On the other beach, in the veil, she seemed to me to tower


even more over her former self than


the other women on earth here.



Rose-Maria Gropp

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “art market”.

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    Sotto 'l suo velo e oltre la rivera


    vincer pariemi più sé stessa antica,


    vincer che l'altre qui, quand'ella c'era.



    (Purgatorio XXXI, 82–84, translated by Wilhelm G. Hertz)

    Beatrice has not yet unveiled herself to him, Dante can only guess at her figure, who even seems to surpass “her former self”, on the other bank of the Lethe river on the Purification Mountain. But: How may this Beatrice, who takes hold of the first-person narrator and made him immortal in love before in “Vita Nova”, have looked like - like this beloved and finally ultimate

    soul companion

    ? How should we picture them, except as angelic? The Divine Comedy doesn't really shed light on that either. It will be a poet and painter of the nineteenth century who gave us the most powerful image of Beatrice, her face, her figure to date.

    It may be both a burden and a destiny to be baptized in 1828 in the name of Dante Gabriel, that of not just any poet and that of an archangel.

    This was the fate of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was also a son of Gabriele Rossetti, who had fled Italy to London for political reasons, and himself also a poet, an imaginative specialist in Dante Alighieri's works and a professor at King's College.

    Rossetti junior made his name into a program, he translated Dante Alighieri's “Vita Nova”, which is about the love for Beatrice, into English.

    He wrote poetry and created paintings as an autodidact with great attraction - including his pictures of Beatrice.

    The moment of their unveiling

    Beatrice meets us in the form of Elizabeth Siddal, an unusual beauty, not according to the standards of Victorianism, with copper-red hair, light eyelashes, tall and slim. She was the daughter of an ironmonger from Sheffield and became the favored model of the members of the "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" founded in 1848, which turned away from the academic art concept that prevailed in England towards the ideal of painting before Raphael, the Trecento and Quattrocento. Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal in 1851 and married her in 1860. He drew and painted her again and again, even after her untimely death; she died of a laudanum overdose in 1861 after giving birth to a daughter. Rossetti put his poetry manuscripts in her coffin. That eight years later hein an exhumation in the night and in the fog, was brought out again, is a guaranteed terrible truth, like a satyr play to Dante's verses of pure worship.

    Nevertheless, Dante Gabriel Rossetti cannot take his work, not Elizabeth's reflection on Beatrice.

    As early as 1853 he recorded Dante's encounter with her in the Purgatorio in a touching way in a small watercolor.

    It is the moment of their unveiling that our lines are eagerly awaiting.

    Beatrice's hands hold the veil as if she had just lifted it.

    Her slim figure towers high;

    two assistant figures on their sides carry crosses.

    It could be two angels, or maybe the trio forms the Christian virtues of faith, love, and hope.

    Beatrice's profile is that of Elizabeth Siddal, facing Dante, dressed in black, who is almost adoringly under the spell of her sight.

    Transfiguration and return

    This “Greetings from Beatrice” in earthly paradise returns on a diptych, the left part of which relates to the earlier encounter with the unreachable in “Vita Nova”. Rossetti writes “Hortus Eden” twice on the upper edge of the painting on the right. The magic of a first contact resides in both images, in the transformation to a higher level.

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti finally impressed us with his idea, his incarnation of Beatrice with “Beata Beatrix”, the famous half-length portrait that he created three years after the death of Elizabeth Siddal. Reproduced an infinite number of times, the picture belongs to the collections of the Tate Gallery in London. It is the fringed vision of the beloved, with lowered lids and slightly parted lips, clad in a green robe of hope, her beautiful hands resting in her lap. A pigeon hovers next to her with a poppy in its beak. Beatrice appears before us in the form of Elizabeth, as if under a veil. In this way the earthly and transcendent imago merges. It is the transfiguration and at the same time the return of Beatrice, who is waiting in the Purgatorio on the other bank of the Lethe,before Dante's eyes "her former self" and all women on earth shimmering.

    All previous episodes of

    our series can be found at www.faz.net/dante.