Beatrice

Beatrice, the woman to whom the great Italian poet Dante dedicated most of his poetry and almost all of his life, from his first sight of her at the age of nine (“from that time forward, Love quite governed my soul”) through his glorification of her in La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy), completed 40 years later, to his death in 1321.

Beatrice is usually identified as Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of a noble Florentine family, who married Simone de’ Bardi and died at the age of 24 on June 8, 1290. Dante wrote a chronicle of his relationship with her in La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life), a prose work interlaced with lyrics. Dante tells of his meetings with her, praises her beauty and goodness, describes his own intense reactions to her kindness or lack of it, tells of events in both their lives, and explains the nature of his feelings for her. La vita nuova also tells of the day when Dante was informed of her death and contains several anguished poems written after that event. In the final chapter, Dante vows to write nothing further of Beatrice until he writes “concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman.”

The promise is fulfilled in La divina commedia, which he composed many years later, expressing his exalted and spiritual love for Beatrice, who is his intercessor in the Inferno, his goal in traveling through Purgatorio, and his guide through Paradiso. At first sight of her, in Purgatorio, he is as overwhelmed as he was at the age of nine, and he is dazzled by her presence throughout the journey, until she ascends again to her place in heaven. This expression of sublimated and spiritualized love ends with Dante’s total absorption in the divine.