The painting is a one-two shock of realisation. On the left, Diana the huntress draws her bow to catch and kill some at first unseen prey. Her action sends the eye across the canvas – which is itself a deep forest of brushstrokes – to discover the identity of her victim. Actaeon is by now half-man and half-stag. His faithful hounds, so sympathetically painted by the dog-loving Titian, are already flying to attack.

Actaeon topples in the brown undergrowth, his head already resembling a stuffed hunting-lodge trophy. The sky is heavy, the trees losing their leaves, the ground thick with damp mulch. Nobody knows whether the painting is completely finished; there is no string to Diana’s bow, and no signature on the canvas, though Titian did not always sign his works. The scene is less dramatic than tragic, sorrowful, immensely subtle in its contrast of the pointlessly vengeful Diana, just performing her automatic vengeance, and poor, hapless Actaeon, whose only flaw was to have looked when he shouldn’t. The story, for Titian, is always more complex than the myth.