Jacopo del Sellaio, The Metamorphosis of Actaeon

William Blundell Spence (1814–1900), Florence, by 1865; James Carnegie (1827–1905), 9th Earl of Southesk, Kinnaird Castle, Scotland; Charles Noel Carnegie (1854–1941), 10th Earl of Southesk, Kinnaird Castle, Scotland; Charles Alexander Carnegie (1893–1992), 11th Earl of Southesk, Kinnaird Castle, Scotland

The panel support, of a horizontal wood grain, comprises three planks, 19, 26, and 8.5 centimeters wide, from top to bottom, that have been thinned slightly to depths ranging from 2.5 to 3.3 centimeters. Four vertical channels were cut into the back with dovetail profiles, presumably to accommodate old but not original battens. These have now been filled with new wood and linked to three long horizontal channels with a V-shaped profile, similarly filled with new wood. Sliding aluminum crossbars have been slotted onto the vertical inserts to stabilize the structure. The lower seam between the planks is slightly open at the left side of the composition, and a partial split runs on a slight diagonal discontinuously along the full length of the central plank. The paint surface overall is evenly abraded. Local losses along the split in the center plank have been retouched, as have larger losses in the hedge dividing Actaeon from Diana at the right, in Actaeon’s tunic, in the outlines of the seated black hound and of the folds of Actaeon’s rose cape at the left, and in the foreground beneath Actaeon’s feet at the left. The head of the retainer at the far left is reconstructed. The sky is thinly painted and reinforced where abrasion exposed gesso preparatory layers. There is no visible barb along any edge of the painted surface.

The most detailed account of the tragic fate of Actaeon, the young hunter who was transformed into a stag by the virgin goddess Diana and devoured by his own dogs, is found in Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.¹ In this version of the myth, Actaeon, a Theban nobleman and grandson of Cadmus, has spent the morning hunting in the wild with his companions and faithful dogs, when, overcome by the heat of the midday sun, he orders a break: “Friends, our spears and nets are drenched with the blood of our victims, and the day has been fortunate enough. When Aurora in her golden chariot brings another day we will resume our purpose . . . Finish your present task and carry home the netted meshes.”² Unbeknownst to Actaeon, the valley where he and his men have come to rest, “dense with pine trees and sharp cypresses,” is sacred to Diana, who also hunts there with her nymphs; hidden in the depth of the forest is a clear spring where the goddess, “weary from the chase,” is wont to bathe. Through a “fault of chance and not wickedness,” Ovid is careful to emphasize, Actaeon, who has wandered through the woods away from his friends, stumbles upon the sacred grove and sees the naked goddess bathing with her nymphs. Diana, outraged at the intrusion, transforms him into a stag and takes away his power of speech—that he may never reveal what he has seen—thus ensuring the gruesome outcome. Actaeon’s poignant realization of his predicament and the dramatic moments leading up to his death are described in unsparing detail by Ovid:

The naked nymphs, seeing a man’s face, beat their breasts and filling the whole wood with their sudden outcry, crowd round Diana to hide her with their bodies. . . . However, though her band of nymphs gathered in confusion around her, she stood turning to one side, and looking back, and wishing she had her arrows to hand. She caught up a handful of the water that she did have, and threw it in the man’s face. And as she sprinkled his hair with the vengeful drops she added these words, harbingers of his coming ruin, “Now you may tell, if you can tell that is, of having seen me naked!” Without more threats, she gave the horns of a mature stag to the head she had sprinkled, lengthening his neck, making his ear-tips pointed, changing feet for hands, long legs for arms, and covering his body with a dappled hide. And then she added fear. Autonoë’s brave son flies off, marvelling at such swift speed, within himself. But when he sees his head and horns reflected for certain in the water, he tries to say “Oh, look at me!” but no voice follows. He groans: that is his voice, and tears run down his altered face. Only his mind remains unchanged. What can he do? Shall he return to his home and the royal palace, or lie hidden in the woods? Shame prevents the one, and fear the other. While he hesitates his dogs catch sight of him. . . . The pack of them, greedy for the prey[,] follow over cliffs and crags, and inaccessible rocks, where the way is hard or there is no way at all. He runs, over the places where he has often chased, flying, alas, from his own hounds. . . . First “Black-hair,” Melanchaetes, wounds his back, then “Killer,” Theridamas, and Oresitrophos, the “Climber” clings to his shoulder. . . . While they hold their master the whole pack gathers and they sink their teeth in his body till there is no place left to wound him.”³

