After a long morning’s hunt, at midday, “the hour when the shadows draw to their shortest,” Ovid tells us, Actaeon turns to his friends and orders them to rest. “Comrades, our nets are soaked, our spears are drenched,” he says. He then goes off on a stroll through the forest, accompanied by his famous dogs, each of which Ovid furnishes with a brief autobiography, denoting their particular talent for catching prey. From within his tranquil wandering, Actaeon comes upon Diana. Having also spent the morning hunting, she is now naked and being bathed by her all-female band beneath that daring sunlight.

There is no question of ill intent. “If you look at the facts,” Ovid writes, “you’ll find that chance was the culprit. / No crime was committed. Why punish a man for a pure mistake?” But Diana doesn’t see it this way. She curses Actaeon by turning him into a stag – the hunter into the hunted. It is not an accident that they are both great hunters, with a passion for catching what is not theirs.

Actaeon can hear his hounds baying and his friends calling him, but when he tries to respond, his utterances come out as stag roars. Although he knows he is the subject of their bloody intent, he cannot stop himself from crying out to them: “…bending his legs like a cringing beggar, he gazed all around / with his silently pleading eyes, as if they were outstretched arms.” His friends, “in ignorant zeal …. encouraged the wild pack… shouting, ‘Actaeon! Actaeon!’ as if he were far away.”

Actaeon, in Ovid’s description, desperately wishes to be freed and returned to his human form, not only to be saved, but because “he would dearly have loved to watch, instead of enduring, his own hounds’ vicious performance”. Even becoming the game has not dented his desire for hunting. Now he is surrounded, and his excellent hounds, “allowed to slake their thirst in their master’s blood”, start tearing him apart. They pin him down and bury “their fangs in his body”.

It is not clear – and the possibility is left unresolved in Ovid’s retelling of the Greek myth – whether Actaeon’s hounds had perceived his own scent entrapped inside the stag and are, therefore, motivated by the desire to kill their prey or to release their master. We are either witnessing a savage murder or a prison break.

The Venetian painter Titian (1488-1576) was also a hunter of sorts, interested in catching, with a sleight of hand, the ephemeral and, paradoxically, the invisible: a passing expression, an interior state of mind, a secret desire, thirst and hunger. He was interested too in humans being turned into animals. This is perhaps why he was drawn to the myth of Actaeon and Diana, which he had read about in The Metamorphoses. The tragedy is the subject of a set of seven large pictures that he painted for his most important patron, King Philip II of Spain. They are collectively known as The Poesie.

It is, of course, impossible to know exactly how the conversation that led to the commission unfolded, but this is how I have always imagined it. The two men only met twice: in Milan in 1548, and at the Imperial Diet at Augsburg in the winter of 1550, when Philip was 23 and yet to become emperor. Titian was 62. They had been introduced by Philip’s father, Emperor Charles V, who was the artist’s long-time patron and admirer.

Titian didn’t like to leave Venice. His house, where he also had his studio, was on the northern edge of the city. From there, on a clear day, he could glimpse, across the lagoon, the misty blue of the mountains where he spent his childhood. He was born and grew up in Pieve di Cadore, a commune nestled deep in the Dolomites, which made their way into the background of several of his paintings. Around the age of nine, his father sent him to Venice to apprentice under Gentile Bellini. Over the next 80 or so years, Titian – Tiziano Vecelli, the one destined to become the greatest Venetian Renaissance painter, ‘the sun amidst small stars’ – hardly ever left the city, which was very unusual for an artist of his stature. His contemporaries were constantly making trips to Florence, Rome and further afield to show their work and cultivate patrons.

He was immensely focused, and I believe this is what accounted for the exceptional distance his work travelled within a relatively short time. Not only did he revise his styles and ideas more than most painters, he also challenged received notions about what a painting can do. Compare, for example, a mid-career picture such as Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-23) with a later work such as The Virgin Suckling the Infant Christ (1565-75). Everything in Bacchus, notwithstanding the active drama, is static and definite: you can clearly see where one detail stops and another starts. Even though the painting depicts a violent assault, all terrains are stable, affirmed by a solid faith in the individual nature of things. But in the Virgin, nothing is happening, and yet each detail is animated with movement and wonder, with the disguised spirits of love and despair, and with the evolutions of oneness and separation. You can almost feel the mother’s breath and the child’s warm anticipation. And yet it all seems passing, very much like the lives we live.

