Titian, 'The Death of Actaeon', about 1559-75

The Death of Actaeon

Titian

Room 8

About the work

Overview

The story of Actaeon is told in the Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid. In Titian’s earlier Diana and Actaeon, painted for King Philip II of Spain in 1556–9 and now jointly owned by the National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland, Actaeon disturbs the goddess Diana and her nymphs at a secret bathing place.

Although never delivered to Philip, The Death of Actaeon is clearly its sequel: Actaeon flees and, stopping to drink at a stream, discovers from his reflection that Diana has turned him into a stag. Titian shows Actaeon in the process of transformation, while he is being torn to death by his own hounds. The death scene was rare in Italian art and Titian may never have seen another painting of it.

While conceived around 1559, The Death of Actaeon was mostly painted when Titian was in his mid-eighties. It may not be entirely finished and could be one of the pictures left in his studio at the time of his death.

In-depth

Around 1551, Titian began producing an ambitious series of large-scale mythological paintings for Prince Philip – later Philip II – of Spain drawing primarily on the Roman poet Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses. Titian called these works ‘poesie’, a term that described narrative subjects taken from classical myth while simultaneously indicating am ambition to create visual equivalents to poetry. During the Renaissance, the relative merits of painting, poetry and sculpture were the subject of intense debate among artists and theorists in Italy.

In Titian’s earlier Diana and Actaeon, one of the poesie painted for Philip II in 1556–9, Actaeon disturbs Diana and her nymphs at their secret bathing place. Ovid relates how the goddess splashes water on Actaeon’s face and dares him to tell the world what he has seen. In The Death of Actaeon Titian has painted the sequel: Actaeon flees and, stopping to drink at a stream, discovers from his reflection that Diana has turned him into a stag. Titian shows Actaeon in the process of transformation, or metamorphosis – his body is still human but he has a stag’s head. Actaeon finds that he cannot speak and he is beset by his own hounds who tear him to death. The death scene was rare in Italian art and Titian may never have seen another painting of it.

This is probably the picture Titian referred to in a letter of June 1559 to Philip II, in which he says he hopes to finish two paintings he has started, one of which is described as ‘Actaeon torn apart by his hounds’. Parts of the work may date from the around 1560, even if most of what we see was painted later, probably in the early 1570s. Titian started The Death of Actaeon when he was in his seventies, was still working on it in his mid-eighties, and it is possible that it was left in his studio at the time of his death in 1576. It was never sent to Spain.

The question of whether the painting is finished has been much debated. Although Titian’s materials in the second part of his career remained essentially the same, the ways in which he used them changed considerably, particularly in his final years. He used a much bolder and freer technique, and fully employed the textures of paint and canvas, leaving various parts of his paintings in different states of completion, as we see here.

In other late paintings, Titian added scumbled touches of deep rose and blue, sometimes applied with his fingers, and it is tempting to think that he might have wanted to do the same here. But pigment change in the sky and other places as well as the dulling of Diana’s bright pink dress caused by dirt and yellowed dirty varnish make the painting seem more monochromatic than it originally was. It is possible that Titian would have wanted to flesh out further the lower body of Actaeon, or add a string to Diana’s bow, but that is far from certain, since in other late paintings he seems to have been happy to leave these details unresolved. The explosion of yellow paint in the foreground he uses to suggest a bush so effectively, is typical of his expressive touch and approach at this stage in his career. It is hard to imagine how anything could have been added to it to make it appear more finished in the traditional sense.

Want to find out more?

Delve deeper and explore the catalogue entry for this painting.

Key facts

Details

Full title: The Death of Actaeon
Artist: Titian
Artist dates: active about 1506; died 1576
Date made: about 1559-75
Medium and support: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 178.8 × 197.8 cm
Acquisition credit: Bought with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, The Pilgrim Trust and through public appeal, 1972
Inventory number: NG6420
Location: Room 8
Collection: Main Collection
Commissioners: Philip II, King of Spain
Frame: 16th-century Venetian Frame

