Diane et Actéon

Diana and her nymphs bathe naked in a rocky landscape around a pool; the goddess, leaning on a rock and holding a spear, wears the crescent-moon diadem that is her symbol, while two of her companions try to screen her from Actaeon with a cloth. But already antlers have sprouted on the huntsman’s head, punished for having seen the goddess naked, and he flees to the right. This is the Ovidian myth as painted by Michel Dorigny in the late 1630s — a pupil and son-in-law of Simon Vouet, whose grand decorative manner he continued, carrying Vouet’s light-filled classicism into the Paris of the 1640s. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.