Fabio Camilletti - The portrait of Beatrice : Dante, D.G. Rossetti, and the imaginary lady

I would like to express my thanks to the editors of the William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature for having enthusiastically believed in this project from the beginning; to Michael Caesar, Simon Gilson, and Manuele Gragnolati for their encouragement and invaluable advice; to Lina Bolzoni, Danile Chauvin, and Anthony L. Johnson for having supervised my early work on Rossetti; and to the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Humanities Research Fund at the University of Warwick for having covered image reproduction costs for this book. I am particularly grateful to the late Guglielmo Gorni for his careful and sympathetic reading of my first experiments on Beatrice, and to Simon Humphries, who, back in 2001, agreed to guide a young visiting student in Oxford, and did so with such care and attention: one of his questions, penciled in the margin of an essay I had written on Hand and Soul, formed perhaps the initial core of the reflection developed here. The rest is indebted to the wonderful environment in which the idea for this book initially germinated: the Scuola Normale Superiore of the late 1990s, where it was still possible to attend Enrico Castelnuovos seminars on medieval art, hear Paola Barocchi talking of Vasari, and discuss the problem of artists signatures in the Middle Ages with Maria Monica Donato. Although I never tried to be an art historianI simply do not have that giftI used to enjoy their classes as a an escape from my everyday routine as a student in literature. Now that they are all gone, and I am about to release a volume in which the conflict between literature and painting plays so central a rolenot to mention Pisa and Vasari, Greek and Italian art, Cimabue and his anonymous forerunnersI understand for the first time that their teaching made a deeper impression than I could expect, and I feel (as Rossetti would put it) divided from my youth. To that time, therefore, I dedicate this book.

Part of chapter 1 has appeared in Dante Painting an Angel: Image Making, Double-Oriented Sonnets and Dissemblance in the Vita Nova, in the volume Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden; part of the Conclusion has appeared in Veils: A Reading of Dante Gabriel Rossettis St. Agnes of Intercession, in the Spring 2010 issue of Ravenna.

ADVISORY BOARD

Albert Russell Ascoli, Berkeley

Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia

Piero Boitani, Rome

Patrick Boyde, Cambridge

Alison Cornish, New York University

Claire Honess, Leeds

Christopher Kleinhenz, Wisconsin

Giuseppe Ledda, Bologna

Simone Marchesi, Princeton

Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale

Lino Pertile, Harvard

John A. Scott, Western Australia

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