Minerva visita as Musas

In early 17th-century Antwerp, painters often worked as a team, each doing what he did best, and this picture is really the work of three men. Hendrick van Balen laid in the figures, the goddess Minerva arriving to visit the nine Muses on their mountain, a story from Ovid. Joos de Momper painted the wooded landscape falling away behind them, and Jan Brueghel the Elder, famous for exactly this, added the flowers scattered through the foreground. Minerva had come to hear the Muses sing and to see the spring said to have opened where a winged horse struck the rock. Sharing a panel like this was ordinary business here, a way for busy masters to sell more.