Caroline Schlegel wrote from Jena to her daughter Auguste on Monday 14 October 1799: ‘my dear Little Chicken … we are pushing very hard to learn Italian; every evening at 7, the devout Father Fritz [= Friedrich Schlegel, W.H.], sainted in God, gives Schelling and I a lesson. Veit is also there.’ Dorothea Veit, the title character of Schlegel’s Lucinde, tells of these Italian studies as well. On 11 October 1799, she writes: ‘Consummate well-being in Jena, quiet life, evenings Dante readings in the “community”’. Over the course of the Dante readings, Friedrich Schlegel in turn relates to Schleiermacher on 6 January 1800 that ‘I am reading Dante with him [= Schelling, W.H.] and Caroline; we have already read more than half of it, and once he has a mind for something, it is irrepressibly great.’

One does not merely read Dante, one translates him, even poeticising for oneself in terza rima and stanzas. Schelling translated the inscription over the entrance to the Inferno as well as the second canto of Paradisio. For Christmas 1799 he wrote a great poem in stanzas, which is preserved under the title The Heavenly Image [Das himmlische Bild], a title that was later chosen for it by the editor of his oeuvre. This poem directly celebrated Caroline as the second Beatrice and it is interfused with clear allusions to verses from the Divina Commedia.