Provenance

Perhaps in the artist's possession at his death (1576); apparently with Bartolomeo della Nave (d. 1636) by the mid-1630s; subsequently acquired by James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton (1606-1649); purchased from Hamilton's collection, on behalf of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria (1614-1662), in 1649; by whom presumably presented to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689) when she was resident in Antwerp in about 1656; certainly in her collection in Palazzo Riario, Rome, by 1662-3; by descent to her heirs until from1721; from whom acquired by Philippe II, duc d'Orléans (1674-1723), Regent of France, 1721; by whom installed in the western part of the Palais Royal in Paris, in the so-called Galerie à la Lanterne, where it remained until the French Revolution (inv. 461); by descent to Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d'Orléans (Philippe Égalité, 1747-1793); by whom sold in 1792 to Édouard de Walckiers (1758-1837), Paris; from whom bought, in the same year, by his cousin François-Louis-Joseph de Labordede Méréville (1761-1801); imported to London by the latter in 1793, and mortgaged to Jeremiah Harman (1763-1844); sold to Michael Bryan (1757-1825), agent of the Bridgewater Syndicate (the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater [1736-1803], the Earl of Carlisle [1748-1825] and Earl Gower, later 2nd Marquess of Stafford and 1st Duke of Sutherland [1758-1833]), in 1798; purchased by Sir Abraham Hume, 2nd Baronet (1749-1838), at the Bryan Orléans collection sale at the Lyceum, London, on 26 December 1798, lot 269, for 200 guineas; by descent to Hume's great-grandson, the 3rd Earl Brownlow (1844-1921); sold by Colnaghi & Co., London, for £60,000, on 15 July 1919 to Viscount Lascelles, later 6th Earl of Harewood (1882-1947); by descent to the latter's son George Lascelles,7th Earl of Harewood (1923-2011); by whom sold at Christie's, London, on 25 June 1971 (lot 27); purchased for £1,680,000by Julius Weitzner (1896-1986) and shortly afterwards sold for £1,763,000 through Martin Zimet to the J. Paul Getty Museum; export by the latter institution was deferred in accordance with the ruling of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and the picture was acquired by the National Gallery with a special government grant and contributions from the National Art Collections Fund, The Pilgrim Trust, and through public appeal in July 1972.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section in Matthias Wivel, ‘Titian: Love, Desire, Death’ (exh. cat. National Gallery, London, 2020), London 2020; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2012

Metamorphosis: Titian 2012

The National Gallery (London)

11 July 2012 - 23 September 2012
2014

Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting

Scottish National Gallery

22 March 2014 - 14 September 2014
2020

Titian: Love, Desire, Death

The National Gallery (London)

16 March 2020 - 17 January 2021

Bibliography

1727

L.D. de Saint-Gelais, Description des tableaux du Palais Royal: Avec la vie des peintres à la tête de leurs ouvrages: Dédiée à Monseigneur le duc d'Orleans, premier prince du sang, Paris 1727
1829

A. Hume, Notices of the Life and Works of Titian. Descriptive Catalogue of Engravings after the works of Titian, from the Bibliothèque du Roi, London 1829
1838

G.F. Waagen, Works of Art and Artists in England, trans. H. Lloyd, vol. 2, London 1838
1854

G.F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being and Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss. […], vol. 2, trans. E. Eastlake, London 1854
1872

Royal Academy of Arts, Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters (exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, 1872), London 1872
1877

J.A. Crowe and G.B. Cavalcaselle, Titian: His Life and Times, London 1877
1897

J.O. Granberg, La galerie de tableaux de la reine Christine de Suède, Stockholm 1897
1911

R. Fry, 'Exhibition of Old Masters at the Grafton Galleries, II', The Burlington Magazine, XX/105, 1911, pp. 161-7
1930

C. Holmes, 'The Italian Exhibition', The Burlington Magazine, LVI/323, 1930, pp. 55-72
1933

W. Suida, Tiziano: 304 tavole in fototipia, Rome 1933
1936

T. Borenius, Catalogue of the Pictures and Drawings at Harewood House and Elsewhere in the Collection of the Earl of Harewood, Oxford 1936
1936

H. Tietze, Titian: Leben und Werk, 2 vols, Vienna 1936
1952

E.K. Waterhouse, 'Paintings from Venice for Seventeenth-Century England: Some Records of a Forgotten Transaction', Italian Studies, VII, 1952, pp. 1-23
1957

B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and Their Works, with an Index of Places: Venetian School, 2 vols, London 1957
1960

F. Valcanover, Tutta la pittura di Tiziano, Milan 1960
1963

C. Gould, 'The "Perseus and Andromeda" and Titian's "Poesie"', The Burlington Magazine, CV/720, 1963, pp. 112-7
1969

H. Keller, Tizians Poesie für König Philipp II. von Spanien, Wiesbaden 1969
1969

R. Pallucchini, Tiziano, Florence 1969
1969

E. Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic, New York 1969
1969

H.E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian: The Religious Paintings, 3 vols, London 1969
1971

B.C. Chiovenda, 'Atheone lacerato dai cani suoi', Commentari, 22, 1971, pp. 180-3
1972

