As Musas

Tintoretto painted these nine tumbling women around 1578 for a Venetian audience that knew them at once as the Muses, the goddesses who inspired poetry, music and the arts. They fill the sky, some with instruments, caught in the fast sweeping brushwork he was known for. The more remarkable story is how the picture reached England. It hung in the ducal palace of the Gonzaga family in Mantua until the 1620s, when that dynasty, deep in debt, sold off its entire celebrated collection. The buyer was Charles I of England, whose agents shipped hundreds of Italian masterpieces to London. It has stayed in the royal collection ever since, and hangs today in Kensington Palace.