La Donna della Fiamma

La Donna della Fiamma — the Woman of the Flame — at Manchester Art Gallery is a pastel of 1870 that belongs to Rossetti's mature symbolic figure series. The fiamma (flame) as an attribute positions this female figure within the tradition of love personified as burning — imagery with roots in Dante, Petrarch, and the Provencal love lyric tradition that Rossetti had absorbed through his reading in medieval Italian literature. Pastel was not Rossetti's primary medium but he returned to it periodically for its capacity to achieve rich, warm color effects with a directness that oil required many layers to produce. Manchester's Pre-Raphaelite collection documents Rossetti's symbolic figure work in a medium different from his more famous canvases.

Pastel allows for a directness of color application — particularly in warm, saturated reds and oranges associated with flame — that suits the subject's symbolic content. The medium's powdery texture and the soft blending possible in it create a different surface quality from Rossetti's oil works.