The Salutation of Beatrice

Beatrice was Dante's beloved, glimpsed once on a Florentine street and lost to an early death, then met again in paradise at the summit of Purgatory. Rossetti painted her again and again, and he had his own Beatrice: his wife Elizabeth Siddal, who modelled his grave, gold-lit women for years and died young in 1862. When she died he buried the only manuscript of a set of his poems in her coffin. In 1869, the date this version bears, he could not leave them there, and had her grave at Highgate opened by lamplight to recover the pages, seven years after the burial.