Landscape with Diana and Acteon
Ca. 1608.Not on display
Hunting in the woods, Acteon stops on the banks of a stream when he sees Diana and her nymphs bathing nude on the opposite bank. Fascinated by their beauty, he observes them with a challenging and amused expression, unaware of the cost of his boldness. Indeed, the outcome will be tragic, as Diana, goddess of chastity, is furious at being seen in the nude by a mortal. She responds by transforming the ill-fated hunter into a buck, who is immediately devoured by his own bloodhounds. The story of Diana and Acteon was extremely popular among Renaissance artists as it allowed them considerable leeway in the painting of nudes. In Book III of Metamorphoses (138-252), Ovid locates the event in the forest near the city of Orchomenus in Boeotia, which the landscape painter Denis van Alsloot transforms into a clearing in the Fora de Soignes, near Brussels, reproducing the site with such topographical precision that it is still recognizable today. The figures, executed by the Brussels artist Hendrik de Clerck, display a similar degree of exactitude in the handling of form. The image demonstrates the respective artistic strengths that were inherent to such Flemish collaborative works. After returning from Italy, De Clerck became very well known as a painter of mythological scenes, and here he displays his mastery of the nude. The small figures, with their pearly white skin and elegant movements and poses, reflect his training in late Mannerism, a style he practiced throughout his career. But these figures also reveal his broad knowledge of both classical statuary and Northern engraving -his two iconographic sources. Here, Acteon is based on the Apollo Belvedere, one of the best known sculptures from antiquity during the seventeenth century. The distribution and treatment of the nudes imbue the scene with a significance that seems to extend beyond simple mythological narrative to express the dichotomy between the sexes via anatomy, posture, costume, and color. Acteon´s muscular body appears on the left, while the soft bodies of the nymphs curve around the goddess to the right. Acteon openly displays his naked body, extends his vigorous arm toward the goddess sitting directly across from him, and shows her his firmly grasped lance (an element with phallic significance). Momentarily shocked, the goddess fails to react as two nymphs hurry to cover her. Acteon´s posture expresses decisiveness, while that of the nymphs reflects surprise and even fear. Acteon´s flesh tones are reddish and warm while those of the goddess and her nymphs are pearly white and cool. This chromatic contrast is reinforced, on the one hand, by the brown of the hunter´s dogs and the red -a color symbolizing passion- robes that wave sinuously around his torso, and on the other, by the cool range of whites, blues, and greens on the women´s robes. Two small touches of red, which, significantly, only partially cover the women´s bodies without suggesting any movement, further emphasize this contrast. Landscape with Diana and Acteon entered the Spanish Royal Collections sometime between 1686 and 1734. The work was not included in the 1686 inventory of Madrid´s Alcazar Palace, but it must have arrived before 1734, as it was listed among those paintings stored in the Armory after having been rescued from the fire that destroyed that palace -home to Spain´s Habsburg monarchs- on Christmas of that year. Sometime prior to 1834, it was moved to the recently founded Real Museo de Pinturas (now the Museo Nacional del Prado), where it was installed in the sala reservada alongside other nudes. This work´s presence in the royal collections indicates the well-established Spanish taste not only for the nude, but also for such collaborative paintings, which were a highly prized Flemish specialty already collected by Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella in the seventeenth century (Text drawn from Posada Kubissa, T.: Splendor, Myth, and Vision. Nudes from the Prado, 2016, pp. 106-107).
