The Judgement of Midas

Around 1720, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was still a young Venetian painter working out how to lighten his canvases. He had trained in the dark, heavy manner of his elders, and here he thins the shadows and opens the sky. The subject comes from Ovid. It is a music contest between the god Apollo on his lyre and the rustic Pan on his pipes, with the mountain-god Tmolus as judge. Tmolus awards the prize to Apollo. King Midas alone objects, preferring Pan's country tune, and for that lapse in taste Apollo fits him with a pair of donkey's ears. This was one of a group of scenes from Ovid that Tiepolo painted to line a single room in a Venetian palace. The figures stay small against a broad sweep of landscape, the quarrel almost lost in the open air.