Actaeon Watching Diana and her Nymphs Bathing

In 1559 Titian delivered his Diana and Actaeon to Philip II of Spain, and in it the hunter who has stumbled on the bathing goddess pulls back in alarm. That is how the story was usually told, and with reason. In Ovid, Diana punishes Actaeon for what he has seen by turning him into a stag, and his own hounds tear him to pieces.

Veronese, painting this a few years later, gives him no alarm at all. Actaeon lounges on a rock and watches, apparently enjoying himself, while Diana and her nymphs bathe on and their clothes and her arrows lie discarded at the right. The canvas is only 26 centimetres high and a metre long. It belonged to a set of mythologies that most likely ran along the wall of a private house as a frieze, perhaps just under the cornice, where a visitor had to look up to find this hunter taking his ease.