Fatal Attraction: Diana and Actaeon — The Forbidden Gaze

Titian’s celebrated painting of Diana and Actaeon freezes a terrible moment of realisation: the split second when the young hunter Actaeon, out with his hounds in a forest sacred to the goddess Diana, comes unwittingly upon her. She, the goddess of the hunt and protector of women and virginity, is bathing with her handmaidens. He, his hands outstretched, sways back in shock, aware that he is doomed.

Titian’s scene is colour and movement; a freeze frame of disaster, of gazes locked one on another: a venomous dart from the goddess to the man who dares to gaze at her, a panicky look from the nymph who feebly tries to close a scarlet curtain, and a sweeter glance from the one who peeks from behind a column.

A second later Actaeon, splashed by water struck up from the spring, is transformed into a stag by the goddess: his punishment and her revenge for gazing upon her. Turned into a stag he is set upon and devoured by his own beloved dogs.

The Greek legend, told the centuries over, the best known being Ovid's Metamorphoses, was a source of inspiration for many artists.

Some show the unfortunate man surprising Diana (and himself; he is certainly red-faced in the Titian) as justification for the painting’s focus on female nudity; others show the act of transformation, his becoming a stag’s head, or the chase and its sorry end.

Titian’s Diana and Actaeon is the most famous example of this myth. Said to be one of the world’s greatest paintings, last year it was bought for the nation after an astonishing appeal that raised £50m in under five months.

The painting, now jointly owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery in London, will be on show alternately at each gallery.

The Diana and Actaeon tale is also the starting point for Compton Verney’s latest exhibition.

Not that the Titian is in the Warwickshire show (although you do walk through a see-through curtain imprinted with the picture where you can check out those gazes; who does Actaeon look at, for example?), but many others are, classical and modern, offering variations on the Greek myth, and tracing changes in depiction of the female nude from a figure of chastity to provocative images of nakedness and sensuality.

It explores voyeurism, power relationships inherent in the gaze, intrigue and revenge.

The King Candaules myth is one example, in which he secretly shows off his beautiful wife for his generals’ delectation.

Two paintings 200 years apart tell this tale. They move from straight story telling (Eglon van de Neer, 1675-80) to an erotic study of voyeurism and female vengeance (William Etty, 1830).

Fatal Attraction: Diana and Actaeon — The Forbidden Gaze as an exhibition gathers pace, indeed raciness, as it looks at these themes.

It uses paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and objets d'art ranging from a magnificent maiolica bowl from 15th-century Siena, to a video called Balkan Erotic Epic, and an arresting if rather repellent sculpture from Berlinde de Bruyckere. The young Belgian artist often features duality, for instance love and suffering, life and death, in her work. Here, Feminine Habitat (2008) appears in the process of some sort of transformation.

Unsurprisingly, the featured artists are mostly male. They include Jan Brueghel the Elder, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Dürer, Delacroix, Rembrandt, Vernonese (a softly beautiful oil painting of Actaeon’s metamorphosis), Degas, Klimt, Picasso, Egon Schiele (a seductive ‘seated’ nude in violet stockings), and Gregory Crewdson with two notable large-scale digital prints.

One section looks at the ‘allowed view’ or ‘artist’s gaze’. Here are several Picasso etchings from his ‘347 Series’ begun when he was 86, works that define the artist as voyeur. Nearby, a Dürer woodcut from 1538 likewise deals with this theme, his showing the artist looking through a grid to draw a naked woman.

But apart from one exquisite Picasso drawing, the work that got my attention in this part of the show was Fiona Banner’s 2007 performance piece and video that cleverly deconstruct the act of viewing. It simply shows the artist making detailed notes while observing a naked model.

As usual when going around a Compton Verney exhibition you don’t just look and enjoy, but find yourself asking questions. You pass through this exhibition as a voyeur, reacting to the expected and unexpected, the sometimes quite subtle, other times more explicit references. You assess the boundaries of acceptability, your own attitudes. Responding, for example, to a 16th-century bronze by Giambologna as a thing of beauty, I discovered it was a rape scene. It remained beautiful.

Compton Verney keeps up this tension throughout its exhibition, finishing with a contemporary work by Balthasar Burkhard. His stunning black and white photograph, a close-up of a woman’s body, is based on a 1866 work by Courbet (not on show). Courbet’s L’Origin du Monde, portraying a naked woman also alone and in close-up, was thought so startlingly direct it took 100 years before it was unveiled to the public.

The exhibition originally was shown last year in a slightly larger form at the Kunst Palast Museum, Düsseldorf. It has its only UK showing at Compton Verney, Warwickshire, and is there until May 31. For details see comptonverney.org.uk