This large and complex canvas, which once formed part of the collects ion of Charles d’Arenberg, records Minerva visiting the muses on Mount Helicon, a story taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (V: 251–72). Like the prime version of this composition, a panel of comparable dimensions today in the Royal Museum of Replica Handbags s in Antwerp,¹ this canvas is a collaboration between several artists in Antwerp. Such partnerships were common in early seventeenth-century Antwerp as they allowed artists to contribute their own specializations to a variety of projects. In this canvas, the rolling and pastel-toned landscape that fills much of the left half of the composition was painted by Joos de Momper, while the active workshops of Hendrick van Balen and Jan Brueghel the Elder contributed to the foreground, the former’s workshop attending to the figures and the latter’s to the flora and fauna.

On the left of this lively scene is Minerva attired in her helmet and holding her shield. She has just arrived atop 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 warmlys to their sacred space as the sounds of their voices and instruments abound. To their right are the flowing waters of the famed spring, as the winged white stallion Pegasus alights from the outcropping above. The lush wooded landscape that surrounds the figures, as well as the rolling river landscape that extends in the distance, wonderfully encapsulate 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…’.²   

¹ Inv. no. 957, oil on panel, 139.6 x 198.5 cm., signed lower right: BALE momper BRVEGHEL. On stylistic grounds, this panel in Antwerp is dated by Werche (see Literature) and Klaus Ertz to the 1620s. While there is consensus on the Antwerp panel that the landscape was painted by Joos de Momper and the figures by Hendrick van Balen, discussions remain as to whether the flowers are by Jan Brueghel the Elder or his son, Jan Brueghel the Younger.

² H.T. Riley, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, London and New York 1893, pp. 166–67.