Diana and Callisto

For a century and a half the kings of Spain owned Titian's two paintings of Diana, made for Philip II between 1556 and 1559. In 1704 Philip V gave both to the French ambassador, and they left the country for good. The pair is now owned jointly by galleries in London and Edinburgh. This canvas is the Madrid copy, painted around 1650, while the originals still hung in the royal palaces and court painters could study them close up. It repeats the scene at about half the size: Diana rises from the bath and points at Callisto, whose clothes the other nymphs are pulling away to expose the pregnancy she had hidden. Examination of the canvas and the pigments places the picture in a 17th-century Spanish workshop, and the Prado catalogues it under Mazo's name. Before it reached the museum it spent 31 years at Madrid's Academy of San Fernando.