Diana e le sue ninfe

There is a reason this painting hangs in the Borghese and not where it was meant to. Domenichino painted it around 1616 for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, showing Diana and her nymphs at an archery contest, arrows still in the air, the goddess presiding over the sport. Then another Roman prince, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, decided he wanted it. When he could not simply buy it, he sent men to seize the canvas from the painter's house, and had Domenichino briefly thrown in jail for resisting. Borghese did this sort of thing more than once to build the collection around us. Off in the foreground two nymphs bathe while someone watches them from the reeds, the quiet act of spying that the myth is really about.