Female beauty and spiritual consciousness

Dante's Beatrice and the meaning of life

Beata Beatrix (1864) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Photo: Tate Britain

On June 8 1290, a beautiful woman from a wealthy Florentine family died tragically young. Her name was Beatrice Portinari. The poet Dante Alighieri was distraught. He had hardly known her, but had long admired this young woman from afar. In fact, his reverence for her had begun when he was still a boy and was only deepened by the few times he had seen her in their shared aristocratic circles. His devotion was life-long, and he came to see her beauty and graceful manner as an intimation of a larger beauty, the glory of God’s divine order. Before Dante wrote his masterpiece The Divine Comedy, he wrote an autobiographical account of his love for Beatrice and detailed his grief following her death. This work is called La Vita Nuova, the ‘new life.’

Dante was drawing on a tradition of courtly love poetry. It was an established trope of this poetry that it would take a beautiful and unattainable woman and use her as a starting point for the poet’s own meditations. By Dante’s time, this poetry had become very complex and moribund. It was only with the work of Dante’s contemporaries that love poetry found new vigour in what came to be known as the ‘sweet new style’—a kind of love poetry that was less focused on formal dexterity than it was on elegance and clarity. However, for Dante, the ‘new life’ is not just a renewal of poetic form, but a new spiritual consciousness. Dante’s contemporaries often used spiritual rhetoric to convey the ennobling power of love, but for Dante his beloved Beatrice is herself an embodiment of the divine order. It is only through the exquisiteness of Beatrice’s beauty that Dante is brought into contact with an otherwise ineffable truth about cosmic reality and the place of humanity within it.

A great lover of Dante was the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His painting Beata Beatrix (1864) illustrates the medieval poet’s theological view of love as a vehicle for divine grace. In the painting, a woman sits with her eyes closed and palms turned upwards. Her expression is that of quiet, inner rapture, her posture is that of prayer. Her head is turned upwards but her gaze is inward. Behind her is a brick wall, upon which is a sundial marking nine o’clock—the hour of Beatrice’s death, and a number associated with the Holy Trinity. Behind the wall in the hazy distance, is a city bridge—thought to be both the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and Blackfriars bridge in London near where Rossetti himself once lived. We see Dante on the right looking across the street at the personification of Love, who holds a burning heart in his hand. A red dove with a halo drops a poppy into the woman’s hand. The overall mood of the painting is that of a dream-like ecstasy and erotic mysticism, achieved through Rossetti’s use of fiery light and blurred lines and contours. The emphasis here is not just on the holiness of human love, but on the sacredness of erotic passion.

Rossetti’s painting is at once a representation of Dante’s story and a representation of the painter’s own grief following the death of his wife and muse, the poet and artist Elizabeth Siddal. Modern scholars like to play down the extent to which this painting commemorates Siddal, but certain biographical details are unmistakable. The eyelids and lips of Beatrice are recognisably those of Siddal, and her glowing and abundant copper hair reminds us of Rossetti’s many other portraits of her. The poppy given to Beatrice by the red dove brings to mind Siddal’s own death, which was the result of an overdose of laudanum. The dove itself also has associations with Siddal and Rossetti’s own relationship, as one of Rossetti’s pet names for his wife was ‘dear dove divine.’ Perhaps most of all, however, this painting is a tribute to Siddal’s own formal technique as an artist. The colours and textures, though painted in oil, have the same ethereal translucence as Siddal’s illustrations in watercolour of English and Scottish folk ballads. The dry-brush technique which gives these earlier paintings their dream-like quality is mirrored here in Rossetti’s painting, and we can see it particularly in the colours of Beatrice’s clothes, her hair and the hazy, visionary background which gives Rossetti’s painting its psychological power. Rossetti is here honouring his wife as an artist, as a creative innovator who inspired his own work and improved his own craftsmanship.

In his letters around the time of his marriage, Rossetti often uses the word ‘thanks’ to describe his feelings towards his new wife. And his many hundreds of sketches made of Lizzie show that to be in her presence was for Rossetti to be put into a reverential and meditative state of mind. Just like Dante with his Beatrice, Lizzie for Rossetti embodied a sort of grace, a manifestation of the spiritual in a fallen and finite world.

