Dante's great muse may rest on a single line in a banker's will
Dante said he met his Beatrice only twice, nine years apart, yet she guides him to heaven in the Divine Comedy. The Florentine woman usually named as the real Beatrice, Bice Portinari, left almost no trace: the firmest proof she lived at all is a small bequest in her father's will of 1287.
Bice was born in 1265, a daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy banker from Portico di Romagna who settled in Florence near Dante's family, raised six daughters and helped fund the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. She married another banker, Simone dei Bardi, and died in June 1290. Boccaccio, commenting on the Comedy, was the first to name her outright, and every later identification leans on his unproven word. Most scholars accept it, though not all.
By Dante's account the first meeting came at a May Day party at the Portinari house, when both were nine. He married Gemma Donati in 1285, but after Beatrice's death he buried himself in study and wrote poems to her memory, gathering them with earlier verses into the Vita Nuova around 1293. There she is idealised in the mould of courtly love, a literary convention in which the admired lady might barely know her admirer and served mainly as a pretext for poetry and philosophy. That convention alone suggests a gap between the woman and the character.
In the Comedy she grows far sharper. She sends Virgil to rescue Dante at the start of the Inferno, and near the end of Purgatorio she takes over as guide, since the pagan Virgil cannot enter Paradise. Where he stands for human reason, she stands for theology, faith and grace. Their reunion in Eden is frosty: she scolds Dante for weeping and for straying after her death. Through Paradiso she becomes patient and ever more radiant, lecturing on subjects such as the markings of the moon, before handing him to Saint Bernard and taking her seat in the Empyrean.
Critics have puzzled over her. Dante likens her to an admiral commanding a ship, an oddly masculine image for a courtly beloved, and many read her as a Christ figure. In the 1850s Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted her repeatedly, above all in Beata Beatrix after his wife Elizabeth Siddal died, and the asteroid 83 Beatrix carries her name.
Source: Beatrice Portinari
