Beatrice Portinari
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Beatrice (1265 – 1290) was an Italian woman who has been commonly identified as the principal inspiration for Dante Alighieri's Vita Nuova, and is also identified with the Beatrice who acts as his guide in the last book of his narrative poem the Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), Paradiso, and during the conclusion of the preceding Purgatorio. In the Comedy, Beatrice symbolises divine grace and theology.
Beatrice Portinari has been immortalized not only in Dante's poems but in paintings by Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets in the nineteenth century. Subjects taken from Dante Alighieri's La Vita Nuova, especially the idealization of Beatrice, inspired a great deal of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's art in the 1850s, in particular after the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddal. He idealized her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as Beata Beatrix.
