Beata Beatrix was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s next step, started in earnest in 1864, two years after Lizzie’s death, and completed in 1870, although he had been making preliminary studies when she was still alive. The background sets this in Florence, with its distinctive Ponte Vecchio over the River Arno, and the sundial sets the time as nine o’clock in the morning, the time of Beatrice Portinari’s death.

Behind the ecstatic figure of Beatrice are Dante (right) with his cap, and the angelic figure of Love at the left. Beatrice is pale and her death is approaching. Her eyes are closed, waiting for release. A red bird with a halo has brought her a poppy flower, a direct association with sleep and laudanum. Beatrice is unmistakably Lizzie.

For once, we have the artist’s account of the reading of his own painting, in a letter Rossetti wrote to its first owner in 1871. He establishes that his literary reference is Vita Nuova, and the work embodies “symbolically the death of Beatrice as treated in that work.” But it doesn’t represent death as such, rather ‘renders’ it “under the semblance of a trance”, in which she is suddenly “rapt” from Earth to Heaven.

The red bird is the messenger of death, who drops a poppy flower into Beatrice’s hands, as she has closed her eyes to see the face of God. This could equally have referred to Lizzie rather than Beatrice.

Rossetti never worked this obsession out of his system. In 1871, he returned to the theme in what proved to be his largest painting ever, based on an original watercolour study, now in the Tate Gallery, he had made as early as 1856.

A decade after Lizzie’s death, Rossetti wove the more complex Dante’s Dream on the Day of the Death of Beatrice, of which this is the artist’s 1880 copy of his 1871 original. There are references to Beata Beatrix, in the red birds at the left and right edges, and his model for Beatrice was Jane Morris, wife of William Morris, designer and close friend. Jane Burden, as she was before her marriage to William Morris, had a similar background to Lizzie Siddall, from humble origins to artists’ model, then into the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Jane and Rossetti became lovers in around 1865 when he was still working on Beata Beatrix, but their relationship cooled later.

Rossetti casts the dream insert in red, for love, showing a red and winged angel of love kissing the dying Beatrice. He clutches not a flower – there are red roses strewn all over the floor – but an arrow of love. The model for the woman on the right was Marie Spartali Stillman, and her husband William James Stillman modelled for Dante’s face.

The finest among Rossetti’s last paintings of Beatrice is The Salutation of Beatrice (1880-82), painted in the last couple of years of his life. It is drawn in part from the figure of Beatrice in the left panel of his earlier Salutation of Beatrice, again using Jane Morris as his model. Sat on a well in the distance are the figures of Dante and the same red angel of Love, or maybe death after all.

In that couple of years before his death, as Rossetti was working on his last paintings of Dante’s beloved Beatrice, two other artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelites were also at work on their depictions of her. Henry Holiday was researching for his 1883 painting Dante meets Beatrice at Ponte Santa Trinita, and Marie Spartali Stillman painted the first of her several watercolours of Dante and Beatrice.

The year after Rossetti’s death, Henry Holiday completed his painting of the second occasion on which Dante claimed he had met with his beloved, in Dante meets Beatrice at Ponte Santa Trinita (1883). Holiday devoted great effort to making this view as authentic as possible. In 1881, the year before Rossetti’s death, he travelled to Florence to make studies, and researched the buildings at the time, which he turned into clay models for a 3D reference. He also got John Trivett Nettleship, a noted animal painter, to paint the pigeons so that they were faithful.

Marie Spartali, as she was before her marriage in 1871, was one of a trio of beautiful young women from Greek migrant families in London who had become known as the Three Graces. Her father, then a wealthy merchant, entertained Pre-Raphaelite painters including Rossetti, who referred to Marie as a “stunner”.

The Three Graces modelled for the artists of the day, and Marie appears as one of the figures in Rossetti’s painting of Dante’s Dream on the Day of the Death of Beatrice (1871, 1880). She learned to paint in private lessons from Ford Madox Brown, and was soon making her own images based on the writings of Dante, and Rossetti’s translations of them into English.

