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...

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