Artemis who Artemis turns into a stag for a transgression and who is then killed by hunting dogs. Usually, the dogs are his own, who no longer recognize their master. Sometimes they are Artemis' hounds. According to the standard modern text on the work, Lamar Ronald Lacey's "The Myth of Aktaion: Literary and Iconographic Studies", the most likely original version of the myth is that Actaeon was the hunting companion of the goddess who, seeing her naked in her sacred spring, attempts to force himself on her. For this hubris, he is turned into a stag and devoured by his own
Grünes Gewölbe is suspended in place of the shaft, while the bowl seems to float on the tips of the stag's antlers. This masterpiece depicts the mythological scene in which the unapproachable Diana changes the hunter Actaeon into a deer and has him torn to pieces by his own dogs for having watched her bathing. The base of the piece presents the forest floor, upon which lies the head of the stag Actaeon, with the dogs falling ravenously upon it. The inscription picked out in diamonds on the rim of the base reads, "DISCRETION SERT EFFRONTERIE PERD" ("Discretion is laudable, indiscretion unwise").