C. Gould, 'The Death of Actaeon and Titian's Mythologies', Apollo, 124, 1972, pp. 464-9
1973

The National Gallery, The National Gallery: January 1971 - December 1972, London 1973
1975

C. Gould, Delaroche and Gautier: Gautier's Views on the 'Execution of Lady Jane Grey' and on other Compositions by Delaroche, London 1975
1976

M.C. Tanner, Titian, the Poesie for Philip II, Phd Thesis, New York University 1976
1978

R. Pallucchini, Tiziano e il Manierismo europeo, Florence 1978
1980

C. Hope, Titian, London 1980
1980

Tiziano e Venezia: Convegno internazionale di studi, Venezia, 27 settembre - 1 ottobre 1976, Vicenza 1980
1981

J.C. Nash, Poesie for Philip II, Phd Thesis, John Hopkins University 1981
1981

D. Rosand, 'Titian and the Eloquence of the Brush', Artibus et historiae, II/3, 1981, pp. 85-96
1982

J. Ingamells, '"Perseus and Andromeda": The Provenance', The Burlington Magazine, CXXIV/952, 1982, pp. 396-400
1984

D. Sutton, 'Aspects of British Collecting, III.XIII: The Orléans Collection', Apollo, CXIX/267, 1984, pp. 357-72
1985

J.C. Nash, Veiled Images: Titian's Mythological Paintings for Philip II, Philadelphia 1985
1987

Gould, Cecil, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools, London 1987
1988

B. Anatra, Venezia e la Spagna, Milan 1988
1988

A. Gentili, Da Tiziano a Tiziano: Mito e allegoria nella cultura veneziana del Cinquecento, Rome 1988
1992

A. Gentili, 'Tiziano e il non finito', Venezia cinquecento, II/4, 1992, pp. 93-127
1993

D. Rosand, Titien: 'L'art plus fort que la nature', Paris 1993
1993

M. Laclotte (ed.), Le siècle de Titien: L'âge d'or de la peinture à Venise (exh. cat. Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 9 March - 14 June 1993), Paris 1993
1994

F. Ames-Lewis (ed.), New Interpretations of Venetian Renaissance Painting, London 1994
1995

J. Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe, New Haven 1995
1995

H. Walter and H.-J. Horn (eds), Die Rezeption der Metamorphosen des Ovid in der Neuzeit: Der antike Mythos in Text und Bild: Internationales Symposion der Werner Reimers-Stiftung, Bad Homburg V. D. H. (22. bis 25. April 1991), Berlin 1995
1996

W.R. Rearick, 'Titian's Later Mythologies', Artibus et historiae, XVII/33, 1996, pp. 23-67
1997

R. Goffen, Titian's Women, New Haven 1997
1998

M. Mancini, Tiziano e le corti d'Asburgo nei documenti degli archivi spagnoli, Venice 1998
1998

S. Cohen, 'Animals in the Paintings of Titian: A Key to Hidden Meanings', Gazette des beaux-arts, CXL/132, 1998, pp. 193-212
1999

Museo Nacional del Prado, Tiziano: Técnicas y restauraciones: Actas del Simposium Internacional celebrado en el Museo Nacional del Prado los días 3, 4 y 5 junio de 1999, Madrid 1999
1999

R. Cocke, 'Titian the Second Apelles: The Death of Actaeon', Renaissance Studies, XIII/3, 1999, pp. 303-11
2001

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2001

F. Pedrocco, Titian: The Complete Paintings, London 2001
2001

V. Biermann, 'The Virtue of a King and the Desire of a Woman?: Mythological Representations in the Collection of Queen Christina', Art History, XXIV/2, 2001, pp. 213-30
2002

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2003

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2003

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2003

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2004

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2005

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2007

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2007

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2008

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Frame

This is a rare mid-sixteenth-century Italian Palladio-style frame crafted from poplar wood. The wide, shallow profile reveals its double-frame structure. The back moulding has a carved egg-and-dart motif and a blue painted frieze. Between this back moulding and the inner frame is a shell flanked by Sansovinesque scrolls. The inner frame has square outset corners with a lamb’s-tongue-and-tip motif. The frieze is lined in blue and gold and includes a double bead-and-reel motif, which surrounds painted rosettes at the corners. A further motif, with a flute and spear pattern, is set between the blue-painted and gilt surface.

The frame’s cut edges show that it was once integrated into a decorative scheme. The frame retains its original water gilding. It was fitted to Titian’s The Death of Actaeon in 2019.

About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

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