Various letters from DGR show that he had begun studies and even a painting of his wife Elizabeth as Dante's Beatrice sometime before her suicide-death in early 1862. DGR told Ellen Heaton in 1863 that he had “lately found” the unfinished painting and that he now wanted to finish it. At that point he imagined that, “The background of the picture should be a landscape one, introducing after the manner of the old Italian painters, scenes from Dante, bearing on its main subject” (quoted in Surtees, , vol. 1. 94). WMR dates the recommencement to 1864, and in 1870 the first oil version was completed for the Honble. William Cowper-Temple (later Lord Mount Temple).

The picture was a celebrated work from the beginning, and DGR executed a number of replicas and drawings, three in oil, a watercolour, and two in coloured chalks. The most important of these is the oil replica painted for William Graham in 1872, to which DGR added a predella.

The picture was recognized as a masterpiece from the beginning, as all the early notices show. The numerous replicas and related drawings testify to its fame as well.

The iconography is centrally Rossettian. The subject, imagined out of Dante, represents Beatrice in a tranced state, caught in a kind of fore-dream of her heavenly translation.

Various commentators point out that the poppy borne by the mystical bird (an Annunciation figure as well as a sign of the Holy Spirit) emblemizes death, and perhaps chastity and peace as well. The dove is both the bird of the pagan Venus and an icon of the Holy Spirit. When Stephens said of the central figure that, “She is herself a vision while . . . the heavenly visions of the New Life are revealed to the eyes of her spirit” (Stephens, 64) he touches on a key element of this portrait and of all DGR's portrait work. These paintings function like sacramental mediations between quotidian and supernatural orders. One recalls the dream vision painted by Chiaro in : the figure stands for a supernal reality, “seen . . . but not seen of men”. Stephens' other comments on the picture are also pertinent, though they do not apply to all versions: “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” ( 64). Dante carries a book, presumably the and stands near a well, symbolizing rebirth and the New Life that Beatrice is dreaming toward. An Arbor Vitae rises behind the figure of Love at the left background.

It is worth noting that all of the background details of this picture, including the cityscape, are much more schematically presented in the first (Tate Gallery) version than they are in other, later treatments of the subject, and particularly the oil version completed after DGR's death by Madox Brown. The point is relevant when one considers the autobiographical dimensions of the work. The river, bridge, and city may be literally (or literarily) the Arno, Ponte Vecchio, and Florence, but they can and should equally be seen as the Thames and south London, with the many arches of the old Battersea Bridge spanning the river.

The work's traditional association with sonnet “” necessarily draws it into a relation with another picture, , which DGR executed in 1869 with Jane Morris as the model. It also resembles the magnificent drawing he did for the Moxon Tennyson volume.

The tranced pose of Beatrice distinctly recalls the pose DGR had Elizabeth Siddal take when she sat for his early picture .

The picture should also be connected with DGR's drawing and watercolour of , which pictures the incident of Dante drawing an angel, recorded in the chapter XXXIV. DGR of course associated himself and his work with Dante in the closest way, so that in the case of the project, his own painting would stand as the equivalent of Dante's angel-drawing.

While the picture has often been linked to sonnet “”, there is no explicit indication that DGR regarded the sonnet and picture as comprising a “double work”.

The Dantean connection, to the , is one that DGR imagined for the picture from its earliest states, as we see from his various letters about the work (e.g., to The Hon. Mrs. Cowper-Temple (26 March 1871) and to Ellen Heaton (19 May and 22 December 1863)). Compare in particular Dante's canzone in the section XXXI (“Li occhi dolenti per pieta del core”, lines 24-28), which is translated by DGR as “ ” (see lines 23-28). The flaming heart in Love's hand is of course a recollection of the first sonnet (“A ciascun alma presa”) in Dante's symbolistic autobiography (see DGR's translation).

DGR always regarded the project as a kind of memorial to his dead wife. She was the model for the first oil version, but later replicas clearly move toward a more abstract treatment of Beatrice's face. Although earlier scholars were unaware of the fact, DGR had done considerable work on the painting before his wife's suicide in 1862. The painting was therefore invested with deep personal, and more particularly Dantean, qualities for DGR. That is to say, DGR would have been able to see the painting as a kind of prophetic construction of Elizabeth as Beatrice, whose death assumed mythic significance for Dante. Moreover, in this version of the painting the cityscape background could as well suggest the Thames, the old Battersea Bridge, and south London viewed from Cheyne Walk as it could the Arno, the Ponte Vecchio, and the skyline of Florence viewed from Beatrice's father's house.

As so often with DGR's mythic imaginations, however, he also saw his other great love, Jane Morris, in the figure of Beatrice, as we know most directly from the exquisite watercolor he did of her in 1872, .

Faxon, , 143-144. Grieve, 23. Johnson, , 548-558. Mancoff, 76-87. Marillier, , 126-129. WMR, , 56, 74. Sharp, , 183-186. Stephens, , 62-64. Surtees, , vol. 1, 93-94 (no. 168). Surtees, , vol. 2, plate 238. Waugh, , 121-124. , Tate 1997, 154-157. Wildman, , 298-300.