Questions to arouse interest. What is there about this picture that suggests a mystery? Where is this lady sitting? What has been brought to her? Of what is the dove a symbol? the poppy? To what hour does the sundial point? What can you see in the distance?
Original picture: National Gallery of British Art, London.
Artist: Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Birthplace: Portland Place, London, England.
Dates: Born, 1828; died, 1882.
The story of the picture. Long ago, in the age of chivalry, there lived a beautiful Florentine lady named Beatrice Portinari. A great poet, Dante, has described her to us from her childhood to her death.
In those days when all true knights served their ladies, and even small boys were required to choose objects of devotion, it was not strange that a boy of nine years should choose a little neighbor girl for this honor. She was only a year younger than he when her father, Folco Portinari, a rich nobleman of Florence, gave a festival in her honor, inviting all his neighbors and friends. Dante went with his father. Here for the first time he met Beatrice, whom he afterwards described as “the youngest of the angels.”
“‘People called her Beatrice then,’ he explains, ‘without knowing how truly the name belonged to her, for it means ‘one who blesses.’” The artist, Rossetti, must have been thinking of this when he named his picture “Beata Beatrix,” which means “happy or pleasing; one who blesses.” Beata sometimes has another meaning—“the elect of Paradise”—and Dante suggests this meaning as he tells us how the people remarked, as she passed, that “she seemed not to be the daughter of a mortal man, but of God.” Indeed, he tells us that whoever looked at her was made better, for all ill thoughts must vanish before her,—“the destroyer of all evil, and the queen of all good.”
She must have been a fairylike little creature as she moved among her father’s guests, dressed in deep crimson, with a few beautiful ornaments which brought out her delicate coloring. At any rate she became the ideal of the small boy, Dante. He became a poet through this meeting and from that time on wrote verses to her. We probably never would have known there was such a person as Beatrice, if he had not told us about her in his poems. Now she will never be forgotten, for not only the poet Dante, but the artist Rossetti, made her name immortal.
It was not until nine years after this first meeting that Dante met Beatrice face to face again. She was walking on the street between two older women, and turned to greet him pleasantly. Dressed in white this time, she seemed to him the fairest and most beautiful lady in all Florence.