Apollo Surrounded by the Nine Muses

Look up. This ceiling was painted in 1743 for a canal house at Rapenburg 48 in Leiden, the home of Diederik van Leyden, a collector who gathered thousands of prints. Jacob de Wit, the Amsterdam specialist in ceilings, made it in five parts. In the oval, Apollo, god of the arts, appears among the nine Muses on banks of cloud, and Minerva, goddess of wisdom, is with them in her helmet, holding a spear.

Around the oval, four corner pieces in a single colour imitate carved relief, each devoted to a kind of poetry, comedy, epic, elegy and the pastoral song. The ceiling stayed in Leiden for more than 160 years, until an auction in 1909 separated it from the house. The Mauritshuis bought it the next year and fitted it into this room in 1912. During the renovation of 2012 to 2014 the whole ceiling came down and went back up again. De Wit signed the centre on the lute, with the date 1743.