Manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder

This label is the museum's loosest link to a famous name. It places the painting in the style of Jan Brueghel the Elder without claiming his hand or his studio. Orpheus Charming the Animals, oil on panel from the early 17th century, shows the singer of Greek myth taming the beasts with music, here playing a viola in place of the classical lyre, among a crowd of animals that includes a white unicorn on the left.

The subject suited Flemish painters, who used it to fit as many creatures and plants as a panel could hold, and Jan Brueghel, son of Pieter Bruegel, made such crowded scenes a speciality in Antwerp. Italian collectors with a taste for music liked the theme too. The scholar Kristina Herrmann Fiore has proposed Sinibaldo Scorza, a painter trained in Genoa and known for animals. How the panel entered the collection is unknown, and it first appears in the Borghese inventory of 1790.