Titian, 'Diana and Actaeon', 1556-9

The story of Actaeon is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book III, 138–255). Ovid relates how the noble young hunter, separated from his friends after a day’s hunting, accidentally stumbles upon Diana, chaste goddess of the hunt, bathing in a spring shaded by a natural cave. Titian substitutes a fountain and a ruinous man-made structure.

We see Actaeon bursting onto the scene and causing consternation among Diana’s virgin nymphs, several of whom hastily seek to cover their nudity. Not all appear dismayed at the intrusion, but rather appear curious or even fascinated; Diana is clearly furious, if perhaps also fascinated. Titian explored the dramatic impact of the moment through a dynamic arrangement of figures, sparkling light, intense colour and animated brushwork. As her handmaid helps cover her with a shift, Diana casts Actaeon a sidelong glance that foretells her cruel act of revenge. Actaeon raises his hands in surprise, as though already half aware of the deadly price he must pay for invading the goddess’s privacy.

The scene is rich in portents of Actaeon’s death: the crumbling architecture is draped with the skins and skull of Diana’s former prey, while in the background is a tiny vignette of the huntress chasing a stag, a foretaste of Actaeon’s destiny as shown in The Death of Actaeon. In that work, Titian movingly painted the final part of the story in which Actaeon, transformed into a stag by Diana, is torn to apart by his own hounds. In Diana and Actaeon, Titian lightens the story’s tragic plot with amusing details: Diana’s lapdog yaps at Actaeon’s hound from the safety of the far bank. The fountain, sinking into the wet ground, appears to lurch under the nymphs‘ weight, and water gushes from a lion mask half-concealed beneath one nymph’s bottom.

Significant too is the sense of physical, even social realism Titian brings to the proceedings. Since women of standing would not pose for artists in the nude, Titian hired his models from what we would understand as the working class, often from the large, thriving community of sex workers in Venice. In a sense, he offers the viewer a harem scene that might have brought with it very real, contemporary associations. He includes a Black woman, distinguished from the other nymphs by her state of dress and position as a servant. Venice had a substantial population of sub-Saharan African descent who, while rarely enslaved, often had menial jobs. Moreover, Black servants and pages were considered prestigious in the courts of Northern Italy, a set up that was emulated among the more exclusive courtesans of Venice. Titian seems to be mirroring social reality. Interestingly, the Black woman’s facial features are much more distinctive than the other nymphs: while they are generic beauties of the kind Titian would routinely paint, she seems to be based on a real person that he hired to model for him – the hidden portrait of a real Venetian woman of the time.

Diana and Actaeon is one of six large mythological paintings that Titian produced between around 1551 and 1562 for Prince Philip, King of Spain from 1556, all of which have subjects drawn from classical myth, predominantly the Metamorphoses. Titian described them with the established term ’poesie‘ (poems), which covered precisely that kind of secular narrative painting, but which also revealed his ambition that they be visual equivalents of poetry. This comparison recalls the paragone, a debate among artists and theorists in Renaissance Italy about the rival claims made for the arts. The Roman author Plutarch’s observation that ’Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks‘ was frequently cited in favour of painting.

In the late 1510s and early 1520s, Titian had created a series of mythological paintings alongside Bellini and Dosso Dossi for Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, which included Bacchus and Ariadne. This series had a considerable influence on European art in the centuries that followed, helping establish the loves of the gods as a popular subject for secular painting. While Titian had been advised by humanists at Alfonso’s court as to subject matter and format, Philip essentially let him choose freely for the poesie.

The first two paintings in the series for Philip, Danäe (about 1551–3) now in the Wellington Collection, London, and Venus and Adonis (about 1553–4), now in the Prado, Madrid, were variations of pictures Titian had painted before. In 1556, Titian dispatched the next painting, Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Collection, London), and three years after that he sent Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. The series was completed by The Rape of Europa (1559–62), now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

The pictures showing Diana were painted together and seem to have been designed to be displayed next to each other as the background landscape as well as the stream in their foreground appear to be continuous between them. However, the light as depicted falls from opposite sides – from the left in Diana and Actaeon and from the right in Diana and Callisto – the only poesia where this is the case This indicates that Titian had a placement between two windows, and so in a very large hall, in mind. It is very unlikely that Philip had initially stipulated a location for the pictures: we know from a letter that Titian intended them all for a single room, but since Philip did not have a fixed residence at the time, the artist was surely just imagining this in the abstract. It is possible, however, that he had received updated information by the time he painted the pictures. In any case, the two paintings have remained together throughout their history.

In a letter of 19 June 1559 the artist informed Philip that the two poesie were finished and that he would await instructions regarding their transport. Titian wrote again on 22 September to confirm that he was about to send the paintings. In this letter he stated that he had worked on them for more than three years, emphasising the exceptional efforts he had expended on the two pictures. He explained that the long time it had taken to paint them was due to ‘the ardent desire that I have to do things that are worthy of Your Majesty, from which it follows that I am never satisfied with my efforts, but seek always with all my industry to polish and to enhance them’. Another letter to the King from the Spanish Ambassador in Venice reveals that the artist had in fact continued to work on the paintings over the course of the summer: ‘Titian will bring to perfection the two paintings of Diana and Callisto [sic] within twenty days because, since they are large and involve a lot of work, he wants to resolve a few little things that others wouldn’t notice.‘

Titian’s many revisions to Diana and Actaeon, where he changed his mind during painting, are visible beneath a complex layering of energetic brushwork. Forms are defined by transitions from one colour to another, broken by reflections and mingling in the shadows, rather than by linear contour. Tonal differences are translated directly into colour rather than initially worked out in black and white. The texture of paint and the track of Titian’s gesture enliven the surface of the picture and enhance its emotional charge. The paint surface remains relatively intact.

Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto was sent to Toledo, where the King was in residence, but was soon moved to the Royal Palace – the Alcázar – in Madrid when Philip moved his court there permanently in May 1561. In 1623, they almost came to Britain when they were packed up as diplomatic gifts for Prince Charles of England and Scotland (soon to become King Charles I), who was in Madrid attempting to woo the Spanish Infanta. But marriage negotiations foundered and the pictures remained in Madrid. In 1704 they were presented by King Philip V as gifts to the French Ambassador who passed them onto the French regent, Philippe II, the Duc d’Orléans. They first came to Britian in 1793 and eventually ended up in the Bridgewater Collection of the Duke of Sutherland, who lent them on a long-term basis to the National Galleries of Scotland in 1945. They were jointly acquired for the National by the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland in 2009 and 2012. They are now displayed at both the National Gallery and the Scottish National Gallery, changing location between London and Edinburgh at intervals of several years.