In his Introduction, Fabio Camilletti offers the following as a summary of his book: "The Portrait of Beatrice is a story of over-interpretations, fabricated evidences, and contested attributions; it is also a story of primitivist dreams, deeply modern anxieties, and the desire to communicate with the dead" (4). This summary is both fair and seductive; the book is written in a compelling style, with a variety of enticing and uncanny examples, and ultimately reflects on matters of love, life, and death as they are mulled over in literature and art of the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Camilletti is keen to stress that this book is not a linear study of reception or influence, although he is in dialogue with scholarship in this area. Rather, Camilletti presents his work as concerning "the cyclical process of reciprocal metamorphosis" (10) between the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri and the nineteenth-century poet, painter, and translator Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Camilletti's main title, The Portrait of Beatrice, is deliberately misleading, since his purpose is rather to remind us that there is a lack of physical description of Beatrice in Dante's Vita Nova, and therefore no fixed iconography of Dante's beloved. Beatrice's portrait is therefore a desideratum that nineteenth-century readers, with their obsession with Beatrice as a historical individual, can only try and fail to find. More accurate is the subtitle's emphasis on Beatrice as an "imaginary lady", with the adjective "imaginary" being rich in meaning: the product of the imagination and potentially non-existent, but also visual, in the Lacanian sense explained in the Introduction. The portraits of Beatrice with which Camilletti is concerned are likewise imaginary as well as plural, and this genre of the imaginary portrait--which Camilletti traces to Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, and others--means a consideration of (the failure of) ekphrasis as well as "reveal[ing] itself as a powerful way of exploring the relation between literature and the visual arts" (9).
In chapter 1 Camilletti focuses on Dante's painting of angels in Vita Nova23 and the illustration of this episode by Rossetti as The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, first in pen and ink (1849, City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) and then in watercolour (1853, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford). One wonders whether there is a more explicit parallel to be drawn between Rossetti's two versions and the two openings of the sonnet "Era venuta ne la mente mia" included in VN 23 and analysed by Camilletti both as presenting different interpretations of Beatrice's death and as--following an intuition of Guglielmo Gorni-possibly resembling the wings of an angel in their potential mise-en-page.
The emphasis throughout this first chapter is on obliqueness, indirection, and plurality, and their implications for our understanding of figurability and the relationship between word and image. In a further challenge to the main title, Dante does not paint a portrait of Beatrice, nor even a portrait of Beatrice as an angel, but rather "figure d'angeli" ["figures of angels"] inspired by his thoughts of Beatrice. To say that Dante is painting is even called into question, since the verb "disegnare" is noted--following Federica Pich's work on this episode--to suggest only preparatory, provisional sketches. Thus "the act of drawing presupposes a future painting" (32) in a logic of deferral and futurity that is also, Camilletti suggests, that of the very end of Dante's Vita Nova.
In Camilletti's reading, the description of Dante painting in VN 23 reveals an unconscious creative urge that is captured and emphasized in the trance-like state of the poet in Rossetti's drawings, as well as in Rossetti's translation of this episode. What is most striking about Rossetti's pictorial versions is that the focus is not on what Dante is drawing (Beatrice or angels) but rather on Dante as artist caught in the act of creation. In the 1853 version in particular Rossetti also surrounds Dante with art rather than books, including a painting of the Madonna and Child that Camilletti considers to be Byzantine and to point both to the "intersection between Western and Eastern art" in medieval Italy (54) and to a further example of another writer who paints through divine inspiration: St. Luke, according to legend.
Beyond Dante and Rossetti, a third author gains prominence in chapter 1 as a necessary point of contrast: Francesco Petrarca. Camilletti argues that the Pre-Raphaelites are also pre-Petrarchist and pre-Petrarchan. He contrasts the "canon of beauties" found in Petrarch and Petrarchism--the beloved's pale face, dark eyes, blonde hair, and red lips--with Dante's lack of specificity about Beatrice's phyical attributes. He also notes that the portrait of Laura purportedly painted by Simone Martini and discussed in two sonnets of the Canzoniere (RVF 77 and 78) misled later readers of Dante--such as Melchiorre Missirini--into hoping for an analogous portrait of Beatrice by Dante's friend Giotto. Camilletti calls out "the tendency to uncritically superimpose Petrarch's dominant narrative on Dante, and consequently to (more or less consciously) read the Vita Nova with the Canzoniere in mind" (34). He also likewise laments that "the model of Laura--opposed, or arbitrarily juxtaposed to Beatrice--has for long prevented an understanding of the specificity of Dante's operation" (44). Thus, this book also contributes to ongoing debates about the relationship between Dante and Petrarch and their impact on transnational literary traditions. In this light Camilletti might do more to differentiate Petrarch and Petrarchism as well as to clarify the extent to which Rossetti, in his view, evades the Petrarchized Dante trap.