The full title of her “Certain ladies of her companionship gathered themselves unto Beatrice…” (1880) actually quotes even more from Dante’s Vita Nuova: “Certain ladies of her companionship gathered themselves unto Beatrice where she kept alone in weeping. And as they passed in and out, I would hear them speak concerning her, how she wept.”

This refers to the ladies of Florence who paid their respects to Beatrice as she kept vigil following her father’s death. Dante is shown sat outside the house, wearing his customary chaperon hat, his head bowed, and being comforted by two of the women who had visited Beatrice inside.

In 1896, Marie Spartali Stillman revisited Dante’s Vita Nuova through Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s popular translation into English. Her earlier version of Beatrice (1896) shows Dante’s beloved Beatrice lost in contemplation while reading, an intimate insight set firmly in the Pre-Raphaelite mediaeval, also seen in detail below.

Her second treatment of Beatrice (1898) employs similar floral language, perhaps emphasising innocence in its lilies, but is less contemplative and more sensual, in a manner perhaps more typical of Rossetti.

In the months before the outbreak of the First World War, she painted The Pilgrim Folk (1914), which may well have been a double valediction, as both her last major painting and her farewell to Italy. It again refers to Dante’s Vita Nuova via Rossetti, a quotation from which was shown with the painting. This passage contains Dante’s account of Beatrice’s death to a group of newly-arrived pilgrims.

Dante leans out from a window at the left, addressing three pilgrims below. At the lower left corner, the winged figure of Love crouches in grief, poppies scattered in front of him, a reference to Rossetti’s paintings. Pilgrims around the well are taking refreshment after their travels, and more are arriving through the alley beyond. Black crows fly in flocks above, symbolising death. The landscape behind is very Italian, and the whole has a fairy-tale unreality about its mediaeval details.

Stillman had used Rossetti’s symbols elsewhere too, including in one of her finest paintings, Love’s Messenger completed in 1885, three years after his death.

A young woman stands by her embroidery at an outside window. On her right hand is a messenger dove/pigeon, to which a letter is attached. She clutches that letter to her breast with her left hand, implying that its contents relate to matters of the heart. The dove is being fed corn, which could either be its reward for having reached its destination (thus the woman is the recipient of the message), or preparation for its departure (she is the sender).

On balance, the presence of corn on the windowsill implies that it is more likely that the dove has just arrived, and the woman is the recipient. But look closely at the embroidery, and she is making an image of one of Rossetti’s angels of love, complete with red wings and a bow and arrow.

There’s another artist who is perhaps the most surprising of all those who painted Beatrice: Odilon Redon (1840–1916), a contemporary of Stillman, who is perhaps as different as you could get in terms of background and style.

Redon’s pastel portrait of Beatrice from 1885 was turned into a print a decade or so later, and appears to have been laid down in pure gold. Like so many other portraits of her, it contains no literary references to indicate whether she is the possibly physical Beatrice from Vita Nuova, or the spiritual guide from the Divine Comedy.

Throughout his career, Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin painted scenes from Dante’s Divine Comedy. This colour lithograph refers to the end of the middle book Purgatory, in which Dante is reunited with his beloved Beatrice, who leads him through the final book, Paradise.

At the same time that Stillman was painting her Pilgrim Folk above, Redon painted one of his relatively few works in oils, of Dante and Beatrice (1914). Their heads, with eyes closed so they can see their God, are among the clouds above the cliffs of a coastline suggestive of Purgatory.

So who was Beatrice Portinari?

Born in Florence in about 1265, making her about the same age as Dante, she was the daughter of a rich banker. By the time she was about 22, she had married another banker, Simone dei Bardi. She is mentioned in the will that her father made in 1287, and is thought to have died in Florence on 8 June 1290, at the age of about 25.

Beyond that, and Dante’s non-specific references to a Beatrice, who could quite easily be someone completely different, or a symbolic figure, there seems nothing to tell. But there are so many wonderful paintings of such an unknown woman.

