Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto were described by Lucian Freud as ‘simply the most beautiful pictures in the world’. And not long ago, in an act of Alex Salmond-defying co-operation, the National Gallery of Scotland and the National Gallery of Great Britain raided their respective coffers – as well as the coffers of their respective, culturally estranged governments – to buy the pictures from the Duke of Sutherland. They will appear in Edinburgh and London on a rotating basis, but have spent the first months of 2012 touring regional outposts. With a splash of water from the bathing Diana, the hunter Actaeon is turned into a deer: that is change as Ovid preferred it. But for Freud it was the splash of colour in Titian, the arranging of limbs, that counts for metamorphosis when it comes to the human form.

LRB 26 April 2012 | PDF Download