Dante Gabriel Rossetti, l'aube du spiritisme et le médium Dante
Abstract
Drawing on a spiritist experiment conducted in the United States in 1874 and centred on otherworldly communications between a dead woman and her living lover, renamed ‘Beatrice’ and ‘Dante’, the article discusses the centrality of Pre-Raphaelite mediation in the appropriation of Dante by the nineteenth-century spiritist movement. In particular, it shows how the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti played a pioneering role in this process, through the analysis of a handful of works that - close to the birth of modern spiritualism - propose an image of Dante as a medium. Rather than passively undergoing the imagery of spiritualism, therefore, Rossetti rather contributes to shaping it, giving rise not so much to a ‘spiritual’ Danteanism as to a true ‘Dantean’ spiritualism.
Keywords
Dante, Beatrice, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, pre-Raphaelistes, spiritismReferences
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