On 11 February 1862, Lizzie, wife of the leading Pre-Raphaelite artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, died of an overdose of laudanum (tincture of opium) at the age of only 32. A couple of years later, Rossetti embarked on an unusual post-mortem portrait of her in the role of Dante’s beloved Beatrice. Although Dante never revealed her true identity, many have believed her to represent Beatrice di Folco Portinari, who had died even younger almost six hundred years earlier, at the age of only 25. Beata Beatrix is one of Rossetti’s major paintings.

The strangest thing about Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (c 1864–70) is that it represents a woman who, beyond Dante’s writing, is almost unknown, yet she’s become one of the most painted women in history. This weekend’s two articles look at some of the better-known paintings of Beatrice, from before Rossetti’s image, and afterwards, spanning some of Europe’s most visionary artists, from William Blake to Odilon Redon.

Dante wrote about Beatrice in two of his most popular works: his youthful Vita Nuova, and in two of the three books in his Divine Comedy. Early commentators don’t appear to have made any association between his literary figure and a real person, let alone a married woman who, at best, only met Dante twice before her early death. Many scholars believe Dante’s figure is symbolic rather than physical, which is more likely in her role in the Divine Comedy. Nevertheless, she has proved a popular subject, particularly during the nineteenth century.

The American Romantic artist and poet Washington Allston shows her in a straightforward portrait of Beatrice from 1819. He makes no literary allusions, although this is most likely to refer to Vita Nuova.

It was William Blake’s paintings for his unfinished illustrated edition of the Divine Comedy that started to explore her in the context of Dante’s narrative.

Beatrice on the Car, from 1824-27, shows her appearing in a chariot or ‘car’ in the midst of a religious procession, which takes place in the earthly paradise on the summit of the island-mountain of Purgatory.

Blake’s best-developed painting of her, Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, from the same few years prior to his death, shows her admonishing Dante for his recent straying from the path of righteousness. This is rich with symbols and graphic devices, such as its vortex of heads and eyes, and the marvellous gryphon pulling Beatrice’s chariot.

Dante’s works enjoyed a revival during the nineteenth century, bringing other artists to use them as themes for their paintings, with the Divine Comedy the more common.

Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Oesterley’s conventional and Romantic view of Beatrice and her chariot follows Dante’s description literally, even down to the colours of her clothing.

Andrea Pierini’s curiously antiquated version from 1853 is also literal in its detail.

William Dyce returned to portraiture style for his painting of Beatrice in 1859, when Rossetti was peaking in his obsession with her. Dyce had considerable exposure to paintings of the Divine Comedy: when he was in Rome in 1827-28, he is thought to have been friends with Friedrich Overbeck, the Nazarene artist who had just been painting frescoes of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered alongside others of the Divine Comedy, in the Casa Massimo. When he returned to London, Dyce was responsible for introducing the Pre-Raphaelites, including Rossetti, to the influential critic John Ruskin.

Others involved with the Pre-Raphaelites also adopted Beatrice as a theme. Simeon Solomon’s ink and watercolour painting of Dante’s First Meeting with Beatrice (1859–63) is taken from Vita Nuova, and its description of the two nine year-olds meeting in about 1274.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti had started to become obsessed with his name-sake and Beatrice soon after his early success as a Pre-Raphaelite painter. In December 1849, he wrote a short story titled Hand and Soul which was published the following month in the first issue of the Germ, the movement’s magazine, edited by Rossetti’s brother William Michael.

His story tells of courtly love, artistic and religious fervour of an imaginary mediaeval painter in the Italian city of Arezzo, who is in a strictly Platonic relationship with “his mystical lady, now hardly in her ninth year”, the same age as Beatrice was when Dante claimed to have met her.

Shortly afterwards, Rossetti started sketching for a painting of their meeting in Purgatory.

In this figure sketch for The Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Purgatory, made in 1852, Dante is on his knees as his beloved Beatrice admonishes him for straying from the path of righteousness.

Rossetti had second thoughts, and in 1853-54 painted this more conventional composition, showing Dante in full spate, and Beatrice flanked by angels carrying golden crosses. His details are at odds with Dante’s account, though.

