About this work
The composition pitches the viewer immediately into high-altitude drama: George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, clad in a seventeenth-century approximation of Roman armour, is hauled upward through the sky by Minerva, goddess of wisdom and war, and Mercury, messenger of the gods, his gaze lifted toward his destination — the Temple of Virtue.
The strong red of the Duke's billowing cloak anchors him at the centre of the image, while a kaleidoscope of gold, cream, ochre, and rosy pink swirls around him.
The three Graces offer the Duke a crown of flowers while Envy seeks to pull him down and a lion challenges him from below — the whole image structured as a circular tondo, composed to be read from beneath, its figures foreshortened with the vertiginous assurance of Baroque ceiling painting at its most theatrical. Etty's version is a small circular sketch after the *sotto in su* ceiling decoration , concentrated and intimate despite its operatic subject matter.
Etty produced this work sometime between 1825 and 1835.
It is a copy of a preparatory sketch Rubens made for a ceiling painting that hung at the Duke's London home, York House — a work later destroyed in 1849.
Rubens's sketch was in the collection of David Wilkie, fellow artist and Royal Academician, and Etty may well have had the opportunity to study it while it was on display in Wilkie's studio. The timing places this work squarely within Etty's mature period — the years following his transformative Italian tour of 1822–24, when his absorption of Venetian and Flemish colour had fully taken hold. It is unsurprising that this packed composition, full of naked and semi-dressed figures, intertwined and elegantly connected, would have appealed to Etty.
The original Rubens is an allegory of Buckingham's political aspirations and the forces he saw as impeding him — a work of grand propaganda recast, in Etty's hands, as an act of devotion to the master he most admired. Although the attribution to Etty has been questioned, the work remains an interesting example of a painted copy of the period after Rubens.
As a fine art print, this image rewards a setting that can absorb its density — a deep, warm-toned wall in a drawing room, library, or study where the eye has somewhere to travel and linger. The circular format gives it the quality of a jewel or cameo: arresting in isolation, yet at home among other works of the Romantic or Baroque tradition. It speaks to the viewer who understands copying as a form of reverence, and who takes pleasure in knowing the layers of a picture — that this is Etty in conversation with Rubens, Rubens in conversation with antiqu
