Diana and Callisto

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Characterized by Titian’s trademark painterly brushwork (meaning the artist’s hand is heavily visible and each brushstroke is distinct), this stunning canvas is filled with ten of Artemis’s followers, and the goddess Artemis herself. Reclined on a throne on the right hand side of the painting at the edge of the lake used for the huntresses’ bath, Artemis points a condemning finger at the sobbing, frightened nymph Callisto, who is being held down on the lower left side of the canvas while a handful of nymphs tear her clothes off her body. Most of the figures in the painting are nude or mostly undressed, but Callisto is being forced to reveal her body and, consequently, her pregnant stomach carrying Zeus’s child. The background of this emotionally charged scene is an open, green landscape and blue skies with some light white clouds. There is a golden cloth just above and slightly to the right of Artemis’s regal position as divine judge that acts as a canopy over the huntresses watching the scene unfold.
The canvas is now owned and displayed by the National Gallery of London and National Gallery of Scotland. There is also a copy of this canvas - made by Titian and his workshop - held at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria. A third canvas, the Death of Actaeon, was most likely meant to be displayed with these two pieces of the poesia, but it remained unfinished by the time of Titian’s death.

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1556-9, oil on canvas, 187x204.5 cm. Titian made this painting to accompany Diana and Actaeon for one of his most faithful commissioners, King Philip II of Spain, in the late 1550s. The background details and setting make it clear these paintings were meant to be displayed together. The canvas depicts an emotional scene in which Callisto, one of Artemis’s favorite nymphs, is forcefully stripped of her clothing by the other nymphs in order to reveal her pregnancy. All of Artemis’s followers are sworn to a life of chastity, but Callisto was seduced and impregnated by Zeus, whose wife punished the nymph by turning her into a bear. Not long after she gave birth to Zeus’s son, he turned both Callisto and their son into the constellations Ursa Major and Arctophylax.

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    Tiziano Vecellio