Such careful labour required a steady routine. But Philip was too persistent. He summoned Titian to make the long journey in order to discuss a new commission, something to rival all the work the Venetian artist had made for his father, and he wished to speak about it in person and at length. Titian accepted: it was important to establish a relationship with the heir to the Hapsburg throne.

I imagine Titian preparing his thoughts on what to propose. He was, by this stage, experienced at managing the whims and fancies of patrons. He already had a measure of Philip, and had gleaned, through their correspondence, that the prince was interested in tragedy.

The bold and ambitious cycle Titian suggested – seven large canvases inspired by the myth of Diana and Actaeon – was to be a new form of painting, in which poetry and art would meet. I see Titian pitching his idea and agreeing, against his own intuition, perhaps as the two men strolled down a garden path in the vanishing evening light, that, yes, the paintings should adhere to Aristotle’s assertion that tragedy must inspire pity and fear. I imagine that Titian must have suspected, given the Hapsburgs’ Catholic fervour and preoccupation with maintaining the empire’s wide territories, that Philip would be inclined to subscribe to Aristotelian notions of the benefits of art.

But pity and fear had little to do with Titian’s purpose. He must have felt, the moment the conversation ended and he was restored to his solitude, at once glad to have won Philip over – glad, too, perhaps, at making it seem that The Poesie had all along been the prince’s idea – and vaguely regretful, as though he had said too much and betrayed himself. I picture him thinking about this all the way back home to Venice.

The Poesie, which constitutes some of Titian’s greatest work, took a long time to produce, nearly 20 years. The delay was due to several factors, not least of all that this period saw a great development in Titian’s philosophy of painting. It was partly encouraged and enabled by the new technology of slow-drying oil paints, with which he could rework pictures over a long period of time, creating overlapping hues and glazes that give the work a sense of unstable vividness, as though each detail is trembling with its own life. But perhaps another reason why things took so long was that Titian needed to cure himself of that conversation with Philip. What we say, even in empty flattery, has a consequence.

For Aristotle, “Tragedy… is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.” In other words, tragedy is an instrumental art, tasked with “healing” an audience from a state of passive indifference and guiding them towards what we might understand today as a state of active civic engagement. But Titian’s work, its astonishing development, suggests that he saw such a willed transaction as a distraction, a premeditated intent that forestalls the free and open-ended interpretation of an ungoverned encounter with the work. That he understood painting as neither an instrument nor an instruction, but rather, like love or grief, as one’s fate, and in the way, ironically, that Aristotle himself understood that word: one’s immersive and inescapable destiny.

The Poesie is about want and escape, and the power of fate’s spell. It starts with Danaë (circa 1551-53), which shows Diana reclining in her virginal captivity, naked and hiding. But Jupiter, who is immune to any barrier, finds his way there and impregnates her with Perseus. In Venus and Adonis (1553-54), Venus is doing all she can to restrain her lover, the hunter Adonis, and save him from death. But he has already turned and appears unstoppable. Diana and Actaeon (1556-59), the most narratively dramatic of the cycle, records the moment Actaeon startles Diana and her nymphs, sealing his fate. His shadow falls on the scene, as though Titian is suggesting that, innocent or not, the act of looking implicates the viewer. Diana and Callisto (1556-9) foreshadows Diana’s will for vengeful cruelty. Perseus and Andromeda (1554-6) has Diana’s son rescuing his beloved. He hovers with his sword over the infinitely dark and mysterious sea, where a monster lies. The paint work conveys the most troubling uncertainty I have ever seen caught on canvas. In The Rape of Europa (1560-2), Jupiter, who is clearly fixated on getting what he wants at any price, has tricked Europa by transforming himself into a benign bull, and is whisking her away. The flesh of her inner thigh is unnervingly real. You can sense it shudder and catch the light amid the hurried escape.

