Dante's La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), published in 1295, is a collection of prose and poetry that tells the autobiographic story of his love for Beatrice. Dante first saw the girl when he was 9 years old, and she 8, and remained infatuated with her from that day forth.
On the right: Henry Holiday's depiction of Dante's first meeting with Beatrice. She is the one wearing the "crimson mantle", turning her head to him.
The nature of their love affair no doubt seems bizarre to us today: although he barely knew her, she was the primary muse for all of his writings. She is the guide that leads him through Paradise in The Divine Comedy, and is often described as "Love herself". He claims to have only met her twice; each occassion a brief meeting on the streets of Florence (in the first, they do not even speak to each other). She subsequently married a banker and died when she was just 24 years old. Dante himself married a woman named Gemma Donati, who one imagines must have been perturbed by her husband's obsession for "the Divine Beatrice", whom Dante claims regularly visited him in dreams.
Because of the nature of their (non-)relationship, critics often praise Dante's depictions of Beatrice as being some of the clearest representations of courtly love (you should recognise this phrase from school-Shakespeare: the idea of love being asexual, unfulfilled, secretive and worshipful). Nonetheless, Dante's love sonnets contain some intensely physical imagery. My favourite sonnet from "La Vita Nuova" describes a vision that Dante has, shortly after meeting Beatrice for the second and final time:
To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this present speech may come,
so that they might write its meaning for me,
greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.
Already a third of the hours were almost past
of the time when all the stars were shining,
when Love suddenly appeared to me
whose memory fills me with terror.
Joyfully Love seemed to me to hold
my heart in his hand, and held in his arms
my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.
Then he woke her, and that burning heart
he fed to her reverently, she fearing,
afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.
(Patrick Cassidy wrote an aria based upon this sonnet, called Vida Cor Meum, which was used in the films Hannibal and Kingdom of Heaven. It is divine - try to find it if you can.)
The vision fills Dante with fear and grief, as he sees in it a foreshadowing of Beatrice's immanent death. The emotions of the poem are strange: note that Love initially holds his heart "joyfully", but after feeding the "fearing" lady Dante's heart, he begins to weep. It is as though the intensity of the image is so powerful that it transfigures emotion. Always in Dante, the symbolic act has more power than the real.
This changes, as La Vita Nuova progresses. Ironically, after Beatrice's death, Dante's love for her takes on a far more real and human quality. His poetry comes to express simpler, non-metaphorical emotion:
Whenever, alas! I remember
that I may never again
see that lady for whom I so grieve,
so much grief is gathered in my heart
by the grieving mind,
that I say: ‘My spirit, why do you not go,
since the torments you suffer
in this world, which grows so hateful to you,
bring such great thoughts of dread?’
Then I call on Death,
as to a sweet and gentle refuge:
and I say: ‘Come to me’ with such love,
that I am envious of all who die.
On the right: Henry Holiday's depiction of Dante's first meeting with Beatrice. She is the one wearing the "crimson mantle", turning her head to him.
The nature of their love affair no doubt seems bizarre to us today: although he barely knew her, she was the primary muse for all of his writings. She is the guide that leads him through Paradise in The Divine Comedy, and is often described as "Love herself". He claims to have only met her twice; each occassion a brief meeting on the streets of Florence (in the first, they do not even speak to each other). She subsequently married a banker and died when she was just 24 years old. Dante himself married a woman named Gemma Donati, who one imagines must have been perturbed by her husband's obsession for "the Divine Beatrice", whom Dante claims regularly visited him in dreams.
Because of the nature of their (non-)relationship, critics often praise Dante's depictions of Beatrice as being some of the clearest representations of courtly love (you should recognise this phrase from school-Shakespeare: the idea of love being asexual, unfulfilled, secretive and worshipful). Nonetheless, Dante's love sonnets contain some intensely physical imagery. My favourite sonnet from "La Vita Nuova" describes a vision that Dante has, shortly after meeting Beatrice for the second and final time:
To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this present speech may come,
so that they might write its meaning for me,
greetings, in their lord’s name, who is Love.
Already a third of the hours were almost past
of the time when all the stars were shining,
when Love suddenly appeared to me
whose memory fills me with terror.
Joyfully Love seemed to me to hold
my heart in his hand, and held in his arms
my lady wrapped in a cloth sleeping.
Then he woke her, and that burning heart
he fed to her reverently, she fearing,
afterwards he went not to be seen weeping.
(Patrick Cassidy wrote an aria based upon this sonnet, called Vida Cor Meum, which was used in the films Hannibal and Kingdom of Heaven. It is divine - try to find it if you can.)
The vision fills Dante with fear and grief, as he sees in it a foreshadowing of Beatrice's immanent death. The emotions of the poem are strange: note that Love initially holds his heart "joyfully", but after feeding the "fearing" lady Dante's heart, he begins to weep. It is as though the intensity of the image is so powerful that it transfigures emotion. Always in Dante, the symbolic act has more power than the real.
This changes, as La Vita Nuova progresses. Ironically, after Beatrice's death, Dante's love for her takes on a far more real and human quality. His poetry comes to express simpler, non-metaphorical emotion:
Whenever, alas! I remember
that I may never again
see that lady for whom I so grieve,
so much grief is gathered in my heart
by the grieving mind,
that I say: ‘My spirit, why do you not go,
since the torments you suffer
in this world, which grows so hateful to you,
bring such great thoughts of dread?’
Then I call on Death,
as to a sweet and gentle refuge:
and I say: ‘Come to me’ with such love,
that I am envious of all who die.
Truly, Beatrice becomes more alive to him after her death. Dante once called her, "La gloriosa donna della mia mente" (the glorious lady of my mind) ... a muse that he was free to imagine as he wished, as it so barely included its original human model.
