Titian, 'The Death of Actaeon', about 1559-75

Around 1551, Titian began producing an ambitious series of large-scale mythological paintings for Prince Philip – later Philip II – of Spain drawing primarily on the Roman poet Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses. Titian called these works ‘poesie’, a term that described narrative subjects taken from classical myth while simultaneously indicating am ambition to create visual equivalents to poetry. During the Renaissance, the relative merits of painting, poetry and sculpture were the subject of intense debate among artists and theorists in Italy.

In Titian’s earlier Diana and Actaeon, one of the poesie painted for Philip II in 1556–9, Actaeon disturbs Diana and her nymphs at their secret bathing place. Ovid relates how the goddess splashes water on Actaeon’s face and dares him to tell the world what he has seen. In The Death of Actaeon Titian has painted the sequel: Actaeon flees and, stopping to drink at a stream, discovers from his reflection that Diana has turned him into a stag. Titian shows Actaeon in the process of transformation, or metamorphosis – his body is still human but he has a stag’s head. Actaeon finds that he cannot speak and he is beset by his own hounds who tear him to death. The death scene was rare in Italian art and Titian may never have seen another painting of it.

This is probably the picture Titian referred to in a letter of June 1559 to Philip II, in which he says he hopes to finish two paintings he has started, one of which is described as ‘Actaeon torn apart by his hounds’. Parts of the work may date from the around 1560, even if most of what we see was painted later, probably in the early 1570s. Titian started The Death of Actaeon when he was in his seventies, was still working on it in his mid-eighties, and it is possible that it was left in his studio at the time of his death in 1576. It was never sent to Spain.

The question of whether the painting is finished has been much debated. Although Titian’s materials in the second part of his career remained essentially the same, the ways in which he used them changed considerably, particularly in his final years. He used a much bolder and freer technique, and fully employed the textures of paint and canvas, leaving various parts of his paintings in different states of completion, as we see here.

In other late paintings, Titian added scumbled touches of deep rose and blue, sometimes applied with his fingers, and it is tempting to think that he might have wanted to do the same here. But pigment change in the sky and other places as well as the dulling of Diana’s bright pink dress caused by dirt and yellowed dirty varnish make the painting seem more monochromatic than it originally was. It is possible that Titian would have wanted to flesh out further the lower body of Actaeon, or add a string to Diana’s bow, but that is far from certain, since in other late paintings he seems to have been happy to leave these details unresolved. The explosion of yellow paint in the foreground he uses to suggest a bush so effectively, is typical of his expressive touch and approach at this stage in his career. It is hard to imagine how anything could have been added to it to make it appear more finished in the traditional sense.