The last is the greatest of the cycle. The Death of Actaeon (1559-75) portrays the final scene, when Diana executes Actaeon. It is the last chapter – both for Actaeon and for Titian, as this was probably the last picture the artist painted. Soon after, the plague conquered Venice and his home was ransacked by thieves. The work never reached Philip, and I am not convinced that Titian had ever meant to send it. The entire logic of The Death of Actaeon, which marks the pinnacle of Titian’s late style, the accumulation of a lifelong practice and study, runs counter to Aristotle’s sense of what a tragedy must do. Here Titian breaks the mould and creates an artwork that does not hold, capture or fix, but rather reveals and suggests. It’s not important that the arrow Diana shoots is nowhere to be seen, or that Actaeon’s legs are only hinted at as they disappear into the thicket, or that the edges of things – the lines separating river from land, one figure from another – are vague and uncertain. Now, he seems to be saying, nothing can be still, everything must be in perpetual motion, as though to live is to be constantly subject to the flux and vulnerabilities of the elements.

Titian is fascinated by ambiguity and multiplying perspectives. He is keen to involve us in them, too – less to inspire pity and fear, and more to implicate us, to render us accomplices, and not in order to incriminate us, but to cause us to imagine what it would have been like to be Diana, or Actaeon, or even his dogs. We are observing Acteon’s death, but so is Diana, and she seems, in her strangely suspended gesture, to be wondering about the essence of the man she is slaying, the Actaeon before his “pure mistake”, and that part of her has become involved in the doubt of the pack, that this may be at once an execution and a release. As though only now, after deforming him, can she be curious about the man.

Titian places a figure between the trees, obscure and far off in the distance, a rider on horseback. Like us, he has stumbled upon the scene, and also like us, he has stopped to look at the carnage. But he does this from the opposite direction, and therefore involves us in the frame: he watches the cruel spectacle unfold while looking directly at us. For him, we and the tragedy form one tableau.

It is a strange and remarkable way to render and think – for Titian is clearly thinking – about a myth concerned with looking, with a man seeing what he shouldn’t have seen, and the rupture of a woman’s privacy. The painting makes poignant the fact that exactly because we can shut our eyes, what we do see – what we cannot help seeing – is more actively ours. And that we, by virtue of our presence in front of the picture, are part of the story.

Around the same time that he was working on The Death of Actaeon – some historians have suggested that this picture too was intended for Philip – Titian, the man who could find beauty in all things, created one of the most unsettlingly gruesome paintings of the Renaissance, The Flaying of Marsyas (1570-76).

Here he is again conversing with a story from the Metamorphoses. Marsyas dared to claim that he may be a better musician than the god Apollo. That was his sin, and this is his punishment. Like Actaeon, he is part animal. But unlike Actaeon, Marsyas does not appear to struggle. He is not fighting to break free. He calls for no one. He simply looks directly at us in question, his eye as sharp as an arrow. But what precisely is he asking?

There is something unsettlingly patient and placid about him, as though what he is undergoing is less a flaying of the flesh and more a bewildered excavation of his talent, to unravel his musical spirit. Apollo is the figure to the far left, playing his instrument and staring up in anxious wonderment. What he wants to reveal is his victim’s innermost purpose. He wants Marsyas’s soul. It’s as though he is most offended not by Marsyas’s challenge, but by the very notion that a lesser being may have greater artistic powers.

Because Marsyas cannot be allowed to compete on equal footing with a god, not even Apollo can ever know the music Marsyas is capable of. No doubt he couldn’t keep from imaging it. But Apollo wants to know, for himself, if for no one else; he wants to be assured. This is the reason for the autopsy.

Because, as well as torture, this is a post-mortem, and like all post-mortems, its purpose serves chiefly the living.

In 2003, when this picture of a man wired up, hooded and made to stand on a small box – if he dares to move, he will be electrocuted – first emerged from Abu Ghraib, the prison on the outskirts of Baghdad, where the US Army and the CIA held and tortured Iraqi prisoners, it immediately brought to mind The Flaying of Marsyas. I remember trying to push away the association. Ever since, whenever I have encountered a reproduction of the painting, I have avoided looking at it. If I came across it in a book, I simply turned the page.