At about the same time, Rossetti was working on a more narrative watercolour of another meeting between the two, this time based on the Vita Nuova, in Beatrice Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies Him Her Salutation (1852). Dante, dressed in his traditional red, is here being ignored by his beloved, after they had bumped into one another at a wedding. This is thought to be Rossetti’s first painting in which Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Siddall is the model for Beatrice.

Lizzie was about 22 at that time. A working class woman, who initially worked at a milliner’s shop in London, she couldn’t have been further from the minor nobility and affluence of Beatrice Portinari. Neither was Lizzie noted for her beauty: she first modelled in around 1849 for Walter Deverell, who chose her for her plainness. Lizzie continued to model for Pre-Raphaelites, and in 1851-52 achieved fame as the model for John Everett Millais’ Ophelia.

Lizzie became an artist in her own right, although her paintings are now sadly neglected. In 1852, she moved in to live with Rossetti, but her health started to deteriorate, probably as a result of tuberculosis.

Rossetti then went on to a more fictionalised watercolour of The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1853), showing Dante being comforted as he is drawing an angel on that day of remembrance for his beloved. This is situated in central Florence according to the view through the window at the right, but there’s an incongruous country garden seen through the door at the left.

As Lizzie’s health declined, Rossetti created more ornate and icon-like paintings of Beatrice. The Salutation of Beatrice from 1859-63 uses oil and gold leaf on conifer wood, set in a frame Rossetti designed and painted himself. It brings together the literary Beatrice from Vita Nuova on the left, with the spiritual Beatrice from the Divine Comedy at the right, where they meet in earthly paradise atop Purgatory. On the frame are inscriptions taken from the respective works, and in the middle is the date and time (on a sundial) of Beatrice Portinari’s death in 1290.

When the couple married in Hastings in 1860, she had to be carried around the corner to attend the church. She became depressed, and was addicted to laudanum (tincture of opium). In 1861, she had a stillborn daughter, and later that year became pregnant a second time. She died on 11 February 1862, as a result of what was almost certainly a deliberate overdose of laudanum.

Stories are at the centre of our lives, and the focus of many of those is the origin of our species and societies. Ancient myths account for the first men and women, and how the world came to be as we know it. Whatever the scientific truth, we still tell stories about events long before historical records, among them the myth of Pandora and her box containing pain and evils.

Although earliest records of Pandora’s story stretch back to around 750 BCE, in one of the oldest Greek anthologies of myth, they weren’t included in the most popular compilations such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so seldom appeared in paintings, although it did enter English usage in the sixteenth century. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that Pandora’s box caught on and became a popular theme in images. This weekend I trace Pandora’s history in European paintings.

The story of Pandora and her ‘box’ is told most fully in Hesiod’s Works and Days, where she is the original woman, created by Hephaestus (Vulcan) for Zeus, as punishment for humans receiving the gift of fire that had been stolen by Prometheus. After she was formed from earth by Hephaestus, other gods gave her properties to determine her nature.

Athena dressed her in a silvery gown, and taught her needlecraft and weaving. Aphrodite shed grace on her head, together with cruel longing and cares. Hermes gave her a shameful mind and deceitful nature, together with the power of speech, including the ability to tell lies. Other gifts were provided by Persuasion, the Charities, and the Horae.

Pandora also carried with her a large earthenware jar (in Greek, pithos) containing toil and sickness that bring death to men, diseases, and a myriad of other pains. Zeus gave her as a gift to Epimetheus, brother of Prometheus. She then opened her jar, and released its evils into the earth and sea. The only thing remaining in the jar was Hope, who stayed under its lip.

This marked the beginning of Hesiod’s second age of mankind, its Silver Age, in which people knew birth and death, as humans had become subject to death, and Pandora brought birth too. In later accounts, Epimetheus married Pandora, and the couple had a daughter Pyrrha, who married Deucalion with whom she survived the flood.

