Beata Beatrix is an oil on canvas painting by Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

, completed in 1872. It depicts Beatrice Portinari

Beatrice Portinari

Beatrice "Bice" di Folco Portinari was a Florentine woman known as the muse of the poet Dante Alighieri. Beatrice was the principal inspiration for Dante's Vita Nuova, and also appears as his guide in the Divine Comedy in the last book, Paradiso, and in the last four canti of Purgatorio...

 from Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri

Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...

's poem La Vita Nuova

La Vita Nuova

La Vita Nuova is a medieval text written by Dante Alighieri in 1295. It is an expression of the medieval genre of courtly love in a prosimetrum style, a combination of both prose and verse...

at the moment of her death. Rossetti modeled Beatrice after his deceased wife and frequent model Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was an English artists' model, poet and artist who was painted and drawn extensively by artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, including Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and most of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's early paintings of women.-Early...

. The painting pictured is one of a pair – the first. The second Beata Beatrix is less well-known. It was painted ten years after the death of Elizabeth and was still unfinished at the time of Rosetti's death. It was faithfully completed by Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown

Ford Madox Brown was an English painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work...

, a close associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. This second painting is in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England

In an 1873 letter to his friend William Morris

William Morris

William Morris 24 March 18343 October 1896 was an English textile designer, artist, writer, and socialist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the English Arts and Crafts Movement...

, Rossetti said he intended the painting "not as a representation of the incident of the death of Beatrice, but as an ideal of the subject, symbolized by a trance or sudden spiritual transfiguration."

The painting is on display in the Tate Britain

Tate Britain

Tate Britain is an art gallery situated on Millbank in London, and part of the Tate gallery network in Britain, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is the oldest gallery in the network, opening in 1897. It houses a substantial collection of the works of J. M. W. Turner.-History:It...

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