Portrait of Beatrice: Dante, D. G. Rossetti, and the Imaginary Lady

By Fabio Camilletti

The Portrait of Beatrice examines both Dante's and D. G. Rossetti's intellectual experiences in the light of a common concern about visuality. Both render, in different times and contexts, something that resists clear representation, be it the divine beauty of the angel-women or the depiction of the painter's own interiority in a secularized age. By analyzing Dante's Vita Nova alongside Rossetti's Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession, which inaugurates the Victorian genre of 'imaginary portrait' tales, this book examines how Dante and Rossetti explore the tension between word and image by creating 'imaginary portraits.' The imaginary portrait—Dante's sketched angel appearing in the Vita Nova or the paintings evoked in Rossetti's narratives—is not (only) a non-existent artwork: it is an artwork whose existence lies elsewhere, in the words alluding to its inexpressible quality. At the same time, thinking of Beatrice as an 'imaginary Lady' enables us to move beyond the debate about her actual existence. Rather, it allows us to focus on her reality as a miracle made into flesh, which language seeks incessantly to grasp. Thus, the intergenerational dialogue between Dante and Rossetti—and between thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, literature and painting, Italy and England—takes place between different media, oscillating between representation and denial, mimesis and difference, concealment and performance. From medieval Florence to Victorian London, Beatrice's 'imaginary portrait' touches upon the intertwinement of desire, poetry, and art-making in Western culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Mar 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268104009

Fabio Camilletti

Fabio Camilletti is reader at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick. He is the author of a number of books, including Leopardi's Nymphs: Grace, Melancholy, and the Uncanny.

Book preview

The Portrait of Beatrice

THE WILLIAM AND KATHERINE DEVERS SERIES

IN DANTE AND MEDIEVAL ITALIAN LITERATURE

Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., and Christian Moevs, editors

——————

VOLUME 16

The Portrait of Beatrice: Dante, D.G. Rossetti, and the Imaginary Lady

• Fabio A. Camilletti

VOLUME 15

Boccaccio’s Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity

• James C. Kriesel

VOLUME 14

Meditations on the Life of Christ: The Short Italian Text

• Sarah McNamer

VOLUME 13

Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary

• edited by Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli

VOLUME 12

Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy

• Dennis Looney

VOLUME 11

Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry

• edited by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne

VOLUME 10

Petrarch and Dante: Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition

• edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.

VOLUME 9

The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets

• Winthrop Wetherbee

VOLUME 8

Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy

• Justin Steinberg

VOLUME 7

Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture

• Manuele Gragnolati

VOLUME 6

Understanding Dante

• John A. Scott

VOLUME 5

Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body

• Gary P. Cestaro

VOLUME 4

The Fiore and the Detto d’Amore: A Late 13th-Century Italian

Translation of the Roman de la Rose, Attributable to Dante

• Translated, with introduction and notes, by Santa Casciani and Christopher Kleinhenz

VOLUME 3

The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning

• Marc Cogan

VOLUME 2

The Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany

• edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Patrick Boyde

VOLUME 1

Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies

• edited by Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.

THE PORTRAIT

of BEATRICE

Dante, D.G. Rossetti, and the Imaginary Lady

FABIO A. CAMILLETTI

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Camilletti, Fabio, author.

Title: The portrait of Beatrice : Dante, D.G. Rossetti, and the imaginary lady / Fabio A. Camilletti.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] | Series: The William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature; volume 16 | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2019002909 (print) | LCCN 2019007100 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268103996 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104009 (epub) | ISBN 9780268103972 (hardback) | ISBN 0268103976 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Characters—Beatrice Portinari. | Portinari, Beatrice, 1266–1290—In literature. | Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 1828–1882—Criticism and interpretation. | Symbolism in literature. | Women in literature.

