Guilliam Forchondt the Elder

This large copper panel depicts Minerva visiting the Muses on Mount Helicon, a story taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (V: 251–72).

On the right of this lively scene is Minerva attired in her helmet and holding her shield and spear. She has just arrived on Mount Helicon to hear the song of the nine Muses and bear witness to Hippocrene (called Aganippe by Ovid), a sacred stream that sprung when Pegasus’s hooves struck a rock. She approaches the nine colourfully dressed daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who welcome her warmly to their sacred grove, as the sounds of their voices and instruments fill the air. In the upper left corner are the flowing waters of the famed spring, as the winged white stallion Pegasus alights from the outcropping above. The verdant wooded landscape that surrounds the figures wonderfully encapsulates the beautiful setting Ovid describes as Minerva encounters the sacred font: ‘She, long admiring the waters produced by the stroke of his foot, looks around upon the groves of the ancient wood, and the caves and the grass studded with flowers innumerable; and she pronounces the Mnemonian maids happy both in their pursuits and in their retreat…’.¹

A painting of this subject by Hendrick van Balen the Elder, Joos de Momper and Jan Brueghel the Elder is in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.²

We are grateful to Dr Jan de Maere for endorsing the attribution to Guilliam Forchondt the Elder on the basis of digital images.

¹ H.T. Riley, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, London and New York 1893, pp. 166–67. 

² Inv. no. 957; oil on panel; 139.6 x 198.5 cm.; signed lower right: BALE momper BRVEGHEL; https://kmska.be/en/masterpiece/minerva-visits-muses. On stylistic grounds, the Antwerp panel is dated by Bettina Werche and Klaus Ertz to the 1620s; while there is consensus that the landscape was painted by Joos de Momper and the figures are by Hendrick van Balen, discussion remains as to whether the flowers are by Jan Brueghel the Elder, or his son, Jan Brueghel the Younger.