The iconographic program of Venus, who is pulled standing by the dolphin to the center of the picture, alludes to her mythical birth from the waves. The pearls in her hair, the waves and the dolphin as an attribute at her feet identify this sensual representation of the foam-born goddess of love. Her erotic aura also effects Diana, who is depicted as the goddess of hunting, dressed in gold-silk armour that allows her feminine charms to shine through, and also as the goddess of the moon, indicated by the crescent moon in her white-blonde tresses. The hovering putto or Eros covers the scene horizontally with his wings.

The earlier attribution of the painting to the Dutch painter Joachim Wtewael (Utrecht 1566 – 1638), supported by Anne Lowenthal in 1986 but since refuted, probably goes back to the ‘monogram’ at the bottom left of a stone next to Diana's feet: “J W f”[ecit] was understood as the monogram of Wtewael's initials. However, the use of initials is highly unusual for Wtewael, although the letters are formed in the same way as the rest of his signatures. Daniele Benati even read them in 2009 as a “misinterpreted tuft of grass”. He revised the attribution and instead stated a strong stylistic relationship to the Mannerist work of Lorenzo Sabatini, also known as Lorenzino da Bologna.

Benati dates the painting to the years 1570-72, when Sabatini was in a position, having completed profitable religious commissions in Florence and Rome, to successfully create erotic works of art for the strong demand of the upper class, which helped to define the contemporary taste of his home city of Bologna in the following decade.

The attribution to Sabatini was finally confirmed in 2014 by Michele Danieli, who succeeded in finding a sketch for the painting that clearly identifies Lorenzo Sabatini as its creator: it shows a detailed preparatory drawing of Diana with dogs and the floating putto.