The Contest between the Muses and the Pierides

This panel is about 91 centimetres wide and only 46 high, and it was probably never meant to hang on a wall. Scholars think it decorated a spinet, a small keyboard instrument for a Venetian house, which would account for both the shape and the subject.

The story comes from Ovid. The nine daughters of Pierus, a king of Macedonia, challenged the Muses to a singing contest and lost. Tintoretto paints the moment just after the verdict. The Muses are still playing, and the losers are already magpies, scattering out of the picture with their instruments and their sheets of music in their claws.

He was 27 in the mid-1540s and taking the work that came, which in Venice meant a great deal of painted furniture: chest fronts, ceiling panels, instrument cases. Almost none of that survives attached to the object it was made for. This one entered the civic collection in Verona in 1871, after passing through two private hands in the city.