Manfred follow-up: Ghislaine McDayter and the Imagery of Manfred

Rounding off our follow up from the panel on 'Manfred: The Text and its Circulation', Ghislaine McDayter reflects upon her paper: 'Iconography and Imagery of Manfred's Illustrations'. McDayter looks at the representations of Manfred and Astarte in Victorian art, exploring the use of Christian imagery. 

What were the most startling iconographic discoveries in your search for images that are associated with Manfred? How did you find these images?

What I found most remarkable about the iconography in the Manfred illustrations I drew on for this paper was the prevalence of Christian imagery that Victorian artists used when depicting the figure of Astarte; this heroine is often posed and represented as the Virgin Mary. In the first Manfred image by G. Staal (mid 1840s) Astarte is depicted with her arms crossed, her right hand raised in a gesture of blessing. She is veiled, serene, and might just as easily have appeared in a Byzantine-style fresco such as that by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1340). There is little textual support for such a “divine” interpretation of Astarte, and yet it became increasingly clear to me that this visual reference was important for a specifically Victorian reading of Byron’s poem – one that focused on the issue of redemption and forgiveness. Thus, in Liška’s “Manfred and Astarte” (1882), Astarte appears in the iconographic pose of the classic Madonna della Misericordia (“Lady of Mercy”) who offers shelter and forgiveness to mankind. Astarte, here, echoes the stance of the protective Madonna with one significant difference; this secular apparition of the Madonna appears to be unmoved by Manfred’s prayer for forgiveness and the Byronic hero remains isolated in own misery. 

Do you have any interesting stories of archival discovery from your research for this paper?

My research into the illustrations of Byron’s work has brought home to me just how many images of the poetry are extant in private collections and in lesser-known editions of the poet’s work that have not been carefully catalogued or examined. This is an untapped mine of material for Byron scholars since the images reveal so much about that ways in which the poetry was being received and understood since its publication.