Diana and Actaeon: Titian's Masterpiece of a Fatal Glance

A Story from Ovid

The painting tells a story from the Metamorphoses, the long Latin poem in which the Roman poet Ovid, writing around the beginning of the first century AD, collected hundreds of Greek and Roman myths about transformation. In the third book, the young prince Actaeon, grandson of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, is hunting with his friends and his pack of hounds. At midday he stops the hunt and wanders alone through an unfamiliar valley. There he stumbles into a shady grotto with a spring, where Diana, the virgin goddess of hunting and of the moon, is bathing with her nymphs.

The nymphs scream and crowd around their mistress to hide her. Diana, ashamed and furious, has no arrows within reach, so she splashes water into Actaeon's face and tells him to go and tell others what he has seen, if he can. At once antlers sprout from his forehead and he turns into a stag. Unable to speak, he flees and is torn apart by his own dogs, who do not recognise their master. Ovid insists that Actaeon came to the grotto by chance, not by wicked intent, and that his punishment was terrible fortune rather than justice. That uncomfortable question of guilt and innocence is one reason the story fascinated Renaissance artists.

Titian chose not to show the transformation or the death. He painted the split second before everything goes wrong: the moment when Actaeon and Diana see each other.

The Poesie for Philip II

By the 1550s Titian was the most celebrated painter in Europe and worked for the most powerful family on the continent, the Habsburgs. He had painted the Emperor Charles V several times and met his son, the future King Philip II of Spain, in Milan in 1548 and again in Augsburg in 1550–1551. Philip became one of his most important patrons and, unusually, gave the old master great freedom in choosing his subjects.

Titian responded with a series of large mythological paintings that he himself called poesie, "poems" in paint. The word showed that he saw his pictures as the visual equivalent of poetry: free, imaginative retellings of ancient stories, mostly drawn from Ovid. The series included:

• Danaë, sent to Philip in the early 1550s;
• Venus and Adonis, delivered in 1554;
• Perseus and Andromeda;
• Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, a pair completed in 1559;
• The Rape of Europa, finished in the early 1560s.

Titian had already shown his talent for Ovid's world decades earlier, in the bright, energetic Bacchus and Ariadne painted for Alfonso I d'Este in the early 1520s. The poesie for Philip are different in mood: darker, more sensual and more tragic, painted by an artist in his late sixties or early seventies (his exact birth year is unknown; most scholars place it around 1488–1490).

Titian planned the two Diana pictures as companions. In Diana and Callisto the goddess discovers that one of her own nymphs, Callisto, is pregnant and expels her. Both pictures show Diana as a judge whose anger falls on someone who has broken the rules of her world, and both are about the same size. In a letter of 1559 Titian told Philip that the two paintings were ready to be sent to Spain.

What We See in the Painting

The canvas is large, about 185 by 202 centimetres, almost square. On the left, Actaeon has just stepped into the grotto. He is still in hunting dress, with his bow fallen at his feet, and he raises one arm in a gesture that seems to mix surprise, apology and an attempt to shield himself. A hound at his side has noticed the women too.

Opposite him, on the right, sits Diana, recognisable by the small crescent moon in her hair. She twists away and pulls a cloth up to cover herself while fixing Actaeon with a sharp, offended look. Behind her, a dark-skinned attendant holds a cloth, and between the two main figures the nymphs react in different ways. One hides behind a pillar and peers out; another looks straight at the intruder; others turn away or try to cover themselves. Titian gives each one a distinct pose, so that the group reads like a ripple of shock passing across the scene.

The setting mixes nature and architecture. The bathers sit beside a stream and a fountain among the ruins of a building with heavy rusticated arches. A heavy red-pink curtain hung above the bathers has just been pulled aside, as if the curtain of a stage has opened. Beyond the grotto, on the right, a landscape of trees, hills and a cloudy sky opens up.

Clues to the Ending

Titian hides the tragic ending inside the picture. On top of the pillar in the centre sits the skull of a stag, its antlers clearly visible: a warning of what Actaeon is about to become. Deer skins hang from the branches nearby, and Diana's small lapdog barks at the stranger. Anyone who knew Ovid would read these details and understand that this moment of discovery will end in death.