Chapters 2 and 3 focus on Rossetti's "Hand and Soul", the story of an imaginary medieval Italian artist Chiaro dell'Erma. One of Camilletti's aims is to show how Rossetti challenges the teleological reading of art history promoted by Giorgio Vasari's Vite [Lives], according to which the Middle Ages are but the prehistory from which Renaissance art triumphantly emerges. In challenging this timeline and privileging early, forgotten painters (even if of his own invention), Rossetti is also reversing the discourse in Purgatorio 11 on the transitory nature of fame--cited by Camilletti (109)--which parallels the replacement of Cimabue by Giotto with the replacement, in literary spheres, of Guido Guinizzelli by Guido Cavalcanti and eventually, it is implied, Dante himself. Camilletti sees Rossetti as inspired by this Dantean parallel between literature and art, even though he strikingly resists this understanding of artistic development as progression over time. Much of this material is, then, pre-Dantean, with special attention paid to two earlier poets that are present in the Commedia as interlocutors: on the one hand Sordello, whom Rossetti accessed in Robert Browning's narrative poem published in 1840; on the other hand Bonagiunta da Lucca, who praises Dante's newness in Purgatorio 24. The epigraph to "Hand and Soul" is taken from a poem at the time attributed to Bonagiunta, and which Rossetti includes and translates in The Early Italian Poets.
In Camilletti's analysis, "Hand and Soul" also emerges as post-Dantean, since--beyond its critique of Vasari--it is also shown to be comparable to nineteenth-century tales of fictional artists, in particular E. T. A. Hoffmann's "Die Jesuiterkirche in G." ["The Jesuits' Church in G."] (1816-1817) and Balzac's "Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu" ["The Unknown Masterpiece"] (1831). Continuing the German focus, Camilletti also draws into the discussion Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder's writings on art, in particular "Raphaels Erscheinung" ["Raphael's Vsion"]. While Camilletti writes that "[f]ictions about Raphael were a genre to itself in the German-speaking countries in the age of Goethe", he contrasts the tradition of a "carnal", Renaissance Raphael with Wackenroder's "mystical Raphael", "the only legitimate heir of St. Luke" (127). The return to St. Luke, now paired with Raphael, marks chapter 3's contribution to the book's discussion of "the imaginary lady", painted from an inner, ideal, mental image through divine or at least irrational means. For Raphael and St. Luke, this imaginary lady is the Virgin Mary, but also leads Camilletti back to Beatrice, via the Dante scholarship of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's father Gabriele. Accordingly, where "Hand and Soul" is, finally, in dialogue with Dante is through Gabriele Rossetti's La Beatrice di Dante (1842), which argues that Beatrice is allegorical and mystical. This interpretation goes strikingly against the search for Beatrice's real, physical portrait epitomized by Missirini and others, although Camilletti now cites from Missirini anecdotes about Antonio Canova and Filippo Agricola, both of whom resort to an ideal image of Beatrice in the absence of any "traccia della sua sembianza" ["trace of her features"] (132-133). Given Gabriele Rossetti's interpretation of Beatrice as no less than Dante's separated soul, Camilletti thereby reinserts Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Hand and Soul" into a particular, familial Dantean tradition.
Camilletti's highlighting of the influence of the father's esoteric Dante studies in chapter 3 supplements his analysis of a Rossetti Familienroman(family romance or, as Camilletti suggests, family novel) in chapter 2. There, the focus is on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's uncle John Polidori, whom Camilletti reads as a phantom haunting the Rossetti family. The term "phantom" is used psychoanalytically, with reference in particular to the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, although Camilletti also cites stories of Spiritualist experiments, which sought to establish contact with the deceased uncle -- amongst other ghosts including even that of Dante himself. Chapter 2 provides historical context for the presence of Italian exiles in England, and also reads the case of John Polidori as "a failed quest for inclusion in British literary circles" (77). Camilletti sees Rossetti's Continental travels of 1849 as modelled on those of his uncle John and of Lord Byron in 1816, and as the context for the writing of "Hand and Soul". Questions of identity, authorship, and authority, characteristic of Rossetti's early works, are, then, convincingly shown by Camilletti to be bound up with hidden family trauma.
The final part of the book is a fourth chapter more than, as is claimed, a conclusion. It concerns "a shadowy and uncanny object" (151), "St. Agnes of Intercession", a story Rossetti never completed and which was published only posthumously in 1886. One of its earlier titles was "An Autopsychology", which is also how Rossetti defines Dante's Vita Nova in The Early Italian Poets, although its epigraphs suggest, again, additional and disparate influences: namely, Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy. Camilletti writes that "'St. Agnes' is articulated upon a series of binary oppositions" which "Rossetti tends to compose [...] in an ambiguous and often not completely graspable unity" (160). In this sense Rossetti's "St. Agnes" mirrors Camilletti's own book, which likewise holds back from bringing its case studies together into some sort of whole. Instead, Camilletti offers a reading of "St. Agnes", stresses Rossetti's failure to illustrate his short stories, and proposes "veils" as an appropriately Dantean, Rossettian, and Lacanian term that, for Camilletti, signifies "points of resistance--charged with tension--where the text's dichotomies collide" (166).
This book studies a range of materials from the writings, art, and translations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in relation to a variety of literary and theoretical traditions. Amongst these, the sustained close reading of Dante's Vita Nova that we find in chapter 1 is somewhat lacking from subsequent chapters, where Dante appears instead only intermittently and as only one of a number of very different interlocutors (the aforementioned Vasari, Wackenroder, Balzac, and so forth). Given the book's title, it is also odd not to find more consideration of Rossetti's own portraits of Beatrice. Beata Beatrix (1864) is, for instance, considered only very briefly in the Conclusion. Still, the number of intertexts evoked in this book testifies to Camilletti's extensive and perceptive research, and Camilletti is always an astute and persuasive reader of literary texts, especially in dialogue with psychoanalytical concepts and theories. While not comprehensive, then, Camilletti's inventive, interdisciplinary study indisputably opens up new and original avenues of research regarding the relationship between Dante and Rossetti, the medieval and the modern, Italy and England, and literature and the visual arts.