The odd thing about cruelty is that it knows no middle ground. It is, in this sense, a passionate state. It either puts its victim centre stage – and for that moment at least, he, she or it becomes the most important thing – or it is violently indifferent to suffering. It often alternates between the two, as it did in Abu Ghraib.

In another image from the same year and at that same prison, naked detainees with bags placed over their heads – I count 7, but there may be more – are forced to form a human pyramid as their happy tormentors pose for the camera.

Sabrina Harman and Charles Graner Jr, look like they could be father and daughter. She has a classically 1950s American face, reminiscent of magazine advertisements from the period for the latest kitchen gadgets or mopping soap. He, too, looks of that era, save for the hat. It is not clear why he is wearing one, as the room looks hot. The very walls seem to be perspiring. Probably it is not a hat, but a rolled-up balaclava. Now that their victims are hooded, we are led to presume, the torturing family is enjoying the liberty of being barefaced. Like with Titian’s paintings, this too implicates us, as it suggests that there is no risk in our identifying Ms. Harman and Mr. Graner – that we are, in other words, on the same side.

The man’s gloved hands are menacing. The one with the thumbs up is reminiscent of the Facebook logo. There is nowhere to go behind them, just endless locks and bars. To one side, the inmates’ clothes are huddled where, presumably, they had been ordered to line up and strip. The colours of these clothes – several greys and dark blues, a dash of turquoise green and a bright red – break the heart. They allude to a life outside of this nightmare. They are the only bright colours now.

Apart from the awful green plastic bags on their heads, the men are completely naked. Not a watch or a ring to be seen. Their skin is the colour of rich sandy earth, of oiled wood and cinnamon. The colour that is dearest to me, and most familiar of all human pigments. This is the colour of the people I loved first, and will love till the end.

The men have nothing to hold on to or hold on with but their hands. And they are clutching, in discrete and desperate shame, to one another, while the jolly Americans smile at us. Like Actaeon and Marsyas, the detainees are being treated as animals. But unlike Diana and Apollo, their torturers are untroubled and uncurious. This, they seem to be saying, is our answer to end all questions. And they appear very pleased with it, and pleased to document it as a memento. They seem to be, as they pose for the camera, anticipating the future pleasure of revisiting such moments.

“Everything is closed... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” These words, spoken in 2023 by Israel’s then minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, were meant to justify his country’s actions in Gaza, as well as explain the terms on which his troops would proceed. Like Diana and Apollo, they see cruelty as ridicule and transformation. And like the Americans in Abu Ghraib, their appetite is unquenchable. It is unquenchable because they have misunderstood their situation.

Over the past two years, Israel has used all of its powers to deny more than two million Palestinians in Gaza the basic requirements for life. It bombed and starved them. It burned down their libraries, demolished historic buildings, scorched farms and wiped out livestock. Israel murdered children, assassinating them with sniper bullets to the head and chest. It destroyed nearly all hospitals, schools and universities, and it killed or abducted many nurses and doctors. More journalists have been killed in Gaza than in both world wars, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan combined. These atrocities, plus the crimes perpetrated by Israel in the West Bank, have shocked the world, left countless people in a permanent state of rage and impotence, and mobilised an international movement.

There have been many images coming out of Gaza. And part of the difficulty of this time has been in knowing how to contend with such a volume, how to look at this exhaustive record of destruction without becoming numb to it. The majority of these images have been taken by Palestinians, live-streaming the daily genocidal horrors that they face.

But there has also been a considerable amount of footage produced by Israeli soldiers, boasting and laughing, enjoying the slaughter and humiliation of a largely defenceless people, rummaging through the underwear of the bombed house of a displaced family, urinating on a child’s colourful crayon drawing, spray painting the star of David on the ruins. Like the Abu Ghraib pictures, these too were made for the pleasure of the perpetrator.

One such image is a still from a video an Israeli soldier had proudly posted on social media, which was then widely circulated. It shows the soldier, clad in uniform and weapons – even his eyes are concealed behind mirror shades – facing a Palestinian man. There are signs that the prisoner had been tortured. His leg appears to have a bullet wound or been stabbed with a blade. He has been stripped down to his underwear. With his hands tied behind his back, he is made to sit on a chair against a wall that is the vibrant blue of a summer sky.

