Enter Actaeon the huntsman, stage left, into a world of startling beauty. He has stumbled on the goddess Diana and her handmaidens while they are bathing. The archer reels in amazement, his dog tensed by his side, as Diana fixes him with a poisonous stare of reproach and recoils like a snake about to strike. He will die for his impudence. She has already decreed it. But as a turbulent world whirls about him – clouds boiling above blue remembered hills on a giddyingly tilted horizon – he is suddenly  infatuated. He has seen one of Diana’s nymphs peeping out from behind a column of stone, and, in the instant of seeing her, has fallen in love. The look in her eyes says she returns the feeling. He will die and she will have to forget him, but for this precious moment none of that matters.

Titian painted Diana and Actaeon in the late 1550s, when he was in his seventies. It is an old man’s painting about love and death, a radiant and free invention. The artist played with the myth he had been commissioned to illustrate, conjuring his own, idiosyncratic image from a passage in Ovid’s Metamorphoses – a text which makes no mention of the sudden love between man and woman central to his interpretation of the story. In Diana and Actaeon’s few square feet of canvas it is possible to see, mapped out for future generations of painters, the dazzling array of Titian’s inventions. He found ways of seeing the human form – often awkward or abbreviated, as well as full of feeling – that no one had found before. He discovered or perfected just about every device and technique for manipulating the refractory medium of oil paint, making the least mark – even dabs and blurs and fingery smudges – utterly alive and eloquent. Diana and Actaeon is not only a nonpareil masterpiece in its own right; it contains, in embryo, the DNA of the entire Western oil painting tradition, from Rubens to Rembrandt to Hals, from Velazquez to El Greco, from Constable to Manet and beyond. It is a testament to Titian’s ubiquity, as source and origin, that the work of neither of the giants of modern painting currently being celebrated in Tate’s major shows of the moment – Mark Rothko, and Francis Bacon – can be readily imagined without the operations of his influence.

Diana and Actaeon is one of the world’s greatest paintings. But more to the point, it is the single greatest Renaissance painting still to be in private hands. It has been in Great Britain for more than two hundred years, but now it is at risk of being sold abroad forever – along with the rest of the extraordinary Bridgewater Collection, including priceless works by Raphael, Rembrandt and Poussin. Although it has been much publicised, the true significance of the crisis still does not seem to have been universally understood. Put simply, this is the greatest threat to Britain’s national collections of art in living memory. It is no exaggeration to say that if the Bridgewater pictures were to go overseas it would be the most damaging loss of Old Master paintings since the dispersal of Charles I’s pictures after the English Civil War.

The extent of the threat first became apparent earlier this year. In August, the Duke of Sutherland, whose family acquired the entire Bridgewater Collection through an advantageous marriage more than one hundred and fifty years ago, decided that it was time to cash in on the value of his family assets. He announced his intention to sell Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, together with its companion piece, Diana and Callisto – one of a group of so-called poesie, or mythological paintings, originally created by the Venetian painter for the King of Spain, Philip II. In recognition of their exceptional importance and longstanding presence in this country, the Duke has agreed to offer the two pictures to the nation for £100 million – a lot of money, for sure, but far less than they might be expected to reach on the open market, even in these economically austere times.

The nature of the deal is complicated – too complicated, at any rate, to squeeze into an easily digestible sound-bite – a fact which has not made life any easier for those running the campaign to save the pictures. But the domino-effect essence of the matter is this:

If £50 million can be raised to purchase Diana and Actaeon by December 31 of this year, then the Duke is prepared to wait another three years for £50 million to be found to purchase the second Titian, Diana and Callisto. Both works have been on long-term loan to the National Galleries of Scotland, together with the rest of the Bridgewater Collection, since the end of the Second World War. But were they to be purchased they would henceforth be split between Scotland and the National Gallery of London – which have jointly spearheaded the campaign – going to each museum in turn for five years at a time.

To add even more jeopardy to the deal, the Duke has also agreed that if the first £50 million can be raised by the end of this year, he will also agree to extend the loan of the rest of the Bridgewater Collection to the National Galleries of Scotland for another twenty one years (after that time, the future of those works would presumably be up for grabs once again). If the money can not be found, he has said that everything, from Raphael’s Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt, to Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait, to Poussin’s Seven Sacraments, will simply go up for sale.

The clock is ticking. From today, only a month remains to raise £50 million to purchase Diana and Actaeon. Titian has always been a painter’s painter, so it is hardly surprising that strong support should have come from Britain’s artists. The painter Lucian Freud, who hates nothing so much as going in front of a television camera, broke a lifetime’s rule by appearing on Channel 4’s evening news, to declare Titian’s picture the world’s most beautiful work of art. Other artists, including Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley, have signed a petition which Tracey Emin, took to Number 10 Downing Street a fortnight ago; and just last week, the artist Tom Hunter restaged Diana and Actaeon itself in an elaborate tableau vivant staged for the benefit of BBC2’s Culture Show – resulting in a modern-dress, photographic version of the scene imagined by Titian nearly five hundred years ago.

Hunter’s willing participants included an acrobat, a gymnast and a stripper from the burlesque troupe La Clique, five female students from the Courtauld Institute and Kim Cattrall, star of Sex and the City – who turns out to be a “huge fan” of the National Gallery and a committed supporter of the campaign to save the Titians. For the love of art, Cattrall and her fellow nymphs even stripped off for the cause, to memorable (if not entirely Titianesque) effect. For once, the phrase “naked publicity stunt” seemed entirely apt. As resident art critic on The Culture Show, I must confess to having been party to this particular consciousness-raising event. In fact my very own dog, Biba – a standard poodle with an unnerving resemblance to a human being in a gorilla suit – played the part of Actaeon’s noble and nervous hound. Just for the record, she appears, truncated to the suitable bit-part of an eloquent silhouette, in the lower part of Hunter’s final frame.

Thanks to the efforts of all involved, the campaign now goes into its last month with what sports commentators like to call “momentum”. But despite that, and despite the National Heritage Fund’s tremendously encouraging donation of £10 million to the cause, more will certainly need to be done. The harsh truth is that it will be all but impossible to raise the thick end of £40 million from the general public at times like these. It would be naive to assume the government will step in, especially when it seems inflexibly committed to pouring billions of pounds into the vast trough of greed, corruption and mismanagement euphemistically known as “the 2012 Olympics”.

Some other solution must be found, so here are four eminently practical suggestions for a solution to the crisis:

 

1)    Her Majesty the Queen steps in to save the day. She has the money, and such an act would be entirely in line with Her Majesty’s recent determination to make her own, extraordinary private collection ever more available to public view.

 

2)    A non-dom hedge fund manager, who has preserved his own fortune while exposing others to toxic levels of leveraged debt, buys the pictures and gives them to the country as an act of philanthropic atonement.

 

3)    The nation’s most successful artists choose to fight fire with fire, donating a selection of their own works of art – inflated by the same market forces that have made Titian’s masterpieces so expensive – to be sold at the salesroom. (I hereby volunteer as auctioneer)

 

4)    The Duke of Sutherland reconsiders the terms he has offered and decides to be even more generous. After all, his ancestors ensured that the pictures were on public display pretty well continuously from 1806 to the present. Does he really want to be remembered as the man who put an end to that tradition of public beneficence?

 

A combination of all four would do the trick equally well, of course. Any or all would carry the additional social advantage of setting a sterling example of selfless giving – and at a time when this country needs to establish a real tradition of private philanthropy, as never before. The bottom line is that it would be a real tragedy for the visual arts in this country if these pictures were to be lost to public view.