Titian painted Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto as a matched pair for Philip II, both begun around 1556 and delivered to the king in 1559^[1]. Philip owned a copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses and likely knew it well, and Titian had already drawn on the same source decades earlier while working on the Camerino d'Alabastro paintings for Alfonso d'Este in Ferrara^[1]. A third picture, The Death of Actaeon, was meant to complete the story, but Titian mentioned it as still in progress in a 1559 letter to Philip and never finished it before his death in 1576^[1][2].

The scene shows the young hunter Actaeon stumbling, by chance rather than design, into the woodland grove sacred to Diana at the exact moment the goddess and her nymphs are bathing there^[1]. One scholar reads the story as a scene of discovery, structurally identical in kind to the companion painting, Diana and Callisto, in which Callisto's concealed pregnancy is likewise uncovered by Diana and her attendants; in both cases, discovery triggers catastrophe^[4]. Titian's Actaeon advances on unsure feet, his arms raised in what reads as surprise and horror at what he is witnessing, and, the same scholar argues, in anticipation of the fear Diana is about to plant in him as the first stage of his transformation^[4].

The large drape that now frames the scene and helps stage Diana's exposure was, according to X-ray analysis of the canvas, not part of Titian's original design^[1]. He appears to have added it as the painting developed, a change that scholars read as deepening the sense of violated privacy at the heart of the composition^[1]. The addition reflects a working method visible across Titian's late mythological paintings: compositions that shifted and sharpened as he painted, rather than being fully resolved in advance.