The Judgement of Midas

A group of figures sits in a classical landscape. In the middle stands a king who seems to have grown large ears. This is the Judgement of Midas, taken from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. On the right is Apollo, wearing a red cloak and laurel crown and holding his lyre; on the left is Pan with his pipes. Pan challenged Apollo to a musical contest: the unfortunate Midas judged Pan the better player so Apollo punished him by turning his ears into those of a donkey.This is one of ten frescoes by Domenichino and assistants which originally adorned the walls of a room known as the Stanza di Apollo in a garden pavilion in the grounds of the Villa Aldobrandini at Frascati, near Rome. Eight of the frescoes were transferred to canvas and are now in our collection. They all show stories of the Greek sun god Apollo.The decoration of the Stanza was designed to glorify the Aldobrandini family but also to express their philosophical and religious ideas. For them, Apollo was not just the classical god of the sun, music and the arts but, by extension, the light of reason. Pan, with his hairy legs, was perhaps understood to represent man’s baser emotions. Like Marsyas in The Flaying of Marsyas, Midas is punished for preferring sensual pleasure to rational thought.This fresco was originally positioned on the left wall of the Stanza, next to Apollo killing the Cyclops. Although Domenichino designed all ten scenes, it is not clear how much he was involved in actually painting them. Seven out of the ten scenes, including this one, were among those illustrated by the painter and engraver Antonio Tempesta in a 1606 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Domenichino may have drawn inspiration from Tempesta’s compositions, although he revised them extensively to make them clearer and adapted them to fit a vertical rather than horizontal space.Several chalk drawings for this composition, including various detailed figure studies, are in the Royal Collection at Windsor. Whether painted by Domenichino or his assistants, the scene was executed quickly (as was necessary with fresco, which dries quickly) – the horizontal joins in the plaster suggest it was done in just three days.