By the early fifteenth century, the story of the fateful encounter between Diana and Actaeon had, more than any other myth, been subjected to a multiplicity of literary interpretations dictated by different and evolving perceptions of Actaeon’s culpability.⁴ Whereas Ovid sought to find justification for the extreme punishment meted out by the goddess by emphasizing the role of the Fates in guiding Actaeon’s steps, medieval mythographers, taking their cue from the rationalizing accounts of Palaephatus (late 4th century B.C.) and Fulgentius (5th–6th century A.D.), focused on an economic explanation of the story.⁵ In this reading, Actaeon was an avid hunter said to have been devoured by his hounds because he spent all his wealth on hunting and caring for them, bringing about his financial ruin. The association between the myth of Acteon and wasteful spending was registered by Dante as well as Boccaccio, who quoted Fulgentius’s words in his own retelling of the myth.⁶ It was also the first explanation attached to Ovid’s story in the popular fourteenth-century adaptation known as the Ovide moralisé (Moral Ovid), albeit followed by a “more noble” Christian exegesis that rehabilitated the figure of Actaeon by identifying him with Christ.⁷ At the same time, drawing from the tradition of medieval lyric poetry, Actaeon’s transformation became a means of exploring the complicated psychology of love and the destructive power of passion. In Petrarch’s Canzoniere (Poem 23), the poet-lover compares himself to Actaeon, a hunter following his beloved to a spring; he gazes upon her naked, and she, embarrassed, splashes water on his face, whereupon he is transformed, metaphorically, into a solitary stag wandering from wood to wood, his former self destroyed by desire.⁸ On a less exalted level, related to the “love chase” motif of courtly literature, in which the hunt was a thinly veiled metaphor for courtship, Acteon became the predatory hunter whose indecent gaze was antithetical to the precepts of chivalric love.⁹

The earliest surviving panel paintings illustrating the story of Diana and Actaeon, confined to deschi da parto (birth trays) and cassone panels, focused on the representation of the salient moments of the Ovidian narrative in a shorthand format evoking the illustrations in illuminated manuscripts. A cassone front in a private collection, London (fig. 1), dated around 1380–85 and attributed to the so-called Master of Charles III of Durazzo, presents the story in three separate medallions, showing, respectively, Actaeon coming upon Diana and her nymphs bathing; Actaeon transformed into a stag being chased by his dogs; and Actaeon attacked by his dogs, as his companions, who fail to recognize him, look on. The same compositional formula appears in a cassone front by an unidentified, possibly North Italian painter, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where banderoles next to a bearded figure holding a hawk—a medieval visual topos for the hunt—identify the three scenes as “How Actaeon went hunting with his dogs,” “How Diana transformed Actaeon into a stag,” and “How Actaeon’s companions went looking for him and could not find him,” this last vignette omitting altogether the figure of the transformed Actaeon.¹⁰ A notable exception is a later Florentine cassone panel in the Muzeum Norodwe, Warsaw, painted in the early decades of fifteenth century, which departs from these models by showing a unified picture field in which the story of Actaeon is inserted into a complex iconographic program that juxtaposes his immoral behavior toward Diana with the virtuous conduct of Meleager in the Hunt for the Calydonian Boar.¹¹