Classification: LCC PQ4410.B3 (ebook) | LCC PQ4410.B3 C26 2019 (print) | DDC 851/.1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002909

∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

ABOUT THE WILLIAM AND KATHERINE

DEVERS SERIES IN DANTE AND

MEDIEVAL ITALIAN LITERATURE

The William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame supports rare book acquisitions in the university’s John A. Zahm Dante collections, funds an annual visiting professorship in Dante studies, and supports electronic and print publication of scholarly research in the field. In collaboration with the Medieval Institute at the university, the Devers program initiated a series dedicated to the publication of the most significant current scholarship in the field of Dante studies. In 2011 the scope of the series was expanded to encompass thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian literature.

In keeping with the spirit that inspired the creation of the Devers program, the series takes Dante and medieval Italian literature as focal points that draw together the many disciplines and lines of inquiry that constitute a cultural tradition without fixed boundaries. Accordingly, the series hopes to illuminate this cultural tradition within contemporary critical debates in the humanities by reflecting both the highest quality of scholarly achievement and the greatest diversity of critical perspectives.

The series publishes works from a wide variety of disciplinary viewpoints and in diverse scholarly genres, including critical studies, commentaries, editions, reception studies, translations, and conference proceedings of exceptional importance. The series enjoys the support of an international advisory board composed of distinguished scholars and is published regularly by the University of Notre Dame Press. The Dolphin and Anchor device that appears on publications of the Devers series was used by the great humanist, grammarian, editor, and typographer Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), in whose 1502 edition of Dante (second issue) and all subsequent editions it appeared. The device illustrates the ancient proverb Festina lente, Hurry up slowly.

Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.,

and Christian Moevs, editors

logo.jpg

ADVISORY BOARD

Albert Russell Ascoli, Berkeley

Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia

Piero Boitani, Rome

Patrick Boyde, Cambridge

Alison Cornish, New York University

Claire Honess, Leeds

Christopher Kleinhenz, Wisconsin

Giuseppe Ledda, Bologna

Simone Marchesi, Princeton

Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale

Lino Pertile, Harvard

John A. Scott, Western Australia

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Then she says, I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me!

I say, I would if I could, but I don’t do sketches from memory

Well, she says, I’m right here in front of you, or haven’t you looked?

—Bob Dylan, Highlands

What of Rafael’s sonnets, Dante’s picture?

—Robert Browning, One Word More

The intellectual heights that beckoned the Byzantines remained unscaled [in the West] and religion was propagated in art through the emotions. It is spiritually and theologically much less ambitious, but it is, quite obviously, more practical and reasonable; and in the long run it succeeded. It can drive one nearly insane to speculate what would have happened if the Crusaders had not scotched Byzantium and the Turks killed it; if, in fact, it had participated in or led the Renaissance, as even in its last throes it led and made possible the approach; instead of expiring at its outset. . . . It is hopeless, because, without these events, one can play with the appalling thought that the Renaissance might never have happened.

—Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Note on the Text

Introduction

CHAPTER ONEPainting Angels

CHAPTER TWOEarly Italian Poets, Early Italian Painters

CHAPTER THREEVisions

Conclusion: Veils

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1848–49), pen and ink on card. Birmingham Museums. Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust.

FIGURE 2. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante Drawing an Angel on the Anniversary of Beatrice’s Death (1853), watercolor. Ashmolean Museum. Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

FIGURE 3. Max Beerbohm, D.G. Rossetti Precociously Manifesting . . . That Queer Indifference to Politics . . . (1916–17), graphite and water-color on paper. Tate Gallery. Photo © Tate, London 2018.

FIGURE 4. Giunta Pisano, Tavola dipinta cuspidata raffigurante San Francesco e sei miracoli (ca. 1255), tempera and gold on wood. Pisa, Museo Nazionale di San Matteo. Photo © SABAP Fototeca, Pisa SBAAAS-PI dig. 03885. AFSPI su concessione del MiBACT/Soprintendenza di Pisa, prot. 0013970 del 01/12/2017.

FIGURE 5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix (ca. 1864–70), oil on canvas. Tate Gallery. Photo © Tate, London 2018.

