Apollo and the Muses

A small, wide panel, 35 centimetres high and 78 across, with gilding worked into the surface, made in Rome somewhere between about 1514 and 1523. Apollo sits among the nine Muses in classical dress, and a cartouche spells out their names in Greek letters, one after another, from Calliope through to Urania. Greek was fashionable learning in the Rome of those years, in the humanist circles around Pope Leo X, and Peruzzi was living in that city, working near Raphael and measuring its ruins as an architect. The panel was catalogued for a long time under the name of Giulio Romano, one of Raphael's pupils. Arthur Kauffmann argued in 1963 that it was Peruzzi's work, Christoph Frommel agreed a few years after that, and the gallery has kept his name on it since.