Dante and Beatrice

Dante and Beatrice

Henry Holiday

Dante is best known for his epic poem The Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of Italian literature. The work is composed of over 14,000 lines, and even most English majors haven't read all of it. But some of us remember a semester laboring through Dante's Inferno, the famous first section of The Divine Comedy. And if we were lucky, the edition we read kept our young interest with lurid illustrations of the sins and graphic punishments in the 9 circles of hell. For example, the creepy drawings of Gustave Dore.

The pretty painting above shows Dante smitten by Beatrice as she trips down the street in Florence with her ladies. Beatrice died at the sad age of 24, but Dante stayed madly in love with her his entire life in that medieval "courtly" way: secret, unrequited, respectful, spiritual. Both were married to others anyway, and only saw each other from a distance a handful of times. After her death, Beatrice was immortalized in Dante's poetry, and much, much later by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who were ALL OVER this kind of romantic legend.

Here's a beautiful short poem:

The love of God, unutterable and perfect,

flows into a pure soul the way that light

rushes into a transparent object.

The more love that it finds, the more it gives

itself; so that, as we grow clear and open,

the more complete the joy of loving is.

And the more souls who resonate together,

the greater the intensity of their love,

for mirror like, each soul reflects the others.

Dante Alighieri, Italian, 1265-1321