Artemis, aka Diana: Mad, Bad and Dangerous?

Just the other day, I posted to Flickr a cyanotype print (blueprint) that I'd made to test a fresh batch of chemicals. To make it I used a photocopy on acetate of a nineteenth-century engraving of a statue. It's the kind of hand-cut engraving that was used by printers before photographically-generated half-tone images were introduced in the 1880s.

I use it as a test image to see how much fine detail is recorded by the cyanotype. The quality of the engraving is superb. It captures both the modelling of the three-dimensional form and the tonal range of the wet collodion/albumen print from which it was undoubtedly copied.

However, one can't help but be interested in the subject of the print as well. It's a statue of an attractive young woman who is strikingly, but negligently, dressed. One of her breasts is uncovered and her hitched-up chiton blows in an unseen breeze that wraps it revealingly around her legs and  the other breast. It's an image that is as seductive as it is graceful.

The bow she carries and the dog by her side identify it as a generic representation of the goddess Artemis in her Roman form as Diana. To find out a little bit more about this  ancient super-woman, I looked her up in my paperback copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Hmmm, not a woman to be tampered with.

Poor Actaeon, a mere mortal, wandering through the woods one day while out hunting, stumbled upon her and her consort of adoring nymphs bathing in a stream. Ovid tells us she was so affronted at being caught without her kit on that she splashed water on him while uttering a terrible curse that turned him into a stag. The poor lad, distraught at his transformation, ran off to try and find his friends but met his own hunting dogs who, not recognising him, set upon him and tore him to pieces. The above painting by Titian shows the fateful moment he glimpses Diana au naturelle. The painting below, also by Titian, shows Diana even more vindictively sticking an arrow into the partially transformed Actaeon.

The Death of Actaeon          source: Wikipedia

This was not the only time Diana revealed the harsh side of her nature. Her favourite nymph, Callisto, came to a tragic end through no fault of her own. She was fancied by Jupiter, who seduced her by disguising himself as Diana. The pregnant Callisto was cruelly rejected by the real Diana and after having Jupiter's child, was turned into a bear by Jupiter's jealous wife Juno. When her child, Arcas, had grown, he met his mother while out hunting. Not recognising who she was, he was about to shoot her when the penitent Jupiter averted tragedy by lifting them together to heaven to form the constellation of the Great Bear, Ursa Major.

I won't go into the incident of the wild boar Diana let loose in a fit of temper, except to say it caused havoc, destruction and death before it was finally killed.

These ancient yarns are an extraordinarily heady mix of unrestrained sex and violence in all their different forms. They provide Queer Theory with a wonderfully fertile subject for study.

source: wikipedia

Myself, I merely wonder why, given Diana's objection to be seen unclothed, artists and sculptors have always delighted in depicting her at least semi-naked. What's the sub-text to this? I'd like to think there's an element of payback for the murderous spite she showed to poor old Actaeon.


Ovid: Metamorphoses, translated with an introduction by Mary Innes.
(Penguin Classics series, first published 1955)
Harmondsworth, UK. Penguin Books.