The Yale Metamorphosis of Actaeon and its companion, Actaeon and the Hounds, represent an evolution in the pictorial representation of the theme, consonant with the ambitious narrative structures and spatial solutions adopted by artists in spalliera paintings in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. The two panels, whose dimensions are also consistent with the spalliera genre, are without precedent in their close reading of Ovid’s text. Together, they illustrate the unfolding narrative of Actaeon’s downfall, from its start to its tragic finish, in a vivid pictorial approach that captures the essence of Ovid’s presentation of the myth. The story, told in separate frames unified by the landscape elements, begins in the left background of the Yale Metamorphosis, where Actaeon and his companions are shown on horseback chasing their prey in a valley crossed by a river. In the foreground, Actaeon, recognizable by his pink cloak, which he has removed from his shoulders, has come to rest in a clearing in the woods with the other hunters and his dogs to escape the noon heat. Following his orders, the day’s catch is hoisted onto the back of a mule. In the second frame, in the center of the panel, Actaeon, accompanied by the three faithful dogs who will later turn on him, is depicted standing aside a clear pool, leaning on his walking staff in a pensive attitude. That these are Diana’s hunting grounds is indicated by the figure of the goddess moving among the woods in the middle distance; she is dressed in a diaphanous white tunic and carries a bow—now only partially visible—in her right hand. The implication of the scene is that Actaeon, who is shown with his back to the goddess, has come upon her sacred precincts by chance, not by “wickedness,” as emphasized by Ovid. In the third frame, on the right, Actaeon is caught in the moment of turning his head away from the naked Diana as she splashes water in his face pronouncing her terrible curse and changing him into a stag. Behind Diana, her agitated nymphs try to cover their bodies or flee into the woods.

The Ovidian narrative continues in the second Yale panel, Actaeon and the Hounds, which presently only shows Actaeon becoming aware of his transformation and being chased by the hounds but was originally completed, on the right, by a depiction of Actaeon’s violent death, excised from the Yale panel at an unknown date and now in a private collection (fig. 2). The beautiful, virtually intact condition of this fragment gives a sense of the original appearance of the Yale picture, prior to its drastic 1955 cleaning. The agitated mood of the composition, conveyed by the fluttering cape and expressive gestures of Actaeon and by the running figures of his companions and hounds in the middle distance, reflects the urgent, frenetic tone of Ovid’s poem at this key juncture in the story: The hunter has become the hunted. On the left, Actaeon, who has just fled from Diana, prompted by the fear instilled into him by the goddess, sees his reflection in a pool and first becomes aware of his transformation. His dogs look on, not yet cognizant of the change. Actaeon’s sudden panic and hesitation are caught in the second frame, where he is depicted in the instant when, overcome by shame and fear, as Ovid relates, he ponders what his course of action should be. In the next frame, corresponding to the following passage in the narration, the dogs have begun their chase after their master; one of them has caught up with him and is already sinking its teeth into his thigh. Actaeon’s head is turned toward them, in a vain attempt to call them off: “He longs to shout ‘I am Actaeon! Know your own master!’ but words fail him.” Ovid continues, “The air echoes to the baying.”¹² The last frame, in the excised fragment, illustrates with graphic accuracy the ferocious attack of the three hounds individually named by Ovid—Melanchaetes, Theridamas, and Oresitrophos—as Actaeon lies prostrate under their hold. In the only departure from the Ovidian poem, and from more traditional representations, Actaeon is not depicted here “on his knees, like a suppliant begging,” but as a passive victim enduring his torment—a possible allusion to the Christian allegorization of the myth.

Actaeon and the Hounds, acquired in Florence by James Jackson Jarves, was the first of the two Actaeon panels to enter Yale’s collection. Assigned by Jarves to Piero di Cosimo, it was recognized as a work of Jacopo del Sellaio by William Rankin¹³ and inserted into Sellaio’s oeuvre by Bernard Berenson in 1909.¹⁴ In 1926 Tancred Borenius¹⁵ discovered the relationship between the Yale panel and the Metamorphosis of Actaeon, then in the collection of the Earl of Southesk at Kinnaird Castle, although he identified both images, improbably, as fragments of a single cassone front. The association between the Jarves panel and the Southesk picture, already attributed to Sellaio in a 1904 catalogue of the paintings at Kinnaird Castle,¹⁶ was overlooked by later authors, however. In 1927 Frank Mather, Jr., identified the Death of Actaeon fragment (see fig. 2), at the time in a Rhode Island private collection, as the missing terminal of the Jarves painting, but he was unaware of the existence of the Southesk Metamorphosis.¹⁷ Raimond van Marle later listed the Southesk painting, at the time on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, among Sellaio’s autograph production, but he considered the Jarves Actaeon and the Hounds separately, as the “mediocre” effort of his workshop.¹⁸ It was not until twenty years later that Alice Wolfe, then a research assistant at Yale, became aware of Borenius’s findings and ascertained that the two works were indeed conceived as pendants to each other—leading to the Gallery’s purchase of the Southesk Metamorphosis in 1952.¹⁹

