Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom
Location History:
The painting was commissioned by Clarence E. Fry for £2,100 in 1875. Following its time in private collections, it was officially acquired by the Manchester Art Gallery in 1906, where it has remained a centerpiece of their Pre-Raphaelite collection.
In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca (completed in 1877), you are essentially looking at a massive, heavily modified architectural upgrade to the standard Victorian model of femininity. Rossetti didn't just paint a delicate muse; he engineered a highly imposing, physically commanding deity. Operating as a visual precursor to the Greek Aphrodite, Astarte—the ancient Middle Eastern goddess of love, fertility, and cosmic order—is rendered here to completely dominate the spatial layout, reflecting the artist's late-stage aesthetic shift toward formidable, monumental female figures.
The primary interactive node of the composition is, of course, Jane Morris. She is draped in a luminous, sweeping emerald-green robe that tightly clings to her physical form. Her posture maps to the traditional "Venus pudica" stance—similar to Botticelli’s famous Venus—but Rossetti heavily upscaled the execution to be far more imposing than graceful. Her hands are locked over her heart and hips, executing a gesture that signals both divine fertility and intense sensual mystery. The background operates as a claustrophobic, deep-space skybox featuring two winged attendants bearing upward-pointing torches. What's absolutely fascinating about the asset allocation here is that while Jane Morris modeled for Astarte, her daughter, May Morris, actually served as the direct source data for the left attendant figure. Directly behind Astarte’s head, a glowing crescent moon acts as a celestial UI element, confirming her total cosmic dominion.
From a technical standpoint, the backend of this project was just as complex as its visual output. The piece was originally commissioned in August 1875 by Clarence E. Fry, a prominent society photographer, who paid a massive £2100—the absolute highest system payout Rossetti ever secured for a single canvas. However, Rossetti ran into severe rendering issues during production. He abandoned the first version of the painting around March 1876 because the initial output failed his quality checks, forcing him to scrap the progress and reboot a completely new version from scratch. To achieve the rich, glowing color space you see in the final build, Rossetti deployed a highly specialized glazing technique he reverse-engineered from studying Titian’s method of utilizing successive color glazes.
To fully finalize the package, Rossetti didn't just deliver the canvas. He deployed a custom sonnet alongside the painting, permanently linking his literary and visual output. The poem specifically identifies Astarte as the ultimate mystery of love, operating "betwixt the sun and moon". Currently housed in the Manchester Art Gallery, the artwork functions as the ultimate system log of Rossetti’s psychological obsession with his enduring muse. It effectively takes a complicated real-world love triangle and transforms it into a profound, immortal visual statement of divine female power.
Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca transforms the ancient goddess into a monumental symbol of feminine power, mystery, and spiritual authority. The imposing central figure, framed by celestial imagery and attendants, suggests that love and beauty are not merely gentle qualities but immense cosmic forces. The painting also reflects Rossetti’s fascination with idealized womanhood, blending mythology, symbolism, and personal emotion into an image of timeless divine femininity.
