Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus is an 1851 oil painting by William Holman Hunt. It depicts a scene from William Shakespeare's "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". The top left and right portions of the frame include excerpts from act V, scene IV of the play. From left to right, the characters are Julia, disguised as a page, Sylvia, Valentine, and Proteus, who is in love with Julia. Sylvia's father, the Duke of Milain, and a group of followers are present in the background. The painting was on display at the Royal Academy in 1851, then
Proteus a backstory that makes the father of his character Theoclymenus, Proteus, a king in Egypt who had been wed to a Nereid Psamathe. In keeping with one of his themes in "Helen", Euripides mentions in passing "Eido" ("image"), a daughter of the king and therefore sister of Theoclymenus who underwent a name-change after her adolescence and became "Theonoë," "god-minded," since she was as it turned out capable of foreseeing the future--as such, she is a prophet who appears as a crucial character in the play. The play's king Proteus is already dead at the start of the action, and his