Representation And Recreation

Love is a crucial topic among Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s artistic creations.By appreciating his works,both poetic and artistic,we find a deep influence by the great medieval poet Dante Alighieri in terms of theme and creation style.The New Life and The House of Life are romantic autobiographies of the two poets respectively.In both texts,love begins within the boundaries of the physical.However,Love soon dies with the death of their beloveds and both authors are challenged in finding a new kind of love that can persevere beyond death.It is in order to achieve this trust that new visions of love are present in both texts.The visions reappear in The Divine Comedy and The Blessed Damozel.However,the poets go their separate way.While Dante continues his journey in the afterlife and succeeds to reach his muse(Beatrice)in Heaven and elevate his love toward the spiritual,Rossetti confesses his inability to reach his own lady(Siddal)and fails to complete his journey of love even if he tries to find his own “Beatrice” in other women of his life.In terms of paintings,Rossetti recreates several scenarios that have happened in The New Life.These visual images are not to be seen as mere representations of the events in Dante’s works.With the creative use of colors and pictorial space,Rossetti integrates his own passion for earthly happiness with Dante’s vision of love.Through a close analysis,this research argues the possibility to define Rossetti’s poetry and paintings as his own versions of Dante’s poetic imagination,in which we see a recreation of Dante’s ideal of love into the society of a new era.This may give some help for future studies in integrating Dante’s concept of love to our modern society,a concept that often seems impossible due to the immense gap of time.