Beginning with Charles Seymour, Jr., modern scholarship has generally placed the Yale Actaeon panels in the last decade of the artist’s activity, although diverging on a more precise chronology. While Seymour and Federico Zeri suggested a date around 1485,²⁰ Ellen Callmann,²¹ following Mather, argued for a date in proximity to Sellaio’s late Crucifixion in the church of San Frediano in Cestello, Florence, datable on documentary evidence to 1490–93.²² For Callmann, the Actaeon spalliere were more or less contemporary to Sellaio’s spalliera series with the story of Orpheus and Euridyce, presently divided between Rotterdam, the Netherlands (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), Kyiv, Ukraine (Khanenko Museum), and Kraków, Poland (Lanckoroński Collection, Wawel Royal Castle),²³ although the latter, richer in detail and more carefully executed, seemed “to a much greater degree by his own hand.”²⁴ The Yale panels were classified as workshop products by Patricia Lurati, who nonetheless anticipated their execution to 1485.²⁵ The qualitative distinctions drawn by these authors, however, do not seem sufficient to warrant a separation of hands. The breadth of the composition in both of the Yale pictures, which evoke the sylvan settings of Roman wall painting—where Actaeon’s story is set within a spacious landscape interrupted by grazing animals and architectural forms, drawing together “the different kingdoms of nature and the works of man”²⁶—reflects Sellaio’s own original adaptation of the Ovidian poem. Intimate details, like the dog sleeping with his head resting in the hunter’s lap in the Metamorphosis, or picturesque features, like the trio of shepherds playing music or gazing up at the sky in the Death of Actaeon (see fig. 2), add poetic notes to the compositions that offset the tragic subject. Such elements are consistent with Sellaio’s approach in the stories of Orpheus, although those works, dated around 1490 by Nicoletta Pons,²⁷ more nearly approach the monumental style of the San Frediano Crucifixion. The Yale pictures, by contrast, seem to occupy a middle ground between the Orpheus and Euridyce panels and a pair of spalliere with the stories of Cupid and Psyche currently divided between the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge (fig. 3), and a private collection, which have been dated around 1480 and are characterized by the same cursory handling of the figures and similar landscape elements.²⁸ Perhaps the most compelling analogies for the Actaeon spalliere are found in the Entombment of Christ in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence (fig. 4)—a work most recently placed around 1485²⁹ and, like the present panels, distinguished from the Cupid and Psyche stories by an identical darker palette and stronger emotive content. —PP

1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, ll. 138–252. The story is first encountered, in different versions, in both Greek art and literature of the Archaic period (ca. 800–479 B.C.). For the evolution of the myth in antiquity, see Leach 1981, 307–28. ↩︎

2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, ll. 138–64. Translations here and below are from Kline 2000. ↩︎

3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, ll. 165–237. In the lengthy passage devoted to the chase and attack, Ovid mentioned no less than thirty-six dogs by name but states that many others were present. ↩︎

4. The issue was highlighted by Ovid at the conclusion of his narrative: “The debate is undecided: to some the punishment is more violent than just, merely for seeing the face of a goddess, others approve it and call it fitting because of her strict vow of virginity, and both can make a case”; Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, ll. 253–55. Among the various studies devoted to the subject, see Barkan 1980, 317–59; Leach 1981, 307–27; and Schlam 1984, 82–110. As noted by Eleanor Leach, “The literary history of the Acteon myth shows it to have been an inherently flexible one with a high potential for incorporating moral ambiguity and an unusual susceptibility to individual interpretation”; Leach 1981, 312. ↩︎