Both men are immobile, yet strikingly different. The Israeli looks like he has reached the end of what he can do, and exactly for that reason, that he won’t or can’t stop. Whereas the Palestinian gives off a patient, noble expansiveness. He seems, from within his gentle gaze, to be privately considering the inner life of his tormentor, finding the will to question and imagine what might have led this man to behave this way.

The expression on the prisoner’s face suggests this. The attentiveness of his right hand, reaching as far as it can – as though he is offering to shake the soldier’s hand, which is drawing away – and the strain in his lifted right foot, speak of a common human sympathy that he is summoning up in himself – old social manners that even in this situation have not abandoned him. Perhaps like Marsyas, he knows he is dealing with an enemy who has lost his bearings, who is suffering two things at once: the limits of his power and the nature of that power.

The prisoner can see this, I imagine, whereas the soldier cannot. And the prisoner knows that the soldier cannot see it, and knows too well the horror that this has and will continue to cause. He does not know if the day will ever come when this soldier will see the truth and the two might be allowed to sit as equals. His face still retains a tired and discrete hope in the possibility. Whatever the case might be, he appears more wedded to reality than his interrogator.

Like the Abu Ghraib images, and many of the photographs and videos produced by members of the Israeli army in Gaza and the West Bank, this picture is less interested in pity or fear than in mockery and contempt. One senses its temperament, its hot private ardour, its anticipation of either our delight or our outrage. In this sense, it is a picture made for the self. It is like that man who shouts his curses and walks off. It is a dead end, a take-it-or-leave-it photograph, inhospitable to our faculties and disinterested in our engagement. Its purpose is merely to tantalise.

And yet, it reveals more than it intends. It is an image that succinctly reveals the contradictions involved in the Palestinian and Israeli confrontation. One is dressed, the other is naked, one is all-powerful, the other is captive. And yet it is not clear, from this picture at least, who is the free man and who is the prisoner.

Like the soldier in this picture, Israel has terribly misjudged its own situation. It clearly does not have a conception of itself, or of the Palestinians, that is rooted in fact. It has been hypnotised by its own myth. Its extraordinary ability to wage several wars at once, and to kill as many people as it likes, whenever and wherever it likes, with the world unable to restrain it, has both divorced it from reality and also, ironically, revealed the limits of its power. And because its assault on Gaza has been phenomenally spectacular, filmed and shared widely, the very nature of its national project, its supremacist and violent character, has never been clearer. This is exactly why it is hard for it to stop.

Meanwhile, the displays of Palestinian steadfastness have been extraordinary. The people of Gaza’s ability to resist, to insist on their dignity, to continue to love and hope, and to express gentle patience in the face of indiscriminate violence have shaken the world. In nearly every interview, when a child, man or woman in Gaza is stopped, as they rush towards the next temporary shelter or meal, to be asked what they have undergone, they end their account with the words, “And thanks be to God.” It is an expression of gracious dignity and a powerful antidote to revenge.

What is clear is that Israel has lost much more than can ever be compensated by theft and murder, and notwithstanding this, or perhaps exactly because of it, the fanatical temptation for it to engage in more theft and murder has never been more irresistible.

The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch had a particular interest in The Flaying of Marsyas. In Tom Phillips’ portrait of the writer (1984-86), a portrayal of Titian’s painting takes up a big section of the canvas. Murdoch sits in front of it, her cautious and cautionary eyes staring into the distance.

She appears to be thinking about the painting, or about what the painting represents for her. She saw it as the pinnacle of Western art, but also, I suspect, as a guiding instruction. She read it as a moral and spiritual drama, a stripping away of the self, a sort of liberation. In an interview, she described it as “an image of the death of the self – that the god flays you, that you lose your egoism”. In her work of philosophy The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Murdoch writes: “Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”

This weddedness to reality, which would include, for example, seeing one’s fellow human beings as human – and, arguably, being undistracted by pity and fear at the expense of, say, sympathy and fraternity – is one of the things the Palestinian man facing the Israeli soldier is holding on to. He appears to be, with every nerve in his body, insisting on it.

1. All quotations are from David Raeburn’s 2004 verse translation of The Metamorphoses.