Diana and Actaeon is the myth of a hunter who walks by chance into a grove where the goddess Diana is bathing, and who is changed by her into a stag and killed by his own hounds. Painters have returned to it for centuries, and the picture most often cited is Titian's, painted between 1556 and 1559 for Philip II of Spain.
The story comes from the third book of the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses. Actaeon is a young hunter who has spent the morning in the hills with his companions and his hounds. At midday he tells the men to stop and rest, and he wanders off alone into a valley sacred to Diana, where a grotto and a pool lie among the cypresses. The goddess is bathing there with her nymphs, and he has walked in by accident.
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A painter has to choose a single moment, because Ovid tells the story in several. There is the surprise, the curse, the flight through the woods and the death, and each has found its painter. Titian chose the first, before anything irreversible has happened. His Actaeon bursts into the scene with his hands raised, and the National Gallery says he is already half aware of the price he will pay.
The curse is the cruelest part of the tale. Diana splashes the hunter's face with water and tells him to go and say, if he can, that he has seen her unrobed. Then she gives him a stag's horns, and when he tries to cry out in horror he finds that he has no voice. The punishment is aimed at the one thing that could save him, which is telling his own dogs who he is.
Ovid himself does not seem to be on the goddess's side. Before the hounds arrive, he stops to say that Actaeon's ruin was a stroke of bad fortune and not a crime of his own. So a painter of the scene has to decide how guilty to make Actaeon look, and the pictures below answer that question differently.
What You'll Discover
Who covered a castle room with the story.
What Diana's sidelong glance tells Actaeon.
What became of Titian's second Actaeon.
How one canvas shows two moments together.
Where Actaeon hides in Corot's grove.