Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon

In 1652 Claude painted the largest landscape of his life, Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon, nearly three metres wide, for a young cardinal in Rome. That canvas is now in Edinburgh. Almost 30 years later, at around 80, he went back to the same mountain for Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna, on a canvas less than half as wide. In Greek myth Helicon was the home of the Muses. Apollo, god of music and poetry, sits among the nine on the hillside at the right, and above them the winged horse Pegasus has struck the rock with his hoof to release the Hippocrene, the spring whose water gave poets their inspiration. Swans, the birds of Apollo, drift on the water below, and a round temple stands on the hill behind. A partly legible inscription at the bottom begins with the word Parnassus, the name of the Muses' other mountain. The Colonna family kept the picture until about 1789.