but cosy musical backing of male-choir humming. Then he plays his ace card: a spoken-word mid-section that begins with a quote from Shakespeare and ends with: "You lied when you said you loved me but I'd rather go on hearing your lies than go on living without you." Somehow, the King manages to make this foolish kind of surrender sound desirable.