Titian's Late Technique

In his later years Titian worked in a way that astonished his contemporaries. Instead of the smooth, carefully blended surfaces typical of much Renaissance painting, he built up his pictures in many layers of oil paint, applied with brushes, and sometimes, according to early accounts, with his fingers. Close up, parts of Diana and Actaeon look loose and sketchy; from a distance the strokes merge into glowing skin, shimmering water and soft, vibrating light.

Colour does much of the storytelling. The pale, warm bodies of the women stand out against the shadowy grotto, while the red curtain, the deep blue sky and the gold and brown of the landscape tie the scene together.

Technical studies show that Titian changed his mind as he worked: X-rays reveal, for example, that Diana's attendant was first painted with pale skin and only later overpainted dark. This was typical of his working method: he would put a picture aside, return to it with fresh eyes, and keep reworking it until he was satisfied.

A Calm Look at the Nudity

The painting shows several unclothed women, which can surprise viewers today. In Renaissance Europe, mythological subjects were the accepted way to paint the nude human body, a skill that artists and patrons regarded as one of the highest challenges of art. Titian had already explored the reclining female nude in works such as the Venus of Urbino (1534–1538). In Diana and Actaeon, however, the bodies serve a story: they show the variety of poses that a sculptor or painter could study, and at the same time make the viewer aware of looking, just as Actaeon looks.

That is part of the painting's cleverness. We, the viewers, stand roughly where Actaeon stands. The picture invites us to think about the difference between innocent seeing and forbidden looking, and about how quickly fortune can turn.

From Madrid to London and Edinburgh

The two Diana pictures hung in the Spanish royal collection for nearly 150 years. In 1704 King Philip V of Spain gave them to the French ambassador, the Duke of Gramont, and soon afterwards they entered the famous collection of Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who served as regent of France. During the French Revolution the Orléans collection was sold, and in 1798 a large part of it, including the two Titians, came to London. The paintings were acquired by a group of British collectors led by the Duke of Bridgewater and then passed down in the family of his heirs, the Earls of Ellesmere and later Dukes of Sutherland, as part of what became known as the Bridgewater Collection.

From 1945 the paintings were on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh, where they became among its best-known treasures. In 2008 the Duke of Sutherland offered to sell the two Diana pictures to the nation for less than their estimated market value. The National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland launched a joint campaign, and in 2009 they bought Diana and Actaeon for 50 million pounds, with support from public funds, charities and thousands of private donors. Diana and Callisto followed in 2012 for 45 million pounds. The two institutions now own the paintings together and show them alternately in London and Edinburgh.

Key Facts

• Artist: Titian (Tiziano Vecellio)
• Date: 1556–1559
• Medium: oil on canvas
• Size: about 185 × 202 cm
• Commissioned by: Philip II of Spain, as one of the poesie
• Source: Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III
• Owners: National Gallery, London, and National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (jointly, since 2009)

Influence and Lesser-Known Details

The poesie were among the most admired paintings in Europe. When Peter Paul Rubens visited Madrid, he studied and copied Titian's works in the royal collection, and generations of painters, from Velázquez to the nineteenth-century Romantics, learned from Titian's loose brushwork and rich colour. In Britain, Diana and Actaeon has inspired artists for over two centuries; during the campaign to buy it, the painter Lucian Freud called the two Diana paintings the most beautiful pictures in the world.

Titian returned to the story later in life. In The Death of Actaeon, painted in his last years, Diana strides forward with a bow while Actaeon, already half turned into a stag, is attacked by his hounds. That darker, sketchier picture was never sent to Philip and remained in Titian's studio; today it also belongs to the National Gallery in London.

A few more details are worth knowing:

• In 2012 the National Gallery celebrated the poesie with Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, a project in which the Royal Ballet and contemporary artists created new works inspired by the Diana paintings.
• In 2020 the National Gallery's exhibition Titian: Love, Desire, Death brought all six poesie together for the first time since the sixteenth century.
• The paintings of the series are now scattered among museums in London, Edinburgh, Madrid and Boston, which is why that reunion was such a rare event.

More than four and a half centuries after it was painted, Diana and Actaeon still captures the sharpest moment of a story: not the punishment itself, but the instant of recognition, when an ordinary hunting trip turns into a tragedy.