Silver Box with Diana and Callisto Relief

The scene unfolds in a detailed forest landscape where the goddess Diana, marked by a crescent moon on her forehead, sits among her nymphs. On the right side of the composition, several nymphs forcibly undress Callisto to reveal her pregnancy, which led to her expulsion from Diana's chaste company. The relief is intricately carved into an iridescent mother-of-pearl lid set into an oval silver box with gilded edges.

This work illustrates a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text that served as a primary source for early modern allegorical and Hermetic interpretations of nature. In the esoteric tradition, Diana (the Moon) represents the feminine, 'lunar' principle associated with the soul's purity and specific stages of the alchemical Great Work involving the purification of matter.