Diane et Actéon

Titian was in his late 60s when he painted this, one of a series of large mythological pictures he made in the 1550s for Philip the Second of Spain. He called them poesie, poems, meaning them to work the way poetry does rather than tell a plain story, and he took the subjects from Ovid. Here the young hunter Actaeon has pushed through a curtain and stumbled, by pure accident, into the grotto where the goddess Diana and her nymphs are bathing. It is the fraction of a second before disaster. He has seen what no mortal man may see, and Diana, half-risen and furious, is about to turn him into a stag, to be run down and torn apart by his own hunting dogs. Titian scatters small warnings through the scene, a stag's skull set on a pillar, an animal pelt, the pool of water between them. Up close the paint is loose and rough, worked with fingers as much as brush, so the flesh and silk seem to shimmer. In 2009 the national galleries of Britain bought it jointly, for about 50 million pounds, to keep it from leaving the country.