Dante and Beatrice: the Vita Nova and the birth of the angelic lady

Dante Alighieri tells us that he first saw Beatrice when both were about nine years old, and that he saw her again nine years later, when she greeted him. On these two meetings, and a few other episodes, he built the Vita Nova, the book probably composed between 1292 and 1295 that alternates poems and prose to tell the story of his love.

Who Beatrice was

According to Giovanni Boccaccio, one of Dante's earliest biographers, Beatrice was Bice, daughter of the wealthy Florentine banker Folco Portinari, who later married Simone dei Bardi. The identification is widely accepted today, although it rests mainly on Boccaccio's testimony. Beatrice died in June 1290, very young. In the Vita Nova, however, her real life remains almost entirely in shadow.

What matters to Dante is meaning. The name itself, Beatrice, is understood as she who gives blessedness. The number nine, which recurs insistently in dates and events, is interpreted as the sign of a miracle, because its root is three, the number of the Trinity. The woman thus becomes the visible sign of a higher and invisible reality.

The little book: prose and poetry

The Vita Nova gathers thirty-one poems, sonnets, canzoni and a ballata, linked by narrative prose and by short commentaries explaining their structure. Dante relates how he pretended to love other women, the so-called screen ladies, to hide the true object of his feeling, and how because of this he lost Beatrice's greeting, which for him was the source of all blessedness.

From that loss comes a turning point: the poet resolves to ask for nothing more, but to find his happiness in the very praise of the lady. This is the poetry of praise, inaugurated by the canzone «Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore», ladies who have understanding of love. The sonnet «Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare» describes Beatrice passing along the street and arousing an admiring silence in others, like a creature come from heaven.

The Stil novo and the gentle heart

Dante belongs to a group of poets who in the Purgatorio, through the words of Bonagiunta Orbicciani of Lucca, are identified as the authors of the sweet new style. The Bolognese Guido Guinizelli had declared in a famous canzone that love always takes refuge in the gentle heart, and that nobility does not depend on birth. Guido Cavalcanti, to whom the Vita Nova is dedicated as to Dante's first friend, had instead described love as a dark and painful force.

The lady of the stilnovisti is often called the angelic lady: her appearance ennobles whoever looks at her and brings him closer to God. Dante takes this idea to its furthest consequences. After Beatrice's death, and after a period of confusion in which the poet is drawn to a compassionate lady, the book closes with a wondrous vision and the resolve to say nothing more of her until he can do so worthily.

That promise would be kept in the Commedia. In the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio Beatrice reappears to Dante at the top of the mountain, takes Virgil's place and guides him through Paradise. The youthful love of the Vita Nova thus becomes the driving force of a theological journey that ends with the vision of «the love that moves the sun and the other stars».