Beatrice di Folco Portinari is credited by many scholars with being the muse of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, appearing as a guide in the Divine Comedy, as well as being the inspiration for La Vita Nuova. Beatrice was the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker, and she married a banker as well, dying at the tender age of 24. Dante met her only two times, nine years apart, but loved her all his life. Their first meeting took place when she was only eight years old, he nine. He was so taken with her that he thought of her often, albeit privately, composed poetry in her honor, and frequented her neighborhood in the hopes of seeing her again. This happened only once, so many years later, when she passed him on the street and gestured a salutation, an “ever so sweet greetingâ€. Struck by love’s arrow, he hurried home to dream of her, and to have a vision of her that led him to write La Vita Nuova. This standard of courtly love sustained him throughout his life, as he continued sanctifying her memory and the dream of their unrequited love well after he had married and fathered children himself. Dante set her upon a pedestal, and made her a rare paragon of virtue of such purity that it inspired in him the intention of doing only good. In La Vita Nuova, written in 1293, Beatrice appears as an agent of blessed salvation. In Divine Comedy, she takes over from the ancient poet Virgil as a guide to Paradise, leading Dante through his vision with serene and maternal care. Thus Dante was able to go to his own death with his deification of her complete and unsullied, calling her “the glorious lady of my mindâ€. Later poets of the pre-Raphaelites and the nineteenth centuries followed Dante’s lead, and Beatrice was also immortalized in the art of many painters of the period (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gustav Dore). It is an almost foreign concept to our time, but for Dante, his love for the beautiful Beatrice was a holy and sacred transport to the higher aspiration of fulfillment in the love of God.
