The portrait shows an unknown young woman dressed as the goddess Diana, painted in 1653, the year after Ehrenstrahl arrived in Sweden. In Greek mythology, Diana was the goddess of hunting and chastity. Portraits of aristocrats in the classical style or in mythological guise were common in seventeenth-century painting. The sources of inspiration can be found in the popular court festivities. During formal ceremonies at the Swedish court, Queen Christina, for example, was often fêted as Diana. Portraiture was not rated very highly in the seventeenth century. Once the sitters began to be seen as brokering a more high-brow conceptual content with the help of symbolically meaningful attributes, as in this case a bow and arrow, portraiture’s status began to rise.
Per Dahlström from The Collection Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg 2014
