Diana and Actaeon

Actaeon raises his hands as he comes upon a group of women bathing. Cloth is lifted and bodies turn towards the intruder. Diana, goddess of the hunt, watches him from among her attendants. In the ancient story told by Ovid, the hunter’s arrival is accidental. Diana punishes him for seeing her naked by changing him into a stag. His own hounds will then attack him. The stag’s skull and hunting trophies within this image hint at that terrible outcome. Titian painted the scene for Philip II of Spain between 1556 and 1559. He called his mythological paintings poems, allowing colour, gesture and setting to tell stories that readers knew from literature. This work was designed to hang with Diana and Callisto, with landscape and water continuing from one composition to the other. The Death of Actaeon develops the later part of the story in another painting. Here, the turning figures and sudden exposure hold the narrative at the moment before the hunter understands what will happen.