This is a painting that DGR grew to care for, after a fairly prolonged unhappiness with a work he had begun simply for money. In all conceptual and iconographical matters the painting differs very little from the original, except that the added predella thickens both the Dantescan motifs and the autobiographical significance of the subject.
Technically, however, the work is very different indeed, as one can see most
immediately if the background areas of the original are compared with this
work. Here everything is articulated with much greater precision: the
figures of Dante and Eros; their respectively attendant symbolic accessories
(the well, symbolizing rebirth and the New Life that Beatrice is dreaming
toward; and the
Arbor Vitae
ornamenting the backspace of Eros); and the distant cityscape
architecture of Florence. In one sense the increased definition seems to
give greater realism to the picture. But in another and even more telling
way the symbolic resonance is increased. That effect comes about because of
the way DGR has sharply defined the presence of a field of golden light. In
the original painting DGR gives Beatrice an aureole (like the figure of
Love) via a witty manipulation of a gold color field that instantiates
nature and supernature simultaneously. Here her glory spreads across the
entire left two-thirds of the picture, and even appears to hollow out by the
power of its lightening the otherwise planar structure of the background
areas. The result is not at all to produce a kind of realistic depth
recession, though it could be read that way; rather, the gold light comes to
seem an extension of Beatrice's person, a flooding glory that rhymes with
the darker gold flesh of her tranced face and folded hands.
So here DGR slightly alters the focus of the ideality he first pursued in the original work. In this painting the ideal is clearly centered in the face of Beatrice; and in this painting that face has been drawn somewhat further away from the face of the artist's dead wife toward a more abstract form.
This is a far more dynamic picture than the original. This picture's energy clearly runs along three disharmonic diagonal lines of force: the lines defined by the arm of the sundial, the line joining the dove to the figure of Love, and the line of Beatrice's right arm. In each case symbolic relations are being drawn in reds and golds.
The formal balance between the main picture and the predella is neatly done: the three figures of the former have their equivalents in the latter (with Love being replaced by the train of Beatricean women) in a mirrored arrangement.
William Graham made an impassioned plea that DGR make a copy of the “has appealed to my feeling above and beyond any
picture I ever saw, and the
(love for it has only
deepened with its growth and my knowledge of its
history”“beastly work”
and abandoned the
effort “as hopeless,”
as he told his
brother. But writing on 5 September 1871 he said that he had taken it up
again and that “it seems to be coming around
tolerably.”
He finished the work a week later, at which
point he began work on a predella for the picture, which Graham had asked
for. He finished the predella shortly thereafter, perhaps in October
(
But DGR was still not really happy with the result, as he told Madox Brown
at the time. The latter encouraged him to go on with the work and he did so
through late 1872 and into the early months of 1873, “with
much beneficial results in depth and transparency.”
On 4 February he told his brother that he had “got at last
the frame for Graham's
and on the same day he wrote to
Brown to thank him for his help and encouragement: “I got
to work on the
(
The fame of the original picture put great pressure on DGR to make replicas and finished drawings of the work.
DGR's detailed commentary (to Graham) elucidates the iconography of the work
quite well: “The picture must of course be viewed not as a
representation of the incident of the death of Beatrice, but as an ideal
of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden spiritual
transfiguration. Beatrice is rapt visibly into Heaven, seeing as it were
through her shut lids (as Dante says at the close of the
(Lady Horner's ‘Him who is Blessed through all
ages;’
and in sign of the supreme change, the radiant
bird, a messenger of death, drops the white poppy between her open
hands. In the background is the City which, as Dante says:
‘sat solitary in mourning for her
death;’
and through whose street Dante himself is
seen to pass gazing toward the figure of Love opposite, in whose hand
the waning life of his lady flickers as a flame. On the sundial at her
side the shadow falls on the hour of nine, which number Dante connects
mystically in many ways with her and with her death. The date below the
predella (31st March, 1300) is that of Dante's meeting Beatrice in the
Garden of Eden (
Various commentators point out that the poppy borne by the mystical bird (a
figure of the Holy Spirit) emblemizes both death and chastity. Stephens,
presumably with the concurrence of the artist, says that Beatrice is sitting
“in a balcony of her father's palace in Florence. The
picture places us in the chamber from which the balcony opens, and the
damsel's form is half lost against the outer light, half merged with the
inner shadows of the place. She is herself a vision while . . . the
heavenly visions of the New Life are revealed to the eyes of her spirit.
The open window gives a view of the Arno, its bridge, and the towers and
palaces of that city in which Dante and Beatrix spent their lives till
the fatal month of June 1290, when she died, and, as the poet tells us,
(‘the whole city came to be, as it were, widowed
and despoiled of all dignity’
. . . In the
background the poet Dante attentively regards the figure of Love, the
ideal Eros of his vision, who, holding a flaming heart, passes on the
other side of the picture heavenwards, and seems to sign to him that he
should follow in that path”
In this version of the subject (and in contrast to the original painting) DGR clearly sketches in the forms of the Ponte Vecchio and the Campanile, less clearly the figures of the Duomo and the skyline of the Palazzo Vecchio, thus particularizing the image as a cityscape of Florence.
The commentary on the original painting applies here as well. This replica's predella, however, elaborates both the Dantescan elements of the picture as well as its effort to recapitulate the manner of medieval and early renaissance religious pictures.
The commentary on the
The first inscription on the frame is below the main picture. The second is
below the predella. The first is from the
The original painting is very much a memorial tribute to DGR's wife
Elizabeth who killed herself in 1862. In this replica, however, as several
commentators note, the emphasis has distinctly changed in several notable
ways. The figure of Beatrice in the Graham replica, for instance, does not
so closely resemble DGR's dead wife, but has been translated to a more
generalized picture of ideal woman. The