The paper examines how the classical myth of Actaeon was adopted in the post-Renaissance period by two anti-Classicist authors, Bruno and Marino, whose approaches to the myth differ despite their common rejection of the Classicist aesthetic paradigm. In one of the sonnets making up Giordano Bruno’s dialogue De gli eroici furori (1585), the Actaeon myth is invested with a new, philosophical meaning, and used to represent a new gnoseological concept. An idyll, on the other hand, included in Giovan Battista Marino’s La Sampogna collection (1620), displays a tendency to hyperliterariness and a taste for surprise effects, proposing a version of the myth which admits a metatextual interpretation. The present study compares each author’s writing practice to their respective poetological positions and analyses it in the light of intertextual references.