She was the great love of the Early Renaissance Italian poet Dante Alighieri. He adored her so much that he cast her as his divine guide to the celestial spheres of heaven in the last book of the Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia in Italian). But his would always be an unrequited love: she was promised to someone else, and so was he. Her name was Beatrice Portinari.
Beatrice Portinari belonged to a family of bankers and politicians; her father was Folco Portinari, a prior of Florence. Her family’s upper-class social status allowed her to marry into another rich Florentine set. She wed another wealthy banker, Simone de Bardi, in an arranged marriage. Dante’s wife was an Italian woman named Gemma Donati, though he never wrote a single poem about her. Instead, it was the beautiful Beatrice who was remarkable to him, though their paths (equally remarkably) only crossed twice in in their lifetimes, in the city of Florence, once when he was a child, and once in adulthood.
“In the Vita Nuova,” writes Dante scholar R. W. B Lewis for The New England Review,
the remarkable blend of reminiscence and poetic excursion put together in the early 1290s, Dante tells of his first glimpse of Beatrice—she being at the start of her ninth year, as he calculates, and he near the end of his. “She appeared humbly and properly dressed,” he remembers, “in a most noble color, crimson girded and adorned in the manner that befitted her so youthful age.”
According to the Vita Nuova, Dante frequently sat and watched Beatrice when they were children, but they only interacted once, on May 1, 1283, when they exchanged a few words of greeting. Dante was hopelessly in love, but “[t]here seems to have been no question at any time of a formal engagement between [him] and Beatrice.” He was betrothed to Gemma Donati in 1277, when he was eleven years old. Though Beatrice also wed another, the true tragedy was her death in 1290, at the young age of twenty-four or twenty-five.
Dante knew Beatrice as a person so little that he romanticized her to the point of fictionalization. In the Divine Comedy, Beatrice and the ancient Roman poet Virgil both are imagined and idealized versions of themselves, the perfect escort through heaven and the perfect escort through hell, according to Jorge Luis Borges. Yet Dante was writing about more than that.
“Allegorists tell us: Reason (Virgil) leads to faith, and faith (Beatrice) leads to divinity, and both disappear once this goal has been reached,” Borges writes. “This explanation, as the reader will have noted, is no less beyond reproach than it is without passion. From such an impoverished schema these verses could never have emerged.”
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In Borges’s estimation, Dante “created literature’s finest work so as to stage therein some encounters with the irrecoverable Beatrice.” He immortalized Beatrice’s image in words, painting her as the ideal, yet ultimately lost, female companion: gentle, sympathetic, cordial, and possessing something of the Madonna’s impenetrable virtue.
No portrait of Beatrice Portinari survives. No one knows if Dante’s great muse was a blonde or a brunette, tall or short, blue eyed or dark eyed, or even of a certain complexion. The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti used the face and frame of his late wife and model Elizabeth Siddal to create a slender, long-necked Beatrice with pale skin and flaming red hair on canvas. Consequently, contemporary readers may mentally conjure Rossetti’s Beatrice while trying to imagine Dante’s perfect woman. For those who reject Rossetti’s interpretation, Beatrice could look like any woman who has ever possessed their hearts and minds at any point in their lifetimes.
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