As with other classical myths, at the time that Jean Cousin painted Eva Prima Pandora, in about 1550, it had been mixed with Christian religious narrative, in this case of Eve and the Fall of Mankind. No longer clothed in Athena’s silvery gown, Eve/Pandora lies naked, propped against a human skull. Her left hand clutches the dreaded jar, which she hasn’t opened yet. Her right hand holds a fruiting sprig of the apple tree, an allusion to the traditional Biblical story of Eve. Coiled around her left arm is a serpent, another reference to the Fall of Mankind.

Pandora seems to have been very seldom if ever painted after that, until the nineteenth century.

When William Etty painted her, in Pandora Crowned by the Seasons in 1824, the significance of the crux of the story, Pandora opening the jar, had become lost in the other detail, and she was just another opportunity to paint a statuesque and almost naked young woman.

It was the now-forgotten Henry Howard who first painted The Opening of Pandora’s Vase in 1834. Pandora, more correctly dressed, crouches to duck the torrent of woe, evil and pain as it streams from the jar, as Epimetheus tries in vain to reseal its lid. This is the story as told by Hesiod in his Works and Days.

The literary story seems to have changed Pandora’s jar into a box as the result of a mistranslation in the sixteenth century, but that transition doesn’t appear to have occurred in paintings until between 1834 and 1860. It also seems more likely that it resulted from confounding of this story with that of Psyche, who had a box she couldn’t open.

This undated painting attributed to Louis Hersent of Pandora Reclining in a Wooded Landscape gives the revised account, with the box firmly shut in Pandora’s right hand, and the motif an uncommitted combination of landscape, nude figure, and weak narrative.

In the 1870s, this suddenly became one of the most popular subjects for mythological paintings. This doesn’t appear to have been the result of it being told in another creative medium, though.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s first painting of Pandora, completed in 1871, shows a moody, brooding Pandora, modelled by Jane Morris. She has just cracked open the lid of the jewelled casket in her left hand, and it’s emitting a stream of noxious red smoke. As this coils around her head, winged figures appear in the fumes. The inscription on the side of the jewel casket reads “Nascitur ignescitur”, meaning born of flames.

This was one of Rossetti’s earlier paintings of Jane Morris, wife of his friend William Morris, and later to be the subject of Rossetti’s passionate obsession. Rossetti’s source for the story was most probably Lemprière’s dictionary of classical mythology, which erroneously referred to Pandora’s box, not jar. It was commissioned by John Graham for 750 guineas, who was so pleased with the result that he exhibited it, against Rossetti’s wishes, in Glasgow the following year.

Jules Lefebvre was another artist who painted Pandora more than once. This initial version from 1872 shows her walking with the fateful box held in both hands, its lid firmly shut. Ominous smoke rises from a series of fumaroles in the ground around her. She is nude, wears an unusual coronet, and there is a six-pointed star above her head.

Next was Alexandre Cabanel’s portrait of the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson (1843-1921) as Pandora, from 1873. As a portrait rather than a faithful account of the myth, the box is closed, almost concealed, and its significance suppressed.

In 1877, the elderly Paul Césaire Gariot’s Pandora’s Box places her in a primeval world of rock, studying the closed box intently, wrestling internally with the desire to open it.

The following year, Dante Gabriel Rossetti made this chalk study for a second painting of Pandora, again using Jane Morris as his model. Her face shows a faint agony this time, as a decorative golden stream emerges from a crack in the lid. Here the inscription reads “Ultima manet spes” – hope remains last, perhaps a candidate for Rossetti’s own epitaph.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema sought a compromise in his Pandora of 1881, in which she holds not a box but a small pot, suitably decorated with a Sphinx. In what appears to be a skilfully painted watercolour, Pandora hasn’t yet given way to the temptation to open the pot.

Jules Lefebvre’s second painting of Pandora made in 1882, a decade after his first, places her in profile next to the sea. She has a star just above her forehead, but that has become five-pointed rather than six, perhaps to dodge any Jewish connotations. His previous gentle narrative has all but vanished.

By this time only one artist had attempted to depict the crux of the story, and that had been Henry Howard almost fifty years earlier.

Reference

Wikipedia on the myth of Pandora.