Midas's Judgement

The myth of King Midas's musical judgement — in which Midas preferred Pan's rough piping to Apollo's lyre and was punished with ass's ears — served as a witty vehicle for the moral hierarchy of the arts in early seventeenth-century Flemish painting. Van Balen's 1617 panel, now in the Hermitage Museum, depicts the moment of Apollo's pronouncement and Midas's humiliation, surrounded by the mountain god Tmolus who judged in Apollo's favour and the nymph Echo. The subject belongs to the broader category of musical mythology popular in Antwerp, where the elevation of music as a liberal art carried both humanist and Counter-Reformation associations. Van Balen's figure style, which drew on Italian sources for idealised deities and Flemish tradition for the more comic or bestial figures, is well suited to a subject requiring both dignity (Apollo) and absurdity (Midas). The Hermitage's substantial holdings of Van Balen's work make it a primary site for assessing his mythological output.

The panel format allows careful detail in both the divine figures' idealised forms and the comic rendering of Midas's nascent ass's ears. Apollo is painted with the polished, cool flesh tone Van Balen reserves for divine males, his lyre a precisely rendered musical attribute. Midas's expression of confused indignation is achieved through subtly exaggerated facial modelling that distinguishes him from the serene divine figures.