Diana and Actaeon

Greece to Paris, 530 BCE–1890

Titian

Diana and Actaeon

1556–59

Oil on canvas, 72 3/4 × 79 1/2 in. The National Gallery, London, and National Galleries of Scotland

Titian (Italian, about 1488–1576). Look at how the picture is split: the hunter stands alone at the left and the goddess's group fills the right.

Look at

  • A pulled-back red curtain and a stone pillar divide the canvas into two unequal halves.
  • The hunter's raised hand is higher than any head in the picture; the bathers' heads sit lower, bunched across the right.
  • The pale bodies are packed together in the lower right, so the eye lands there after the hunter.
  • The blue sky shows mainly through the arch, a bright patch that fills the gap between the two sides.
  • One of six myth paintings for Philip II of Spain, known as the poesie, with subjects from Ovid.

Image: National Gallery, London image, via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (faithful reproduction of a public-domain 2D work)

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