Love requires us to learn to buffer romance with reality and to enchant reality with romance.Ī medieval poet, Dante is talking about the difficulties of surrendering to love in the abstract love as a spiritual and poetic practice. But even when relationships don’t remind us of earlier trauma, surviving disappointments and staying committed is a central developmental challenge. The loss of the joy and romance that eventually informs relationships can be shattering, particularly if it recapitulates a childhood experience of what Kohut called traumatic deidealization – the sudden (as opposed to gradual) confrontation with a parent’s flaws. My job is to convince partners to embrace both and not cling to the highs or let the lows of the relationship define their picture. Joy fills us with life energy and hope, woe chastens our self-importance. Reading La Vita Nuova, Dante’s great treatise on the rule of love, reminds me that this mix of joy and woe is developmental. One minute we feel grand to be at the center of a partner’s attention, the next minute we feel ignored, or perturbed by the daunting task of meeting another’s needs. Love both feeds and vexes our inherent narcissism. As a couples therapist, I am continuously confronted with the alternation of joy and woe in intimate relationships. Binding descriptionĬloth realized by Vittorio Ferrari based on Vittorio Grassi's drawings.When he firsts views his beloved Beatrice (they are both nine years old), Dante hears two voices in his head: first “Now the source of joy has been has been revealed,” then “Woe is me! For I shall often be impeded from now on.” Love enters our lives with the possibility of both completing and defeating our plans. In 1921, year of the sixth centenary of Dante Alighieri’s death, three artists worked together to create what we can consider today a real and perhaps unique miniated codex of the XXth century: La Vita Nuova illustrated with forty original watercolours by Vittorio Grassi, entirely hand written by the calligrapher Enrico Brignoli and decorated in every page by Nestore Leoni’s decorations. In the past "La Vita Nuova" has inspired many writers and artists even if, in six centuries since its creation, an edition entirely decorated with full colour illustrations has been printed only once. The story of his love for Beatrice, starting from their first encounter when she is only nine years old, is described by Dante according to pure “Stilnovo” advices and offers a poetical autobiography, which documents young Dante’s adhesion to “Stilnovo” ideals and spiritual evolution. If The Comedy represents the most complicated, voluminous and famous of Dante’s works, La Vita Nuova is his more sublime poetic composition.
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