Diana al bagno con le ninfe, con Atteone e Callisto

Rembrandt painted this in 1634, the year he married and set up as an ambitious young master in Amsterdam, reaching for the grand mythological subjects that sold to wealthy collectors. He crams two of Ovid's stories into one wood panel, both about the goddess Diana punishing a trespass. On the left the hunter Actaeon has stumbled on Diana bathing, and you can just catch the antlers already sprouting from his head as she turns him into a stag to be torn apart by his own hounds. On the right the nymphs strip the clothes off Callisto, exposing that she is pregnant and has broken her vow. What is striking is how little Rembrandt idealises any of it. These are heavy, ordinary bodies caught mid-scramble, not the smooth goddesses of Italian painting. Off in the background he even slips in an elderly couple who belong to neither story, one of those unexplained figures he liked to leave for the eye to find.