Date: 04-09-2005
Owning Institution: The National Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: Middle Ages & Earlier        

I started this column five and a half years ago and have greatly enjoyed, not only writing it, but also reading the many letters which it has elicited from readers of all ages and aesthetic persuasions. I have been inundated with a fascinating multiplicity of footnotes and corrective addenda to my own undoubtedly imperfect interpretations of the various pictures selected for reproduction on this page. I have been sent messages of encouragement, as well as some bitingly eloquent expressions of outright disgust – on receiving which I have tried to remind myself that it is better to be read and disagreed with than never read at all. So to all of you who have written in over the years, thank you for your insights.

However, this particular imaginary museum is now closing, so this week’s “In the Picture” – number 279, if I have counted it right – is also the final one in the series. I have decided to end with a work by the same artist with whom I began, namely Titian. His Noli Me Tangere, painted when he was a young man, was the subject of my first  column; and his Death of Actaeon, painted near the end of his life, is the subject of my last. This depiction of the mythological huntsman Actaeon, pursued to his death by the vengeful goddess Diana, can be seen in the National Gallery, in London.

Titian painted the picture for his most powerful patron, Philip II of Spain. In a letter written on 19 June 1559, the artist professed his undying devotion to the “most unconquerable Catholic King”, informed him about several works in progress, and asked with the utmost delicacy when he might expect to see some money for all his efforts. He also mentioned, in passing, that he had it in mind to paint the work reproduced here, “Atheone lacerato da suoi cani” – Actaon torn to pieces by his own hounds. As it turned out, the painting was still in the artist’s studio when he died, in the great plague that ravaged Venice in 1576. This fact has been the source of considerable debate. Some scholars take it as evidence that the work is merely unfinished. Others, however, regard the picture as one of the most daringly impressionistic examples of Titian’s late style.

I take the latter view, partly because I fail to see how Titian could have taken The Death of Actaeon to a higher degree of finish without destroying its strange, severe beauty. In addition, x-ray evidence drawn from numerous other pictures has shown that it was never his practice to lay in a mere sketch or underpainting in this hectically agitated and deeply expressive style. A Spanish visitor to his studio reported that Titian would occasionally work with “large brushes, almost like brooms”, and perhaps he used these to create the flurries of brown paint into which Actaeon, leapt upon by his hounds, seems almost to be dissolving. Titian’s pupil Palma Giovane noted the artist’s habit of applying pigment, in certain places, with his fingers, and there are traces of this too in the threads and smudges of white that form the choppy surface of the stream coursing through this scene of mythological tragedy. The vehemence with which the artist has applied the paint, particularly evident also in the blurred, mobile, windswept landscape background, seems particularly well suited to the themes of death and metamorphosis.

The story of Actaeon had been passed down from antiquity in the third book of the Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Titian would probably have first read it in his own language, in one of the many Italian translations of Boccaccio’s useful compendium of classical tales, the Genealogia Deorum. Boccaccio’s version is concise in the extreme:

“Actaeon was a hunter. One day, tired from the chase, he had gone into the valley of Gargafia, probably to quench his thirst, for there was a fresh and clear stream in the valley, and it happened that he beheld Diana in the spring, who was naked and washing herself. Diana, discovering this, took it ill, and she took some water in her hands and splashed it in Actaeon’s face, saying “Go say what you have seen, if you can”. And Actaeon was immediately changed into a stag, and when his hounds saw him he was killed immediately and gashed with their teeth and eaten up.”

Titian shows the grim climax of the story, taking the liberty of introducing Diana into the scene, as huntress, administering the coup de grace with an arrow from her bow – and revealing her right breast in the process. But the picture’s faint glimmerings of eroticism are shadowed by intimations of mortality. Actaeon, whose head has already metamorphosed into that of a stag, seems as though he is attempting vainly to call out to his hounds, even as they savage him. This is a detail which suggests that Titian had taken the trouble to familiarise himself with Ovid in the original by the time he painted the work. In the Metamorphoses, Diana’s victim “longed to cry out, ‘I am Actaeon, recognise your master’; the words refused obedience to his will.”

Before Titian, the theme of Diana and Actaeon had been treated light-heartedly by the artists of the Italian Renaissance. The subject had often been deemed appropriate to wedding celebrations, for example, with the bride-to-be portrayed as Diana – a comical hint to any would-be Actaeons among the bridegroom’s friends. But in Titian’s hands, the theme acquired a tragic dimension. It is possible that the artist intended some moral to be read into the work, perhaps concerning the perils of lubricity. Titian had almost singlehandedly invented erotic art as a genre, in his many depictions of the female nude; so maybe there was even an element of self-confession at work, in this picture of a man turned into a beast by the spectacle of a nude goddess, and hounded by his own dogs as if by his own sexual passions.

The picture’s meaning – like that of any great work of art – cannot be absolutely determined. But there is an undeniable quality of melancholy, and finality, about it. It is not only an extremely moving picture. It is also, I think, a kind of valediction.