FIGURE 6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Bonifazio’s Mistress: Compositional Study (ca. 1856), pen and brown ink on paper. Birmingham Museums. Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my thanks to the editors of the William and Katherine Devers Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature for having enthusiastically believed in this project from the beginning; to Michael Caesar, Simon Gilson, and Manuele Gragnolati for their encouragement and invaluable advice; to Lina Bolzoni, Danièle Chauvin, and Anthony L. Johnson for having supervised my early work on Rossetti; and to the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Humanities Research Fund at the University of Warwick for having covered image reproduction costs for this book. I am particularly grateful to the late Guglielmo Gorni for his careful and sympathetic reading of my first experiments on Beatrice, and to Simon Humphries, who, back in 2001, agreed to guide a young visiting student in Oxford, and did so with such care and attention: one of his questions, penciled in the margin of an essay I had written on Hand and Soul, formed perhaps the initial core of the reflection developed here. The rest is indebted to the wonderful environment in which the idea for this book initially germinated: the Scuola Normale Superiore of the late 1990s, where it was still possible to attend Enrico Castelnuovo’s seminars on medieval art, hear Paola Barocchi talking of Vasari, and discuss the problem of artists’ signatures in the Middle Ages with Maria Monica Donato. Although I never tried to be an art historian—I simply do not have that gift—I used to enjoy their classes as a an escape from my everyday routine as a student in literature. Now that they are all gone, and I am about to release a volume in which the conflict between literature and painting plays so central a role—not to mention Pisa and Vasari, Greek and Italian art, Cimabue and his anonymous forerunners—I understand for the first time that their teaching made a deeper impression than I could expect, and I feel (as Rossetti would put it) divided from my youth. To that time, therefore, I dedicate this book.

Part of chapter 1 has appeared in Dante Painting an Angel: Image Making, Double-Oriented Sonnets and Dissemblance in the Vita Nova, in the volume Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages, edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Tristan Kay, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden; part of the Conclusion has appeared in "Veils: A Reading of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s St. Agnes of Intercession," in the Spring 2010 issue of Ravenna.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

I quote Dante’s Vita Nova from Guglielmo Gorni’s critical edition of 1996: references are given parenthetically in the main text, using the abbreviation VN and following Gorni’s new division of the book into thirty-one sections against the arbitrary partition into forty-two (or forty-three) sections uncritically adopted by scholars after Torri’s edition of 1842. English translations are given following Mark Musa’s version (1992), although I sometimes allowed myself to alter Musa’s text in order to preserve the literality of some passages. In the Conclusion, I employed Rossetti’s translation in order to emphasize its intertextual connections with St. Agnes of Intercession. Translations from the Divine Comedy follow Robert M. Durling’s edition (1997–2011). Unless otherwise stated, all translations are mine.

For philological reasons, in quoting Rossetti’s text I could only limitedly rely on The Collected Works edited by William M. Rossetti in 1887. Luckily, the Rossetti Archive edited by Jerome McGann provides scholars with an impressively extensive body of sources for reconstructing the textual history of Rossetti’s works, and I have therefore made constant reference to it.

Introduction

Oscar Wilde’s novella The Portrait of Mr W.H. (1889; rev. and enl. 1921) opens with the unnamed narrator being drawn by his friend Erskine into a conversation on the question of literary forgeries: would it be acceptable, Erskine asks, to manipulate evidence in order to support a theory one profoundly believes to be true?¹ Erskine possesses a sixteenth-century picture of a boy in Elizabethan costume that his friend Cyril Graham—now deceased—claimed to represent a certain Willie Hughes: a boy actor of Shakespeare’s company and perhaps, he argued, Mr W.H., the enigmatic addressee of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Graham had developed his Willie Hughes theory over years, painstakingly perusing Shakespeare’s writings in search of concealed references that would support his argument. His conjecture would be entirely plausible if not for two simple and nonetheless crucial facts: no evidence could actually be found that any Willie Hughes had ever existed, and the portrait itself was a fabrication. In his last letter, before committing suicide, Graham had written that he believed absolutely in Willie Hughes; that the forgery of the picture . . . did not in the slightest degree invalidate the truth of the theory. . . . It was a foolish, mad letter. I remember, the narrator comments, "he ended by saying that he intrusted to me the Willie Hughes theory, and that it was for me to present it to the world, and to unlock the secret of Shakespeare’s heart" (my emphasis).

