Journey to Beatrice
Journey to Beatrice

Author: Charles S. Singleton

Publisher:

Published: 1977-09

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Originally published in 1977. This volume recovers the allegory in Dante's Divine Comedy and presumes that readers' deficient knowledge of or interest in allegory have led to misinterpretations of Dante's poem. None of the dozens of commentaries on the Comedy published in the first half of the twentieth century was concerned with allegory more than sporadically, says Singleton, and so these treatments directed readers' attention to the merest disjecta membra of that continuous dimension of the poem. From Singleton's perspective, the allegory of the Comedy is an imitation of Biblical allegory, which was acknowledged by thinkers in the Middle Ages but not by intellectuals during and following the Renaissance. Singleton attempts to restore the allegorical elements to the foreground of interpreting the Comedy.

Portrait of Beatrice
Portrait of Beatrice

Author: Fabio Camilletti

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2019-03-30

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 026810400X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Portrait of Beatrice examines both Dante's and D. G. Rossetti's intellectual experiences in the light of a common concern about visuality. Both render, in different times and contexts, something that resists clear representation, be it the divine beauty of the angel-women or the depiction of the painter's own interiority in a secularized age. By analyzing Dante's Vita Nova alongside Rossetti's Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession, which inaugurates the Victorian genre of 'imaginary portrait' tales, this book examines how Dante and Rossetti explore the tension between word and image by creating 'imaginary portraits.' The imaginary portrait—Dante's sketched angel appearing in the Vita Nova or the paintings evoked in Rossetti's narratives—is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose existence lies elsewhere, in the words alluding to its inexpressible quality. At the same time, thinking of Beatrice as an 'imaginary Lady' enables us to move beyond the debate about her actual existence. Rather, it allows us to focus on her reality as a miracle made into flesh, which language seeks incessantly to grasp. Thus, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti—and between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature and painting, Italy and England—takes place between different media, oscillating between representation and denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance. From medieval Florence to Victorian London, Beatrice's 'imaginary portrait' touches upon the intertwinement of desire, poetry, and art-making in Western culture.