Diana the Huntress

In the same two years the museum gives this panel, 1602 and 1603, Giuseppe Cesari, known as the Cavaliere d'Arpino, painted Diana more than once. A larger picture on copper of about that date, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, shows the goddess of the hunt and her nymphs surprised at their bath by the hunter Actaeon, whom she turns into a stag. That museum describes his carefully finished cabinet pictures as highly prized by collecting prelates and aristocrats. His brother Bernardino, who worked with him, made a faithful copy of one of his versions of the Actaeon story, and it belonged to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew, before 1613. Here Diana is on her own, as the huntress, on a wooden panel only 44 centimetres high, and the picture came to the Capitoline from the collection of the Sacchetti family.