Wilde’s novella was meant to be an homage and a contribution to the so-called imaginary portrait genre: a kind of aesthetic fiction, centered on nonexistent artworks, that had originated in the Pre-Raphaelite circles of the mid-Victorian age—through the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Simeon Solomon—and had later been canonized by Walter Pater in his Imaginary Portraits (1887).² The 1899 version was primarily an erudite exercise in critical interpretation and a parody of the excesses of criticism and particularly the obsessive, semi-idolatrous industry of Shakespearean criticism that grew up in the nineteenth century.³ Through the Willie Hughes theory, Wilde posed an ironic and nonetheless strongly ethical question about literary criticism, emphasizing the risks of overinterpreting the author’s intention beyond the boundaries established by the text. The forged portrait of Willie Hughes, supplying the lacunae of Shakespeare’s Sonnets with external evidence, was, in other words, a perfect emblem of what literary theory would later label as intentional fallacy—that is to say, the presumption that understanding the author’s will is the necessary premise for the correct interpretation of that author’s works, pushing scholars to the exploration of sources that are external to the text and even to the (more or less unconscious) drive to manipulate them.⁴

In later years, Wilde would extensively rework his tale in view for a stand-alone publication. The volume was to be enriched by the reproduction of the fake portrait of Willie Hughes, commissioned to Swiss artist Charles Ricketts:⁵ the written Portrait would, therefore, mirror the painted one, generating a double game of forgery by which the novella’s ambiguity could resonate with that of a perfectly imitated Elizabethan artwork. Wilde himself encouraged such a game by ironically pretending—in writing to Ricketts—that the painting was actually the true work of French sixteenth-century portraitist François Clouet: It is not a forgery at all—it is an authentic Clouet of the highest artistic value. It is absurd of you . . . to try and take me in—as if I did not know the master’s touch.⁶ The same game pervaded Wilde’s rewriting, in which the obsessions haunting the protagonists were explored in greater depth. Wilde engaged in a close analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, heightening the punctilious accuracy of his characters’ conjectures beyond the limits of pastiche and ultimately creating the impression of an actual critical essay, dissimulated under the guise of a deliberately puzzling narrative.⁷

In its final shape, Wilde’s Portrait was thus something more than an exploration of the fallacies of philology. It became a reflection on the critic’s desire, and on the way it affects interpretation by blurring the borders between the interpreting subject and the interpreted object (much as the analyst’s desire—as Sigmund Freud was beginning to understand in the same years—is caught in the mechanisms of transference and countertransference in relation to the desire of patients).⁸ Situated beyond every possible demonstration, the existence of Willie Hughes—as well as the hope to unlock the secret of Shakespeare’s heart—remains a matter of pure faith, and Willie an image of the will that pushes readers to project their own concerns, anachronistically, onto otherwise dead texts, to the extent of fabricating false evidence in order to voice their unspoken desires.⁹

Throughout the nineteenth century, the equation between Dante and Shakespeare was a common one, in conformity with the Romantic canon of world literature that had promoted them as anticlassicist models of stylistic hybridization, linguistic experimentation, and literary realism.¹⁰ Specific circumstances, however, favored subtler speculations on these two authors’ reciprocal affinities. Dante and Shakespeare were both monumental figures of modern literature, whose greatness was nonetheless paired by an astonishing scarcity of documental evidence regarding their lives; no reliable portrait eternalizing their features survived, or any autographed manuscript of their works; moreover, and paradoxically, precisely the totalizing, all-encompassing dimension of their oeuvre made it impossible to fully understand the man behind it and to unlock—to speak in Wilde’s words—the secret of his heart. Only on two occasions, in the view of nineteenth-century readers, had Shakespeare and Dante spoken directly about their inner selves: in two small, apparently intimate books, which, separated as they seemed from the universalistic breadth of their best-known masterpieces—the tragedies, the Divine Comedy—could allow readers (or, better, make them believe they were accessing) a confession and an indiscretion revealing their authors’ soul.¹¹ In Shakespeare’s case, this book was the Sonnets, and the object of the poet’s love the enigmatic Mr. W.H.; for Dante, it was his youthful composition Vita Nova, and his beloved one the no less undecipherable Beatrice.

