And placed on board a barque that should speed well
Through wind and wave, and with our will comply.”
With reverent humility and tenderness Dante is leading Beatrice into the enchanted boat of which he dreamed. She yields her hands to him and seems to pause beneath his earnest gaze as she steps down. Around her are the companions of their voyage,—Guido Calvacanti with his lady Giovanna, also known as Primavera, and Lapo degli Uberti and his love.
“Beata Beatrix,”—“The Blessed Beatrice,”—depicts, not the actual death of Dante’s beloved, but rather a mystic trance in which is made known to her the nearness of her end. She sits on a balcony overlooking the city of Florence, which is already shadowed by the coming loss. Before her is a sundial, marking the fatal hour. A dove, flying into her lap, carries a poppy-blossom, the symbol of sleep. The lovely face of Beatrice is upturned, as if to greet the unseen messenger, and full of perfect peace. She seems to have attained the sight of blessedness, and to be yielding her spirit to a deep and sweet content, but the earthly weariness lingers about her brows and on her pale and parted lips. In the background, Dante and the figure of Love are seen passing in the street below. Love holds a flaming heart in his hands, and they both gaze in grief and awe at the rapt countenance which the dignity of the coming death suffuses with exquisite pathos and transcendent charm. In the features of this Beatrice, more than in any other, Rossetti has regained and embodied the thought that found superlative expression in Michaelangelo,—“the notion of inspired sleep, of faces charged with dreams.”[[14]]
A more familiar passage from the “Vita Nuova” is illustrated by the largest, and in many respects the finest, of Rossetti’s completed pictures, “Dante’s Dream;” dealing with the poet’s record of the vision in which “it was revealed to him that the Lord God of Justice had called his most gracious lady unto Himself.” “Then feeling bewildered,” says Dante, writing of that strange experience, which occurred to him at the age of twenty-five, “I closed mine eyes, and my brain began to be in travail, as the brain of one frantic. And I seemed to look toward Heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels who were returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud. Then my heart, that was so full of love, said unto me, ‘It is true that our lady lieth dead;’ and it seemed to me that I went to look upon the body wherein that blessed and most noble spirit had had its abiding place. And so strong was this idle imagining that it made me to behold my lady in death; whose head certain ladies seemed to be covering with a white veil, and who was so humble of her aspect that it was as though she had said, ‘I have attained to look on the beginning of peace.’” On a red-draped couch in the chamber of death lies the Blessed Beatrice, clad in white robes, her hands folded on her bosom, and her bright hair spread about her pillow. Her maidens, at her head and feet, are hanging over her a purple pall, filled with May-blossoms, the emblem of the spring-time of her life, in which she died. The floor is strewn with poppies, symbolizing again the sleep in which she takes her unbroken rest; and on the frieze above are roses and violets, suggestive of the beauty and purity of the departed soul. Over the couch hangs a lamp, glimmering with a fast-expiring flame; and high up in air, through an opening in the roof, is seen a flight of angels, garbed in the deep red of a damask rose,—symbolic of the Platonic love which should immortalize the beloved in the sight of all men,—and bearing the white cloud that represents the life that has fled. The crimson doves, of which Rossetti made his constant symbol of heavenly ministries, flutter up and down the staircases on either side of the room. Before the couch stands the figure of Love, with his flame-coloured robes fastened at the shoulder by a scallop-shell, signifying pilgrimage. In one hand he holds a winged arrow—his weapon for the heart—and a bunch of rosemary; with the other he leads Dante, who, clad in the black garb of mourning, tinged with the purple of consecration, advances as if in a dream, and shrinks, dazed and awed, before the beauty of the dead Beatrice. And Love, still holding Dante by the hand, bends forward and kisses the face of the beloved, thus making himself the mediator between Dante and Beatrice, and the reconciler of life with death. It is as though the poet’s life-long worship were summed up and presented at the gate of heaven by a higher power than his own, and a benediction wrested for him, by the very humility and devoutness of his passion, from the glorified spirit beyond the grave. The dominant note of the design is one of resignation and hope; the passionate, strenuous, mystical resignation which Platonism brought into Christianity at the dawn of the Renaissance, and hope, born of the quickened fervour and resolution of romantic love.
In two notable subjects Rossetti deals with incidents recorded by Dante of himself after the death of Beatrice. In a early water-colour of singular dignity and elevation of feeling, he celebrates “The Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice.” “On that day,” says Dante in the “Vita Nuova,” “which completed the year since my lady had been made of the citizens of eternal life, I was sitting in a place apart, where, remembering me of her, I was drawing an angel upon certain tablets; and as I drew, I turned my eyes, and saw beside me persons to whom it was fitting to do honour, and who were looking at what I did: and according as it was told me afterwards, they had been there awhile before I perceived them. Then I arose for salutation and said, ‘Another was present with me.’” The poet, kneeling at a window overlooking the Arno, absorbed in his memorial task, has suddenly become conscious of his visitors, and is overwhelmed with delicate pride and shame.
“Our Lady of Pity.”
From an unfinished study.
By permission of the Corporation of Birmingham.
