John Lessore: In the whole history of art, Titian is my favourite painter and in the National Gallery, this Titian of Diana and Actaeon is my favourite painting. It used to be the Bacchus and Ariadne, but this one has supplanted it. Actaeon quite unwittingly stumbled across Diana bathing in the nude and saw her.
Lizzy McInnerny: Diana dashed some water into the face of the intruder, saying, now go and tell, if you can, that you have seen Diana naked. The hero fled. He could not but admire his own speed, but when he saw his horns in the water, he groaned and tears flowed down the face which had taken the place of his own. When he hesitated, the dogs saw him. He fled and they followed. He longed to cry out, but the words didn’t come. Presently, one fastened on his back. Another seized his shoulder. They were all around him, rending and tearing. It was not until they had torn his life out that the anger of Diana was satisfied.
John Lessore: In this painting, you see he has just started, he’s still a man except for his head, but that’s enough for the dogs. They’re already beginning to tear him to bits. He is no longer their master. He is now their victim.
Jill Dunkerton: The X-ray of 'The Death of Actaeon' shows the most extraordinary number of changes. Sometimes you can make out one of the hounds that we still see in the final painting, for example, that head there, but if you look, there are many more hounds in the X-ray than there are in the painting itself.
There’s a lot of discussion and disagreement about whether a painting like 'The Death of Actaeon' is actually finished. I personally think that at this late stage of his career, Titian himself didn’t necessarily know when pictures were finished. It isn’t lacking any of the final glazes, any of the systematic build-up of colour that you get with earlier pictures and, indeed, with Titian’s earlier pictures, because that was no longer part of his painting process. He is now ranging over the whole surface of the picture. One moment, he is using a glaze; the next moment, he is using an opaque colour. In a sense, it’s unfinished because Titian probably never lived to decide the point at which it was going to be finished, but it’s not unfinished to me in a technical sense. It’s not an incomplete picture and to me it works completely as an image.
John Lessore: Nobody had ever painted in such an abstract, plastic way in which the emotion he is conveying is not conveyed by narrative so much as by shape and movement and colour. What he was doing was incredibly deliberate and refined. It’s just that the handling is so powerful that one gets the impression that the paint is slapped on any old how, which it’s not. It’s certainly not. This is a very late Titian. He must have started it when he was about 70, but gone on with it when he was in his middle 80s. The 10 or 15 years between starting it and finishing it... “finishing” in inverted commas because theoretically it is not finished, but I’m not quite sure that that’s really what Titian felt about it. I think that if he’d wanted to do any more, he would have.
Titian, The Death of Actaeon
More paintings by Titian
(Showing 6 of 19 works)
Three male heads at different stages of life are paired with the heads of three animals: a wolf, a lion and a dog. The Latin inscription divided to correspond to the three heads translates as: ‘Learning from Yesterday, Today acts prudently lest by his action he spoil Tomorrow.’ The meaning and pu...
Not on display
One of the most famous paintings in the National Gallery, Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne illustrates a story told by the classical authors Ovid and Catullus. The Cretan princess Ariadne has been abandoned on the Greek island of Naxos by Theseus, whose ship sails away in the distance. Bacchus, god o...
Risen from the dead, Christ appears to his grieving follower, Mary Magdalene, in the Garden of Gethsemane. At first she mistakes him for a gardener but then reaches out her hand in wonder. Christ says, ‘Do not touch me’ (in Latin, noli me tangere); it is time for his followers to let go of his ea...
Titian painted this picture when he was in his early twenties, at a time when private portraits of individual women were still rare. We don‘t know the identity of the sitter, if indeed this is a portrait in the traditional sense, rather than a general picture of a woman designed to encourage such...
On display elsewhere
In this, one of Titian’s earliest portraits, the sitter turns to look at us over his shoulder and momentarily meets our gaze. Our attention is focused on the raised brow above his right eye, which is positioned midway across the picture. The man’s elbow rests on a parapet and his voluminous quilt...
Girolamo Fracastoro (1476/8–1553), a celebrated medical doctor, as well as an astronomer, mathematician and poet, proposed the theory of contagion and in 1530 wrote an epic poem that gave the name ’syphilis' to the virulent, sexually transmitted disease that was ravaging Italy in that period.Alth...
Not on display
The Virgin and Child are accompanied by the young Saint John the Baptist and a kneeling woman, who cannot be clearly identified. She holds the infant Christ in her arms and gazes at him in adoration.It is not clear which, if any, New Testament episode is shown here. The shepherd and herdsman in t...
This is one of Titian’s earliest surviving works. It shows the Adoration of the Shepherds – the flying angel in the distance announces Christ’s birth to them. Saint Joseph presents the infant Christ to a young shepherd, who kneels in reverence.It is unusual to find only one shepherd in attendance...
The Pharisees (chief priests) ask Christ whether it is right to pay tax to the Romans, who rule Palestine. Christ, sensing a trap, asks whose likeness and name are on the coinage: ‘They say unto him, Caesar’s. Then he saith unto them, render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and...
This is Titian’s largest group portrait. The man in a red robe is probably Gabriel Vendramin (1484–1552). The man holding the altar may be Gabriel’s brother, Andrea Vendramin (1481–1547), and the boys are his seven sons. On the altar is a reliquary of the True Cross that their great-great-grandfa...
The Virgin Mary gazes at the infant Christ who feeds from her breast. The naked child is encircled in his mother’s arms and twists away from us. Our eye is drawn from the Virgin’s delicate fingers, up the line of Christ’s back and to the expression of devotion on her face.Titian appears to be cit...
The infant cradling a dove to his cheek closely resembles Cupid in two versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, dating to around 1560, in Washington and New York. Yet the way in which the picture is painted and the range of colours used are characteristic of Titian’s work of the 1520s.This apparent...
Not on display
A boy sings from a partbook while his music master beats time with his finger and perhaps sings along. A woman leans her arm against the teacher’s shoulder, her head tilted with a faraway look as if she is listening to the music. A youth accompanies the boy on a viol da gamba, while a young man b...
Not on display
Reminiscent of Titian’s style, this painting is typical of the kind of mythological scene made for learned, private patrons in Venice that he helped pioneer. Cupid, god of love, raises his arrow to pierce a woman embracing a youth who holds a golden apple.The central couple may be Hippomenes and...
Not on display
This is a copy of Titian’s large canvas known as ‘La Gloria’ (The Glory) or The Trinity. Titian’s painting was commissioned by Emperor Charles V of Spain in 1551, and is now in the Prado, Madrid.The Emperor and Empress with their son Prince Philip and his sisters kneel in their burial shrouds bef...
Not on display
You've viewed 6 of 19 paintings