Like Wilde’s Portrait, The Portrait of Beatrice is a story of over-interpretations, fabricated evidences, and contested attributions; it is also a story of primitivist dreams, deeply modern anxieties, and the desire to communicate with the dead. Like Wilde’s novella, and as the title makes clear, it begins with a portrait—better, with an absent portrait, which becomes, however, all the more exciting to the gaze of nineteenth-century interpreters insofar as it remains absent and may consequently be constructed as the object of archaeological trouvailles, philological speculations, or creative re-elaboration. Beatrice, the most central figure in Dante’s poetry—from the Vita Nova to the Comedy—is nonetheless, like Mr. W.H., one of the most elusive characters in literary history: she left scant or no trace beyond Dante’s oeuvre and her actual existence was disputed as early as the fifteenth century.¹² This debate reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when the popularity of Dante—for both aesthetic and political reasons—triggered Romantic and later Positivist historiography to industriously investigate sources in order to support literary analysis with documental evidence, and inspired, with regard to the identity of Dante’s beloved, a veritable quest for the historical Beatrice.¹³ At the same time, while scholars diligently scrutinized archives and medieval artworks in search of the evidence of Beatrice’s true features, a completely different approach emerged, precisely taking the absence of any given portrait—or of any physical description of Beatrice in Dante’s works—as an incentive toward the visionary re-creation of the beloved’s ideal beauty, which had to be extrapolated from the modern artist’s interiority rather than reconstructed from historical documents.

In other words, the historical figure of Beatrice—which an ancient tradition, inaugurated by Boccaccio, identified with the daughter of Folco Portinari and the bride of Simone de’ Bardi—was replaced by that of the beatrice, with the lowercase initial and an adjectival meaning, potentially denoting every feminine figure who, as per the literal signification of the name, conferred blessing: a double understanding of her name that Dante’s book explicitly allows and encourages, and that led Leo Spitzer to argue that a German translation should render it as Beglückerin.¹⁴ Already heralded in the works of early nineteenth-century artists such as Antonio Canova and Ary Scheffer, this approach found its most radical expression in the literary and artistic works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose activity—from the late 1840s onwards—can be taken as the turning point in the reappraisal of the Vita Nova in the Victorian age, in England and beyond: the shift of sensibility that ended up replacing, in nineteenth-century common taste, the image of the stern poet and prophet of the Comedy with that of the young Dante as artist and lover.¹⁵

Tellingly, Rossetti’s first artwork inspired by the Vita Nova is a drawing representing Dante in the act of painting, inspired by the episode narrated in VN 23. On the first anniversary of Beatrice’s death, Dante relates, he was intent at drawing an angel in memory of her and was so absorbed in a sort of mystical trance that he did not perceive that other people had entered the room; he then returned to drawing angels before deciding to compose instead an unusual sonnet, possessing two different initial quatrains. A self-reflective piece on the relationship between image and word, Dante’s episode radically questions the possibility of reaching representation by means of imitation: the true portrait of Beatrice, who had already been compared to an angel when she was alive, can be accomplished only through a visionary operation, transfiguring and sublimating her memory into an angel-like figure.¹⁶ At the same time, by shifting between different simulacra—the living presence of Beatrice that haunts Dante’s mind, the angelic figure sketched by his hand, and the double sonnet, with its deeply iconic value—VN 23 explores the broad polysemy of the medieval notion of imago in its theological implications, ultimately sanctioning the experience of love as a a circle where the phantasm generates desire, desire is translated into words, and the word defines a space wherein the appropriation of what could otherwise not be appropriated or enjoyed is possible.¹⁷

