Diana and Callisto

By the 1620s Paul Bril had worked in Rome for about 40 years, and the city's taste in landscape had moved on. Painters from Bologna had made calm, open countryside the fashion, and this late panel follows them, with a broad, quiet valley running back to low blue hills. The story sits small in the foreground. Callisto, a companion of the huntress Diana, was seduced by Jupiter and hid her pregnancy. In Ovid's telling it came out when the nymphs went to bathe. Across the stream a group of them seize Callisto and pull off her clothes, while Diana, already undressed, sits by the water at the lower right among her attendants. The panel came to the National Gallery in 1924, left by Sir Claude Phillips, an art critic who had been the first keeper of the Wallace Collection.