The picture was undertaken as part of a planned “to represent the life and work of the great Florentine in a
triple relation”
(see
DGR as Designer and Writer
“Art, Friendship, and Love”
(see his long letter to Woolner of January 1853, in
The Art celebrated in DGR's picture is clearly
a Rossettian “double work of art”
. Indeed, the picture
underscores DGR's attachment to the ideal of relationship per se, with
love and friendship reflecting an interchange he pursued in his life as
an artist, designer, and writer.
The picture reflects DGR's response to the image of Dante that DGR knew from the tracing that Seymour Kirkup sent to DGR's father. The tracing was made from what was thought to be a portrait of Dante by Giotto, discovered in Florence when DGR was twelve.
DGR worked at the picture in 1852 and exhibited it,
or rather the
The figures in this imaginary historical reconstruction, besides Giotto and Dante, are Cimabue (Giotto's master) standing behind the painter as he works, and Cavalcanti (holding a book of Guinicelli's verses) standing behind Dante. Beatrice moves below them in a procession of women; she is reading from a book. The arrangement is profoundly conceptual, all but allegorical, of DGR's “triple relation” of “Art, Friendship, and Love”. Dante and Giotto represent Art, the relations between the various men (but especially between Giotto and Dante) represent Friendship, and Beatrice and the women focus the subject of Love.
DGR's own elaborate commentary on the picture is important: “The main incident is that old one of mine, of Giotto painting Dante, but treated quite differently from anything you have seen, and with the figures of Cimabue, Cavalcante, Beatrice, and some other ladies. It illustrates a passage in the Purgatory which perhaps you know, where Dante speaks of Cimabue, Giotto, the two Guidos (Guinicelli and Cavalcante, the latter of whom I have made reading aloud the poems of the former who was then dead) and, by implication, of himself. For the introduction of Beatrice, who with the other women (their heads only being seen below the scaffolding) are making a procession through the church, I quote a passage from the Vita Nuova. I have thus all the influence of Dante's youth Art, Friendship and Love with a real incident embodying them. The combination is, I think, the best which has yet occurred to me in illustration of this period of the poet's life, and the design is certainly about the best I have made” (see
Correspondence
A complex set of historical circumstances invest this
picture. Giotto's
As DGR's letter to Woolner indicates, the picture draws upon a pair of texts from Dante, both of which are copied on the Tate Gallery drawing: six lines from the
It is clear that DGR took the imaginary event pictured in the scene as an emblematic figuration of some of his most cherished ideas about art, and in particular about art's relation to love, friendship, and poetry.