Diana and Her Dog

This Diana and Her Dog at the Getty Museum depicts the chaste goddess of the hunt in an intimate outdoors setting that combined the female nude tradition with the natural landscape of forests and moonlight associated with Diana's domain. Ricci's treatment of the female figure brought Venetian painting's traditional ease with the sensuous nude to a mythological subject whose chastity provided classical justification for the nude's presence. The Getty Museum's Italian Baroque holdings preserve this alongside other examples of the mythological figure painting that formed a significant strand of Ricci's production alongside his religious subjects.

Diana's luminous flesh and the landscape setting are rendered with Ricci's characteristic warm palette, the huntress goddess painted with the fluent brushwork and sensuous color that defined his approach to mythological subjects.