Astarte Syriaca

By 1877 Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a wreck, dependent on the sedative chloral and increasingly reclusive, and he kept painting one face. It belonged to Jane Morris, the wife of his friend and business partner William Morris, and the woman he had loved for years. Here he casts her as Astarte, a Syrian goddess the ancients worshipped as an older, harsher forerunner of Venus. She fills almost the whole tall canvas, an eight-pointed star at her brow, the sun and moon meeting behind her, two attendants raising torches. The long neck and heavy jaw are Jane's features pushed toward the monumental. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to hang beside it, calling her beauty a mystery even the planets bow to. He died five years later.