Beata Beatrix

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Date: begun 1877

Materials: Oil on canvas; in original frame

Lucre was the lure

'Beata Beatrix' is an idealised portrait of Elizabeth Siddal in the role of Beatrice, the focus of Dante's unrequited love in the 'Vita Nuova'. William Graham, one of the artist's best patrons, made the substantial offer of nine hundred guineas for the first 'Beata Beatrix'. This tempted Rossetti into undertaking an oil replica, with the addition of an elaborate predella representing the meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise. Rossetti found this a chore - "a beastly job, but lucre was the lure".

Rapt to Heaven 

The Birmingham version of 'Beata Beatrix' dates from 1877, and was completed by Ford Madox Brown after Rossetti's death.

In a letter of 1871, Rossetti describes the picture as "embodying, symbolically, the death of Beatrice", continuing: ". . . it is not at all intended to represent Death . . . but to render it under the resemblance of a trance, in which Beatrice seated at the balcony over-looking the City [Florence] is suddenly rapt from Earth to Heaven. You will remember how much Dante dwells on the desolation of the city in connection with the incident of her death, & for this reason I have introduced it, as my background, & made the figure of Dante and Love passing through the street & gazing ominously on one another, conscious of the event, whilst the bird, a messenger of death, drops a poppy between the hands of Beatrice". 

Colours of hope

In an essay of 1891, F. G. Stephens noted that Beatrice's costume, of green and purple, represented "the colours of hope and sorrow as well as of life and death". The background cityscape is also treated differently, presumably having been painted by Brown from photographs of the other pictures

The frame of 'Beata Beatrix' is consistent with other Rossetti frames of the 1870s, although its roundel decorations lack the representations of sun, moon and stars (a further Dante reference) that appear on the three other frames.