Diana

Pellegrini's Diana, painted around 1720, depicts the goddess of the hunt in her familiar guise as athletic virgin huntress. Diana was a frequent subject in early eighteenth-century decorative painting, her combination of physical freedom, classical authority, and chaste female beauty making her an ideal figure for aristocratic ceiling and wall decorations. Pellegrini treated mythological subjects with a light, graceful facility well suited to the Rococo interiors he decorated across Europe.

The goddess is shown in the open air with her hunting attributes, the composition combining figure painting with landscape in a characteristically Pellegrini-esque arrangement. His warm, liquid brushwork renders the flesh with appealing lightness. The palette — warm flesh against cool sky and leafy green — is quintessentially his Venetian Rococo manner.