Titian, 'Diana and Callisto', 1556-9

The nymph Callisto was the favourite of Diana, virgin goddess of the hunt. Jupiter, king of the gods, noticed her beauty and seduced her by disguising himself as Diana. Titian has painted the moment Diana forces Callisto to strip and bathe after hunting and discovers her pregnancy. At the goddess’s command Callisto is pinned down by her fellow nymphs and her clothes torn off, exposing her swollen belly. Callisto sprawls on the ground with legs and arms flailing. Titian shows her humiliating exposure and banishment from Diana’s chaste entourage.

In the next part of the story, never painted by Titian, shamed Callisto is transformed into a bear by Jupiter’s jealous wife Juno. Years later, her son with Jupiter, Arcas – now an adolescent – meets her while out hunting. Before he can kill her, Jupiter takes pity and immortalises them as the constellation Ursa Major (the Great Bear) and Arctophylax (the Herdsman) respectively. Still furious, Juno secures with the water-dwelling titans Oceanus and Tethys a promise that the two will never be able to dip below the horizon to slake their thirst in the ocean.

Titian heightens his drama by his free and expressive brushwork. Voluptuous flesh is suggested in energetic brushstrokes and dabs of paint. The contours of the figures dissolve as the thinnest of dragged brushstrokes are swept over the surface of the canvas, contributing to the sense of dynamism and movement. Trees sway, streaks of golden cloud swirl in the sky and the stone pier tilts disconcertingly. The unicorn pattern of the gold cloth hanging over the tree is worked wet-in-wet, with glittering impasto highlights. The cord at the upper edge of the canopy that secures the fabric to the branches is a simple streak of lead white paint that relies on our eye to give it meaning. Titian made a number of alterations to the group around Callisto in particular during execution, altering poses and removing or adding clothes to individual figures, clearly working to get it just right. Unfortunately, the paint surface is rather damaged in certain areas, especially in the figures of Diana and Callisto themselves, who have lost some of their definition and bodily presence because of paint loss.

Diana and Callisto 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 myths, predominantly the Roman poet Ovid’s 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.

Diana and Callisto was delivered to Philip along with Diana and Actaeon in 1559. They 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 two pictures. In any case, they have remained together throughout their history. Around the time he was working on the pair, Titian began another painting associated with them, The Death of Actaeon. For some reason, Titian did not sent this painting to the King and it remained in his studio unfinished at his death.

Probably in the mid-1560s, some years after Diana and Callisto was sent to Spain, Titian and his workshop produced a full-sized variant of it (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). It was common at the time for artists to make copies and variants of successful compositions for other patrons. He also had an engraving made of the composition in 1566 by the Flemish printmaker Cornelis Cort, indicating that he thought it was particularly representative of his powers of invention and suitable for mass circulation.

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 Britain 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.