Diana and Actaeon

The scene comes from one of the grimmer tales in Ovid. Actaeon, a young hunter, loses his way and stumbles into a hidden pool where the goddess Diana is bathing with her nymphs. He has seen what no mortal was meant to see. Diana flings water in his face, and antlers begin to push from his forehead. Before he grasps what is happening, his own hounds no longer know him and run him down. Tiepolo painted this around 1720, early in his Venetian years, setting the disaster in a wide wooded landscape with the figures small among the trees and rocks. He chose the instant of the splash, when Actaeon still wears a man's body and only the first branch of horn.