Gabriele Rossetti and La Beatrice di Dante : considerations on the presence of Dante in nineteenth-century England

Abstract

This paper focuses on the cult of Dante in nineteenth-century Britain by discussing Gabriele Rossetti's idea of Beatrice. The Italian exile was persuaded that Dante's work could be explained only by Dante himself and he therefore strove to find the necessary evidence to substantiate such an idea. In La Beatrice di Dante. Ragionamenti critici, Rossetti identifies Beatrice first with Philosophy and then with the Ghibellin ideal, thus rendering a complex yet unique interpretation of the figure of Beatrice whom he even connected with the tradition of European occultism.