Diana and Actaeon

The hunter Actaeon stumbles upon the goddess Diana bathing with her nymphs at the edge of a dark wood, the figures rising out of shadow in flashes of white, rose and gold. Jacopo Bassano painted Diana and Actaeon in 1585–92, giving the fatal moment from Ovid a strange, flickering tenderness; the great Bassano family’s patriarch and a painter of rustling natural detail turns the myth into a scene of almost pastoral intimacy: the pools of water glimmer, the hounds press forward at the left, and Diana’s attendants startle like startled deer while the goddess herself meets the intruder’s gaze. The late date shows the veiled, smoky colour and loose handling of his final years, and the whole picture trembles between idyll and catastrophe. The painting is held in the Art Institute of Chicago.