The Portrait of Beatrice: Dante, D. G. Rossetti, and the Imaginary Lady by Fabio Camilletti (review)

‘“it is in reading incorrectly” that we can “nevertheless read correctly”’ (p. 14)— this quote by André Gide, referenced by Fabio Camilletti in his The Portrait of Beatrice, burrows to the very core of his book’s innovative reshaping of the discursive boundaries of medievalism studies. His is not a book about medievalism or ‘medieval reception’ as it is typically understood—as a strictly linear process of ‘pulling’ from the past—but rather centres the idea of the reactivation and reanimation of the cultural outputs of Dante Alighieri by Dante Gabriel Rossetti ‘as a cyclical process of reciprocal metamorphosis’(p. 10). This reciprocal process, according to Camilletti, allows for an analysis of the art and ideology of Rossetti’s nineteenth-century Dantesque oeuvre to in turn shed light on the gaps, opacities, and potentialities of the original thirteenth-century source material. In other words, The Portrait of Beatrice examines Dante and Rossetti in parallel, moving beyond strictly defined notions of historicity and linearity to uncover mutual and complementary conceptions of sacred beauty, genius, artistic interiority, self-reflection, and the creative process across modern and medieval texts.

Beatrice, as a divine figure and a potent symbol of the absent, morbid muse was never fully visually realized by Dante or his contemporaries. As such, it is only through anachronistic reinvention that Rossetti and other post-medieval artists have formulated a visual and textual image of Beatrice. Camilletti takes up the popular Victorian genre of ‘imaginary portrait’ tales to interrogate the tension between word and image, between written and visual expression in Rossetti’s artistic portrayals of Dante’s ambiguous muse. The ‘imaginary portrait’ genre is held up as the template for Rossetti’s ahistorical renderings of Beatrice. The potential of such an activity to in turn open up new ways of ‘looking at’, in a literal and metaphoric sense, the medieval works of Dante is interrogated. Camilletti’s book opens up new and interesting avenues of analysis around not just the reception of the Middle Ages but the reciprocity of the medieval past and the post-medieval present within texts and between them.