Rappaccini seems to attribute greater importance to his art than to his daughter because he has condemned her to a life of solitude in a poisonous Eden for the sake of his experimentation. He raised her to be as deadly as the beautiful purple-flowered shrub by the broken fountain, and she must live with the knowledge that though her heart is loving and kind, her breath and her touch are unwholesome and damaging.
Further, Rappaccini never consults Giovanni or his daughter when he decides to convert the normal youth into a poisonous being like his daughter. For the sake of science, he has raised a poisonous girl from her infancy, and now he seeks to transform a grown adult into her poisonous match. He never took his daughter's feelings or future into consideration when he experimented on her; neither does he take Giovanni's feelings or future plans into consideration before experimenting on him. He gives them no choice. In this way, Rappaccini has placed his science (or his art, as Baglioni refers to it) ahead of Beatrice and Giovanni.
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