Minerva and the Muses

The nine Muses of ancient myth looked after poetry, music, history, dance and the stars. None of them was in charge of painting, and Jacques Stella quietly changed that. In this canvas from the later 1630s he gave one of the Muses a palette, placing painting among the arts of the mind. The story comes from Ovid. Minerva, goddess of wisdom, climbs Mount Helicon to see the spring that the winged horse Pegasus struck from the rock with his hoof, and finds the Muses there. The Louvre reads the picture as an allegory of artistic inspiration kept in check by reason. Stella borrowed the grouping from Raphael's Parnassus in the Vatican, and his Minerva from another of Raphael's scenes in the same room. By 1710 the painting belonged to Louis XIV and was recorded at the royal menagerie at Versailles.