The sculpture is a Roman marble of the first or second century CE, copying a Greek bronze attributed to the Athenian sculptor Leochares from around 325 BCE. This double provenance (Greek original, Roman copy, then European afterlife as a French royal possession) is the sculpture's main historical fact. The original bronze, like almost every major piece of classical Greek bronze sculpture, has not survived. Bronze was too valuable; it was melted down in late antiquity, the early Middle Ages, or both. What we have of Greek bronze sculpture today is almost entirely Roman marble copies made for collectors during the late Republic and the Empire, when Greek classical art was the prestige form Roman patrons wanted in their villas.

The Diana belongs to a small set of these copies that are exceptionally faithful to their lost originals. The figure strides forward, drawing an arrow from the quiver on her back with her right hand while reaching for the head of a hind running at her side with her left. The pose is mid-stride, mid-aim, mid-decision; she has not yet shot the arrow she is reaching for. Pairing the Diana with the Apollo Belvedere (a male nude of the same Roman-copy-after-Leochares type, now at the Vatican) suggests the original bronze was an ensemble: Artemis and Apollo, the twin children of Leto, each shown in the moment before action. Leochares would have made both for the same patron, probably for a Greek sanctuary, possibly for the cult complex at Olympia or Athens. The ensemble has been broken since antiquity; only the figures remain.

The sculpture's modern history begins in 1556, when Pope Paul IV sent it as a diplomatic gift to King Henry II of France. The French court had been requesting Roman antiquities for decades and received them only sporadically. The Diana was placed in the gardens of Fontainebleau, moved to the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles by Louis XIV in the 1680s (which is where the name attaches), and brought to the Louvre after the Revolution. It has been one of the Louvre's signature works ever since, displayed in the Salle des Cariatides where its conditioned silvery patina against the room's dark masonry can be seen at its proper register.

Diana is the huntress, the moon, the protector of women in childbirth, and the only Greek deity who refused, throughout her mythology, to be married off. The Greek cult of Artemis was one of the oldest in the Mediterranean (older than Apollo's, older than Zeus's), and her sanctuaries at Ephesus and Brauron operated continuously for over a millennium. The Versailles sculpture is one of the most successful surviving depictions of her in any medium: it captures her in the position the cult most consistently associated her with, alone in the woods, aiming, the moment before the kill.