This close-up makes it easier to see this as a mythological variation on an established late medieval chivalric theme of the lover kneeling to gaze in awe, worship, and desire at the "celestial" beloved. This mythological theme has something in common with Dante's love for Beatrice and with the larger theme of the religion of female beauty in Renaissance and Baroque humanist aesthetics, a subject treated most famously in literature at the end of Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier" and in numerous other writers including Bembo (Gli Asolani) and the Petrarchan sonnet tradition which governs most sonnet writing into the early 17th century. Another 17th-century example of this larger theme, translated into Dutch middle class domestic terms, is Ter Borch's Woman at Her Dressing Table, shown below in this art gallery, where a young page stares, transfixed. The eagerly mounting horses of Apollo, glimpsed above Endymion in this close-up of Poussin's painting, were a common motif symbolizing male desire, as seen in Holbein's image of a naked rider on a rising horse inscribed with a line from Petrarch, "And desire leads me on" - an image found in my 16th-century art gallery on this site.
