The Salutation of Beatrice

The picture should be compared and contrasted with the earlier Salutation of Beatrice picture, where DGR does not compose the scene in the distorted way that he does here. Beatrice is in this case radically foregrounded, dominating the picture and throwing both Love and Dante into recession. DGR forcefully relocates this Beatrice in reference to a current viewer of the painting (or, when we reflect on Jane Morris as the model, in reference to DGR himself).

The title of this picture can be misleading since the passage in the Vita Nuova which it references is the sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare” (which DGR rendered in his translation as “My lady looks so gentle and so pure”). Conventionally, however, the designation “The Salutation of Beatrice” refers to a very different passage in Dante's autobiography,—near the opening, when Dante first meets Beatrice in Florence dressed in white and flanked by two other ladies. DGR rendered this event in a much earlier picture—the left panel of the diptych called The Salutation of Beatrice.

One of DGR's last pictures, this painting was found after his death in his studio on an easel, framed. It has sometimes been described as unfinished, but the painting is clearly all but finished, with perhaps some of the architectural background not quite completed. That background, a compound of Siennese and Florentine details, is based on photographs sent to DGR by his friend Fairfax Murray.

DGR sent F. G. Stephens a prose description—not quite an ekphrasis—of the picture that Stephens could use in his art reviewing for the Athenaeum.