Diana and Cupid

Diana stretches out over a cloth draped over, with an arrow just off the bow she is holding, body forming a relaxed but elegant, sculptor's pose instead of an active hunting movement a peacefulness which Batoni took without any modifications from a very famous marble sculpture of a Cretan sleeping princess, Ariadne, changing a statue of a resting woman into one of a woman who is at her readiness, very reserved, and yet alert. Beneath her, Love (Cupid) is grasping the bowstring, the only gesture by which Batoni creates the entire subtle drama in the picture: instead of delivering the weapon into Cupid's hand, she is holding it from his grasp, thus transforming a mythological picture of a girl and Cupid into a small, ongoing negotiation of power in which the goddess of chastity and the god of desire are on both sides. Colour is also a part, that is, the handling of, adding to the tension: Diana's red, flowing, costume is the warm against the cool landscape colours; through her laurel-topped dark hair and well-proportioned facial features she is giving an aura of authority to which Cupid's soft, youthful form could only be a match to a little extent. The myth becomes a piece attached to historical reality in a way that the painting's pendant character is revealed: it was made to be placed on a wall opposite the Batoni portrait of his patron after a hunt, as a reclining man in the Roman countryside, meaning Diana's mythic abstinence was meant to serve as a reflection on the very real sporting activities of an aristocratic Englishman a pointed juxtaposition of ancient and modern, Roman scenes that Batoni's patrons and a society, more or less, like theirs, would have identified easily a fashionable art historical device, similar to Panini's paired views of ancient and modern Roman ruins which one found on display nearby.