Diana Bathing with her Nymphs with Actaeon and Callisto

Rembrandt painted Diana Bathing with her Nymphs, with the subordinate scenes of Actaeon and Callisto, around 1634 — one of his rare extended engagements with classical mythology in the Italianate manner that dominated Dutch academic art of the period. The painting's unusual triple-subject format (the main Diana composition framed by the smaller narrative episodes) suggests a sophisticated classical program unusual in Dutch painting, which generally preferred straightforward mythological subjects to complex poetic programs. Rembrandt's treatment of the female nude diverges sharply from the Italianate ideal: his women are real bodies rather than classical sculptures, observed rather than idealized — a naturalism that was already controversial and would become more so as his career developed. Contemporaries like Gerard van Honthorst and Hendrick ter Brugghen were developing classicizing mythological subjects in a more conventionally idealized manner. The Salm-Salm collection at Anhalt Castle in Germany holds the painting as part of German princely collecting of Dutch Golden Age art that accumulated significant holdings throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The unusual combination of two mythological episodes creates a complex narrative, with Rembrandt's warm palette and dramatic lighting focusing on the nude figures against a dark, leafy landscape.