Focus on The Dawn of Love (painting) and discuss the Composition.
The Dawn of Love illustrates an early passage from Comus, a 1634 masque by John Milton. Comus is a morality tale in which the female protagonist, referred to only as "The Lady", becomes separated from her family. She encounters the debauched magician Comus who captures and imprisons her, and uses all the means at his disposal to try to inflame her sexual desires. The Lady resists all temptation, and using her reason and sense of morals resists Comus's efforts to draw her into intemperance or surrender to desire.Etty's painting is not a direct illustration of a scene from Comus. Instead, it is inspired by an early passage in which Comus, prior to his meeting with The Lady, muses on the notion that sin is only problematic if others become aware of it, and thus that it is right and natural to surrender to base desires while under cover of darkness, arguing that "What hath night to do with sleep? Night hath better sweets to prove, Venus now wakes, and wakens Love". Etty's painting shows the nude Venus, as "Goddess of nocturnal sport", reaching across to wake the sleeping Love by stroking his wings. While Etty had built his reputation on his renowned ability to paint realistic human figures, Venus in The Dawn of Love is highly stylised, and painted in a deliberate pastiche of the style of Rubens.The Dawn of Love intentionally presents a moral dilemma to viewers. By his open depiction of nudity and sensuality, Etty makes the same argument as that presented by Comus, that it is rational for the viewer to succumb to their lustful thoughts while in private. The picture presents the same moral challenge to the viewer as that which Comus presents to The Lady, that of remaining true to her better, moral and rational, nature, despite there being no apparent disadvantage in surrendering to desire.While Etty regularly painted nudity, he rarely depicted physical intimacy other than in combat, and The Dawn of Love is unusual among his works; Etty's biographer Leonard Robinson commented in 2007 that The Dawn of Love "is a subject so untypical of Etty that one finds difficulty in understanding why he painted it".
nude John Milton right masque Comus Rubens Venus