Certainly, Rossetti’s choice of illustrating this episode has to be understood as an uncryptic reference to his own double vocation as a poet and a painter, retracing in Dante’s text the germs of a mutual exchange between art and poetry that medieval culture still made possible, and whose reactivation in the industrial century was a central part of the Pre-Raphaelite agenda. Still, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice is also a manifesto of the way love and image making are reciprocally interconnected, giving birth to a cycle in which iconic texts on the one hand and textualized images (i.e., images derived from texts, or possessing a textual, that is to say narrative, structure) on the other enter into mutual, and tensile, relationship. Rossetti’s operation can thus be seen as an attempt at reactivating a quintessentially medieval experience in the heart of Victorian London, by means of translation (of thirteenth-century Italian poets and of Dante); poetic compositions (The Blessed Damozel, first composed in 1847, and Dante at Verona, composed between 1848 and 1850); artworks (such as The First Anniversary); and the two prose works that inaugurate the imaginary portrait genre (Hand and Soul and St. Agnes of Intercession), both answers, albeit indirect, to the problem of painting the portrait of she who confers blessing in modern times.¹⁸

Figure 1

FIGURE 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1848–49), pen and ink on card. Birmingham Museums. Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust.

In this book, I approach Dante and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as exhibiting two interdependent ways, in different times and contexts, of facing and communicating the problem of rendering, by visual means, something that eschews mimetic strategies of representation. For Dante, this problem concerns the rendering of the divine beauty of an angel-like woman (and is thus a theological problem, connected to the sacred status of the image in medieval debates on iconolatry). For Rossetti, it concerns the depiction of the painter’s own interiority in a secular age now recognizing that the ego is not master in its own house (to use Freud’s famous expression) and becoming increasingly aware of the existence of a realm, inaccessible to diurnal logic, that will later be labeled the unconscious.¹⁹

Both authors, from their own points of view, explore the limits of the tensile relationship between word and image without fully solving it, and thus multiply ambiguity. Hence my choice to use the term imaginary, by which I mean not only to refer to the imaginary portrait genre, but also to exploit in its psychoanalytic (i.e., Lacanian) nuances. The Imaginary, for Jacques Lacan, never merely denotes what is fictive as opposed to what is true. As the domain of illusion—which does not, however, coincide with the illusory, insofar as the latter term implies something unnecessary and inconsequential—the Imaginary encompasses the broad spectrum of all that possesses a strong visual quality and cannot consequently be fully reduced to the verbal sphere, including images, dreams, mirror reflections, and fantasies: the profound work of figurability, in other words, characterizing the unconscious, which, as Georges Didi-Huberman writes, "gives to dreams, symptoms, and phantasms their paradoxical visual quality, their dissemblant semblances, . . . touched by the great wind of the Unheimliche."²⁰

In particular, for Lacan, the Imaginary plays a central role in the so-called mirror stage, that is, in the construction of subjectivity by means of self-identification with the subject’s specular image. As such, the Imaginary encompasses the illusions of wholeness, synthesis, autonomy, duality and, above all, similarity that are constitutive of the mirroring process; and, at the same time, it is the site of the radical alienation—one of the terms by which Lacan reformulates the Freudian notion of the uncanny (das Unheimliche)—arising from doubling and dissociation.²¹ From this viewpoint, the Lacanian Imaginary is a powerful instrument for understanding the medieval theory of love, whose foundational myths—as Giorgio Agamben has reconstructed—are Narcissus and Pygmalion: as we will see more closely throughout the book, falling in love, for medieval medicine (and poetry), means developing a burning passion for an image that is carved in the lover’s heart, so that articulating a lover’s discourse means addressing an externalized simulacrum of the poet’s own interiority.²² Not incidentally, the Lacanian