Titian: 'The Death of Actaeon' | Paintings | The National Gallery, London

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 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 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 and it was not till they had torn his life out that the anger of Diana was satisfied. In this painting you see he's 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's no longer their master he is now their victim. The x-ray of the death of Actaeon shows the most extraordinary number of changes. Sometimes you can make out one of the hands that we still see in the final painting for example that head there but if you look there are many more hands 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 color that you get with earlier pictures and indeed with Titian's earlier pictures because that was no longer part of his painting process. He's now ranging over the whole surface of the picture one moment he's using a glaze the next moment he's using an opaque color and in a sense it's unfinished because Titian probably never lived to decide the point of 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. Nobody had ever painted in such an abstract plastic way in which the emotion he's conveying is not conveyed by narrative so much as by shape and movement and color. 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's not finished but I'm not quite sure that that's really what Titian felt about it. I think that if he wanted to do any more he would have.