Actaeon - Actaeon in Art

Actaeon in Art

• Aeschylus and other tragic poets made use of the story, which was a favourite subject in ancient works of art.
• There is a well-known small marble group in the British Museum illustrative of the story, in gallery 83/84.
• Two paintings by the 16th century painter Titian (Acteon and Diana and Actaeon).
• Actéon, an operatic pastorale by Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley suggests a parallel between his alter-ego and Actaeon in his elegy for John Keats, Adonais, stanza 31 (' had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness/ Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray/ .../ And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,/ Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.')
• The aria "Oft she visits this lone mountain" from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, first performed in 1689 or earlier.
• Giordano Bruno, "Gli Eroici Furori".
• In canto V of G. B Marino's poem "Adone" the protagonist goes to theater to see a tragedy representing the myth of Actaeon. This episode foreshadows the protagonist's violent death at the end of the book.
• In Act I Scene 2 of Jacques Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld Actaeon is Diana (Artemis)'s lover, and it is Jupiter who turns him into a stag, which puts Diana off hunting. His story is reliquished at this point, in favour of the other plots.
• Ted Hughes wrote a version of the story in his Tales from Ovid.
• In Alexandre Dumas' novel La Reine Margot, Charles IX of France, fond of the hunt, has a much-loved and ill-fated hunting dog named Actaeon.