Beata Beatrix (replica) 

1871-1873

Frame: Its general design replicates the frame of the original painting, except, of course, for the fact that this is in two parts, with the frame separating the main picture from the predella bearing a small plaque with the picture's title. The symbolical roundels are the same, except that there are two at the bottom. The top of the frame bears two inscriptions: Jun: Die 9: ANNO 1290 QUOMODO SEDET SOLA CIVITAS! There is another inscription below the predella: MART. DIE 31 ANNO 1300, Veni Sponsa di Libano.

This is a painting that DGR grew to care for, after a fairly prolonged unhappiness with a work he had begun simply for money. In all conceptual and iconographical matters the painting differs very little from the original, except that the added predella thickens both the Dantescan motifs and the autobiographical significance of the subject.

Technically, however, the work is very different indeed, as one can see most immediately if the background areas of the original are compared with this work. Here everything is articulated with much greater precision: the figures of Dante and Eros; their respectively attendant symbolic accessories (the well, symbolizing rebirth and the New Life that Beatrice is dreaming toward; and the Arbor Vitae ornamenting the backspace of Eros); and the distant cityscape architecture of Florence. In one sense the increased definition seems to give greater realism to the picture. But in another and even more telling way the symbolic resonance is increased. That effect comes about because of the way DGR has sharply defined the presence of a field of golden light. In the original painting DGR gives Beatrice an aureole (like the figure of Love) via a witty manipulation of a gold color field that instantiates nature and supernature simultaneously. Here her glory spreads across the entire left two-thirds of the picture, and even appears to hollow out by the power of its lightening the otherwise planar structure of the background areas. The result is not at all to produce a kind of realistic depth recession, though it could be read that way; rather, the gold light comes to seem an extension of Beatrice's person, a flooding glory that rhymes with the darker gold flesh of her tranced face and folded hands.

So here DGR slightly alters the focus of the ideality he first pursued in the original work. In this painting the ideal is clearly centered in the face of Beatrice; and in this painting that face has been drawn somewhat further away from the face of the artist's dead wife toward a more abstract form.

This is a far more dynamic picture than the original. This picture's energy clearly runs along three disharmonic diagonal lines of force: the lines defined by the arm of the sundial, the line joining the dove to the figure of Love, and the line of Beatrice's right arm. In each case symbolic relations are being drawn in reds and golds.

 

The formal balance between the main picture and the predella is neatly done: the three figures of the former have their equivalents in the latter (with Love being replaced by the train of Beatricean women) in a mirrored arrangement.