On the frame of the version of this painting in Tate Britain, Rossetti had embossed the quote from Jeremiah which Dante quotes in his passages reflecting on Beatrice’s death. ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas.’ ‘How doth the city sit solitary…’ After her death, says Dante, his home city of Florence ‘was left like a widow robbed of all her dignity.’ In Beatrice’s death, Dante had lost not just a beloved, but a source of moral virtue and a spiritual ideal. In one poem Dante writes:

‘Her beauty, as it strikes the gazing eye,
Dispatches such sweetness to the heart
That only those who feel it understand.
And swiftly from her lips she seems to send
A tender loving spirit who finds out
The yearning soul and stays to whisper: “sigh.”’

And in another sonnet he says:

‘There is such power in her loveliness
That it awakes no envy, but its sway
Makes others walk with her, clothed in the dress
Of gentleness and love and constant faith.’

The word ‘sigh’—‘sospira’ in Italian—is not just sentimental for Dante. He uses it many times in his book to signify soul, psyche, thought. In other words, ‘sospira’ stands for consciousness, a consciousness that is transformed in death and unites with divine reality. It is only through Beatrice’s earthly and spiritual beauty that this union with God is possible. The significance of the word ‘sospira’ can be found in the final sonnet of Dante’s Vita Nuova, which imagines his sighs of lamentation taking on a life of their own, going up to meet Beatrice and coming back to tell him of her new life. This spiritual reality witnessed by Dante’s ‘pilgrim spirit’ is so full of ‘splendour’ that the returning consciousness can only speak of it in ‘words too deep for me to understand.’ However, when this spirit mentions the name of Beatrice, he ‘understands him well.’ In other words, Dante is not yet ready for the Beatific Vision. But the name of Beatrice keys him in, gives him the closest approximation to the divine reality that his narrow, fallen consciousness can cope with. Beatrice, then, has prepared the way for Dante’s eventual, direct vision of God. Only Beatrice can right now ‘gaze upon him [Christ] who is blessed throughout all the ages.’

Dante Gabriel Rossetti translated La Vita Nuova himself, and frequently painted motifs from the story of Dante and Beatrice. However, he was not a practicing christian and did not write religious poems like his famous sister Christina Rossetti. Nevertheless, for Rossetti, female beauty was an intimation of a higher reality, and gave meaning and value to an otherwise fleeting existence. In a sonnet called Heart’s Compass, Rossetti writes:

‘Sometimes thou seem’st not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar
Some heavenly solstice hushed and halcyon;
Whose unstirred lips are music’s visible tone;
Whose eyes the sun-gate of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular;—
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.’

Sensuous female beauty still does elevate the onlooker to a new consciousness, but in Rossetti’s works it is purely aesthetic, not metaphysical. In Dante’s theological vision, Beatrice is the embodiment of an ineffable cosmic order. In Rossetti’s view, Beatrice personifies Love, which is life at its highest frequency. The difference between Dante and Rossetti is not that the former is spiritual and the latter is secular. Both poets see love as a window into ultimate reality. What comes between Dante and Rossetti is Romanticism. For Dante, spiritual reality is hierarchical. For Rossetti, erotic love is not a sign of the transcendent so much as an intimation of a spirituality that is immanent, the very energy of life itself.

The new consciousness can be found, then, in the here and now. The critic Walter Pater would codify this aestheticism in the conclusion to his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873). Intense aesthetic experiences, Pater says, shock us out of habitual consciousness and reconnect us to the ‘vital forces’ that give meaning to life. For Pater, and for Rossetti, we do not need metaphysics to find this meaning, we only need to enter into the fullest delight in everyday experience, and the best way to do that is through art, poetry and music. Pater writes:

‘Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.’

Whether for Dante’s theological, cosmic vision, or Rossetti’s more Romantic, aesthetic worldview, Beatrice embodies a new state of spiritual consciousness. It is a state of consciousness which is the opposite of industrialised, instrumental or utilitarian thinking. The experience of such evocative and captivating beauty is intrinsically valuable, rather than being something valued for its usefulness to a further practical end. The religious visual rhetoric that Rossetti draws upon to articulate his vision is an expression of moral seriousness, even though it is not like Dante’s poetry communicating any doctrinal spiritual creed. There may or may not be a God, there may or may not be a metaphysical order beyond what can be seen or touched. Rossetti leaves the question open. However, it is the experience of the real, physical beauty that is enough. Our sensuous perceptions transfigure consciousness and inspire reverence, wonder and a chaste heart. This is what a woman’s beauty does to a man.