Dante and Beatrice, from a Florentine meeting to Paradise

The couple formed by Dante Alighieri and Beatrice is unlike any other. There was no love affair between them in the ordinary sense: no engagement, no elopement, perhaps only a few greetings. Yet from that almost entirely inward love came two masterpieces, the Vita Nova and the Divine Comedy, and an idea of the beloved woman that shaped European poetry.

Who Beatrice was

It was Giovanni Boccaccio, in his Trattatello in laude di Dante, who identified Beatrice with Bice, daughter of the wealthy Florentine banker Folco Portinari. A document confirms that Bice married Simone de' Bardi, of another great banking family. She died young, on 8 June 1290. The identification is generally accepted, although some scholars have thought of a partly symbolic figure.

Dante, for his part, married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been promised as a boy according to the custom of the time, and had several children with her. He never names her in his works. For a man of the 13th century, marriage and poetic love belonged to separate spheres, and this scandalised no one.

The Vita Nova

Composed around 1293 to 1295, the Vita Nova alternates prose and poems and tells of the love for Beatrice as an inner story. Dante sees her for the first time at the age of nine, dressed in red, and sees her again nine years later, when she greets him in the street. The number nine recurs constantly in the book, and Dante links it to the Trinity, as a sign that Beatrice is a miracle.

The book features the screen ladies, pretended loves meant to hide the true feeling, the greeting withheld by Beatrice when offended by gossip, and finally her death. Famous is the sonnet that begins «Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare», in which the lady passes through the city and all who see her feel themselves made better. The work closes with the resolve to say of her what was never said of any woman.

The guide of Paradise

That resolve is fulfilled in the Comedy. Already in the second canto of the Inferno it is Beatrice who comes down from heaven to ask Virgil to rescue the lost Dante, and she explains that she does so out of love. In the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio she appears in the Earthly Paradise, veiled, on a triumphal chariot, and Dante recognises «the signs of the ancient flame», translating a line of the Aeneid.

Their meeting is stern at first: Beatrice reproaches Dante for having strayed from her after her death. Then she guides him through the heavens of Paradise, explaining the mysteries of faith. Only at the end, in the Empyrean, does she return to her place among the blessed and hand over the task to Saint Bernard, while Dante sees her smile from afar.

A love that becomes theology

In the Romantic era the image of Beatrice enjoyed great success. The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who bore the poet's name, devoted to her in the 1860s the painting Beata Beatrix, now in Tate Britain in London, and Henry Holiday depicted in 1883 the meeting of the two along the Arno. Many 19th-century illustrators, from Gustave Doré onwards, portrayed her beside the poet on the journey through the heavens.

With Beatrice the beloved woman ceases to be merely the object of desire and becomes the means by which man draws near to God. It is a decisive step in the history of Western love, joining the legacy of the troubadours to Christian theology and making a greeting received in the street the beginning of a journey all the way to heaven.