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Beata Beatrix
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He feeds upon her face by day and night,/And she with true kind eyes looks back on him . . .
Not as she is, but was when hope shown bright;/Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
—From "In an Artist's Studio," Christina Rossetti (1856)1(pp796,1136)
Shortly before Elizabeth (Lizzie) Eleanor Siddal's coffin was taken for burial in February 1862, her husband, Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), softly lifted her hair and with tenderness placed a slender volume of his poetry next to her cheek.2-3 Believing that she inspired his poetry, he thought it fitting to bury the only copy of these poems with her. The son of a professor of Italian literature at King's College, London, Rossetti had found his Beatrice in Lizzie Siddal (1829-1862), telling his mentor, Ford Madox Brown, that, like his namesake, 13th-century poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), when he met her his destiny was defined. In . . . [Full Text of this Article]
James C. Harris, MD
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