The Challenge of the Pierides

Rome in the early 1520s had a booming trade in prints. Engravers turned painters' designs into sheets that sold by the hundred, and when Rosso Fiorentino arrived in the city around 1524, a print publisher known as Baviera ordered drawings from him to be engraved. One of them, cut in copper by Jacopo Caraglio, told this story from Ovid. The nine daughters of King Pierus challenged the Muses to a singing contest, lost, insulted the winners, and were turned into chattering magpies.

On the left the Muses sit naked with lyre, harp and shawm. On the right the Pierides hold a tambourine, bagpipes and a horn, the noisy instruments. Between them flows the spring of Hippocrene, opened by a kick of the winged horse Pegasus, and nymphs and river gods sit as judges.

Whether Rosso painted this panel himself is still disputed. In the collections of Charles I of England and of Louis XIV it went under the name of Perino del Vaga. The connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette gave it back to Rosso, and since the mid-20th century scholars have stayed divided, some seeing a copy after the famous print. The picture makes judging hard. In 1765 the restorer Robert Picault transferred the paint from wood to canvas, and much was lost. The laboratory of the French national museums has since found an ochre priming that Rosso used in his Roman years, and changes of mind exactly where the painting departs from the engraving. The crouching Muse, seen in profile with crossed feet in the print, here turns towards us.