5. See Hawes 2008, 27–29 (with previous bibliography). ↩︎

6. Hawes 2008, 27–33; Branca 1997, 228–23; and Branca 1999b, 64–65. ↩︎

7. As spelled out in the second moralizing commentary, “Diana represents the Godhead that reigned in the Trinity, naked and without human nature, and that Actaeon saw unveiled. Actaeon is the Son of God, who with purity of heart knew the holy Trinity, which reigns eternally, without beginning or end, openly naked”; Murray and Boyd 2023, 272–73. See also Barkan 1980, 329–30. As noted by Vittore Branca, this interpretation was consonant with the allegoric significance attached to the stag in the Christian patristic tradition, where the animal was viewed as a symbol of renewal and the soul’s transformation from sensual animal love to virtuous spiritual love. See Branca 1997, 224; and Branca 1999b, 63. ↩︎

8. Barkan 1980, 335–37. From the start of the poem, as noted by Leonard Barkan, Petrarch equates love with the loss of identity. ↩︎

9. Hawes 2008, 38–39. ↩︎

10. Inv. no. 41.190.129, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/198950. The companion to this panel (inv. no. 41.190.130, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/238017) shows three allegorical scenes, but the text accompanying them is no longer legible, making it difficult to decipher their subject. The last figure, a crowned woman seated on a marble throne and surrounded by a mandorla of light, is clearly a divinity, but her identity is unclear. ↩︎

11. Inv. no. M.06.603 (158656); see Miziołek 1996b, 15–66. The panel has elicited a variety of attributions, with most recent opinion opting for the so-called Master of Charles III of Durazzo (see Lorenzo Sbaraglio, in De Marchi and Sbaraglio 2015, 93), but the body of works currently gathered under this personality is not entirely homogenous. ↩︎

12. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, ll. 230–31. ↩︎

13. Rankin 1905, 13, no. 82. ↩︎

14. Berenson 1909b, 184. ↩︎

15. Borenius 1926a, 2:135–37. ↩︎

16. Unpublished manuscript, 1904, excerpt in the curatorial files, Department of European Art, Yale University Art Gallery. ↩︎

17. Mather 1927, 298. ↩︎

18. van Marle 1931b, 406, 407, 410n1. ↩︎

19. It appears that in 1946 Wolfe was working on a new catalogue of Yale’s Italian pictures, a project that was later abandoned for unknown reasons. Her correspondence with the earl of Southesk, inquiring about his panel, is preserved in the Gallery’s curatorial files, along with the subsequent exchanges between the Gallery’s then-director, Theodore Sizer, and Edward Hutton in London, who had been asked to act as mediator in the purchase. ↩︎

20. Seymour 1970, 179–81, no. 130; and Fototeca Zeri, Federico Zeri Foundation, Bologna, nos. 17052–53. ↩︎

21. Callmann 1998, 156. ↩︎

22. See Pons 1990b, 46–52. ↩︎

23. Respectively, inv. no. 2563, https://www.boijmans.nl/en/collection/artworks/3868/orpheus-eurydice-and-aristaeus; inv. no. K. 115; and inv. no. 7934. ↩︎

24. Callmann 1998, 156. ↩︎

25. Lurati 2007, 155. ↩︎

26. Minervini 1860, 1; quoted by Leach 1981, 317. Eleanor Wilson Leach inserts Giulio Minervini’s description in her discussion of the fully developed topographies of Third Style Pompeian illustrations of the myth. ↩︎

27. Nicoletta Pons, in Paolini, Parenti, and Sebregondi 2010, 216–18, no. 18. ↩︎

28. Jerzy Miziołek proposed a date for these panels around 1480; Miziołek 2019, 78. Deborah Krohn’s dating in the 1470s, during the period of Sellaio’s recorded collaboration with Biagio d’Antonio, is too precocious; Krohn, in Bayer 2008, 293–95, no. 136. There is no evidence in these works of any hand other than Sellaio’s. ↩︎

29. Maria Antonia Rinaldi, in Hollberg 2023, 113, no. 97. ↩︎