Dante Rossetti

"One of the grandest and most elaborate portraits of Jane Morris created during the latter part of Rosetti's career, Astarte Syriaca, epitomizes the ideal of the voluptuous, sensual woman -- the muse. After the death of his wife Elizabeth Siddall in 1862, Rosetti returned to the subject matter of the female figure with greater intensity and captured his models with an obsessive sense of sensuality that heralded a novel theme in his work. The painting, Venetian in style as a result of Rosetti's multiculturalism, received mixed criticism due to its strong, often disturbing, erotic content (Rossetti Archive, Astarte Syriaca [for a picture]). Indicative of the nature of his relationship with Jane Morris, Rosetti's treatment of color and feminine subject matter allocates a sense of melancholy within the work, a sentiment that consequently divulges his own tragic love for Jane, the second great muse of his life.

Rosetti renders Jane as Venus Astarte in the painting. Depicted as an icon of desire and sensual perfection, Venus's direct gaze, bare shoulder, and strong stance reveal the strength of her own sexuality. Behind her torch-bearing attendants, a crescent moon shines in symbolic representation of her relation to the cosmos and the divine immortality of her womanly beauty. Rosetti introduces this idea in the first line of the accompanying sonnet of the same name, as he makes an allusion to the figure of the "woman clothed with sun" from the Book of Revelation 12:1, thus revealing his perception of the divine and cosmic power within the beauty of the female (Rossetti Archive). He describes her physical features in an idealized manner that implies the realization of these divine orders upon an encounter with such beauty:

And from her neck's inclining flower-stem lean
Love-Freightened lips and absolute eyes that wean
The pulse of hearts to the spheres' dominant tune.

The image of the spheres here refers to the Pythagorean music of the spheres, and the weaning of the pulse of hearts implies that desire itself can instigate a realization of the cosmic order, the ultimate mystery (Rossetti Archive). Thus, as a composition that references religious iconographic imagery, Astarte Syriaca depicts "the very epitome of the Rossettian Pre-Raphaelite love goddess" (Wood 102) through the idealization of the woman."