Diana of Versailles Diana of Versailles The Diana of Versailles is a slightly over lifesize marble statue of the Roman goddess Diana (Greek: Artemis), with a deer, located in the Musée du Louvre, Paris. It is a Roman copy (1st or 2nd century AD) of a lost Greek bronze original attributed to Leochares, c. 325 BC. The statue is also known as "Diana à la Biche", "Diane Chasseresse" ("Diana Huntress"), "Artemis of the Chase", and "Artemis with the Hind". The statue was discovered in Italy: the Louvre website suggests Nemi, where there was an ancient sanctuary; other sources posit Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli;
Diana (mythology) supplanting the earlier Titan goddess Luna. She also became the goddess of childbirth and ruled over the countryside. Catullus wrote a poem to Diana in which she has more than one alias: Latonia, Lucina, Juno, Trivia, Luna. Along with Mars, Diana was often venerated at games held in Roman amphitheaters, and some inscriptions from the Danubian provinces show that she was conflated with Nemesis in this role, as "Diana Nemesis". Outside of Italy, Diana had important centers of worship where she was syncretised with similar local deities in Gaul, Upper Germania, and Britannia. Diana was particularly important in the region