ABSTRACT
In Dante Gabriel Rossetti's watercolour The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, modelled on the thirty-fourth paragraph of the Vita Nuova, Dante is portrayed suddenly lifting his head. The watercolour resumed the subject of the first of Rossetti's artworks inspired by Dante, a drawing with the same title completed in 1849. Among them, beholding him pitifully, is a young woman. In his hand, Dante holds the figure of an angel that he has been drawing: a figura of Beatrice, sketched in a moment of mournful imagination as a tangible sign of her presence-in-absence. The already published version of his poetic speech focuses on the mourning for the departed Lady. In being grounded in an oscillation between mourning and celebration of the Lady's glory, the double-oriented sonnet could be seen as a bipolar and multistable textual object, as a compromise formation resulting from the two contradictory and irreconcilable instances of loss and faith in an afterlife survival.
