Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, the £50m picture bought partly by the Scottish Government last year, was put on display at the National Gallery in London.

Meanwhile, the effort to save the second Titian at the National Galleries of Scotland has already begun.

From now until 2012, Diana and Actaeon will be on display at the Edinburgh and London national gallery institutions for eight-month periods, on a rotating basis. After that the painting will spend five years at a time in London and Edinburgh, beginning in London from May 2012.

The National Galleries of Scotland are now also in the planning stage of the second bid needed to keep a Titian on the walls of the National Gallery in Edinburgh.

They have to raise another £50m by 2012 to keep Diana and Actaeon’s partner

painting, Diana and

Callisto, buying it outright from its owner, the Duke of Sutherland.

The deal to buy Diana and Actaeon also secured, for another generation, the rest of the Duke’s Bridgewater Collection, which includes three paintings by Raphael, a signature self-portrait work by Rembrandt and the Seven Sacraments by Poussin.

The Bridgewater Collection is considered to be the core of the NGS collection, and vital to its reputation as a world-class gallery.

Michael Clarke, the director of the National Gallery of Scotland, said it was too early to comment on the ultimate fate of Diana and Callisto.

“We are just at the planning stages for that, there is a lot of work behind the scenes that goes into something like that, and we are not going to go out publicly because this is not the best time to do that, just as we are coming out of a recession,” he said.

He said that the deal to share the painting was one that made sense considering its high price and the way various funders had to be found to secure the work for Scotland.

“The economic reality of buying these works means it makes sense to work together,” he said. “Secondly, the funding bodies such as the National Heritage Memorial Fund [which gave £10m to the deal] are in favour of these arrangements because it means the painting is seen by as many people as possible.”

The space on the wall created by the absent Titian in the National Gallery on The Mound has now been taken by a work by Poussin.

Diana and Actaeon was bought with £12.5m from the Scottish Government, the same amount from the National Gallery and £10m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, a UK-wide body which is funded by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in London. The NGS gave more than £4.5m and the rest of the sum included £7.4m from public donations.