The first meeting in 1274 was when he was nine and she was eight. This meeting is best described in his own words, as translated here by Rossetti, from Vita Nuova (c. 1293), literally ‘New Love’, a collection of short prose pieces and poems on courtly love: ‘Nine times already since my birth had the heaven of light returned to the selfsame point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious Lady of my mind was made manifest to mine eyes; even she who was called Beatrice. . .and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth year. Her dress, on that day, was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very tender age. At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: ‘Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi’ [Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me].
The nine-year-old Dante sounds not quite like our own dear modern nine-year-olds perhaps, but it needs to be pointed out here that Dante is not so much recounting something autobiographical, as a modern would, but is instead exploring the nature of both earthly and divine love. They met again nine years later, and again it has to be Dante’s description as translated by Rossetti: ’And passing through a street, she turned her eyes thither where I stood sorely abashed: and. . .saluted me with so virtuous a bearing that I seemed then and there to behold the very limits of blessedness. . . betaking me to the loneliness of mine own room, I fell to thinking of this most courteous lady, thinking of whom I was overtaken by a pleasant slumber, wherein a marvellous vision was presented to me: for there appeared to be in my room a mist of the colour of fire, within the which I discerned the figure of a lord of terrible aspect to such as should gaze upon him, but who seemed therewithal to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see. Speaking he said many things, among the which I could understand but few; and of these, this: ‘Ego dominus tuus’ [I am your Lord] In his arms it seemed to me that a person was sleeping, covered only with a blood-coloured cloth; upon whom looking very attentively, I knew that it was the lady of the salutation who had deigned the day before to salute me. And he who held her held also in his hand a thing that was burning in flames; and he said to me, ‘Vide cor tuum’ [‘behold thy heart’].
Suspicious commentators have noted that Dante seems to have liked things to happen in nines, and as Renaissance Florence was after all not that big a place, he should surely have seen his beloved Beatrice more than twice in nine years. But as every woman knows, men see what they want to see in women, and perhaps he was only recording the moments of vision.
It is the second meeting that appeals to modern sensibilities, and is perhaps most commonly imagined as depicted in that Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece Dante and Beatrice (1883), by Henry Holiday. It is a very fine painting, though Dante looks a bit older than the teenager he was (a digression may be permitted here: Kitty Lushington was the model for the maidservant in the painting, and Kitty was also to be the inspiration for one of Virginia Woolf’s best-loved characters, Clarissa Dalloway – not a lot of people know this, but you can therefore see what the young Mrs Dalloway looked like in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, where the painting hangs). The encounter between Dante and Beatrice also features in a Florentine scene in the film Hannibal (2001), in which a sonnet from Vita Nuova is sung in a street performance of an opera supposedly based on the book.
What Happened Next
Dante married a woman called Gemma in 1285, by whom he had four children; Beatrice married a banker called Simone in 1287. Asked how he coped with life after her marriage, Dante replied ‘Ladies, the end of my love was indeed the greeting of this lady. . .in that greeting lay my beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires.’ Beatrice died in 1290, aged 24, but reappears, famously and wondrously, in Dante’s masterwork, one of the greatest of all poems, the Divine Comedy (1308-1321), as Dante’s guide into Paradise towards ‘The Love which moves the sun and the other stars’.