阿克泰翁之死

Titian was already in his seventies when he began this, and probably still touching it in his mid-eighties. He first mentioned it in a letter to Philip II of Spain in 1559, promising to finish a picture of Actaeon torn apart by his hounds. He never sent it. It sat in his studio in Venice, and it may well have still been there when he died in 1576. That long, unhurried making is what you are looking at. The paint is dragged and scumbled, the surface left open in places, and Actaeon himself, already turning into a stag as his own dogs bring him down, seems half-dissolved into the dark wood around him. For a long time people took all this as unfinished. When it was sold in London in 1798 it went for a modest 200 guineas, the low price reflecting exactly that doubt. Diana, the goddess who set the punishment in motion, strides in from the left with her bow, and if you look, there is no string on it.