Diana and Actaeon
1650. Oil on canvas.Room 040
After studying the canvas, the pigments, and the technique of this work as well as those of Diana and Callisto (P424), we can be sure that these paintings are 17th-century Spanish copies. The originals of these paintings were some of Titian’s masterpieces from his final years. They belonged to the royal collections starting with the reign of Philip II the Prudent. However, Philip V gifted them to the Marquess of Gramont in 1704.
Both copies are extraordinarily faithful to the originals and demonstrate the close care with which Titian’s work was studied in mid-century Madrid. The similarities in colour between the landscapes in these copies and the landscapes by Mazo reinforce the relationship with these painters. With this in mind, it is worth noting that Palomino claimed to have seen Mazo’s copies of originals by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Once these works were transferred to Italy, where there is no knowledge of his skill, they undoubtedly passed for originals. Documentary evidence suggests that Mazo had made copies for the Marquess of Carpio of precisely these two compositions with dimensions similar to the originals or, at least, that they were in his collection in 1651.
Martínez del Mazo, skilled at copying the great masters and imitating the style of Titian, made small-format versions of the originals of these two paintings (now in the United Kingdom) for monarchs and noblemen. The former requested duplicates of their most prized works as decoration for their palaces, while the nobility strove to emulate their tastes.
Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E., Carreño, Rizi, Herrera y la pintura madrileña de su tiempo, Madrid, Ministerio de Cultura. Banco Herrero, 1986, p.328-329
