The Judgment of Midas

The Judgment of Midas at the Gardner Museum depicts the musical contest that Ovid recounts in Metamorphoses XI: the rustic god Pan challenges Apollo to a flute-versus-lyre competition, judged by the mountain god Tmolus. King Midas alone voted for Pan, and Apollo punished his bad taste by giving him donkey ears — a witty myth about the dangers of preferring the common over the refined. The subject carried obvious resonance for the cultivated Venetian patrons who commissioned these mythological panels: they were implicitly Apollonian connoisseurs, not Midas-like vulgarians. Veronese renders the Ovidian pastoral with his characteristically elegant approach, the divine figures inhabiting a landscape more like the Venetian terraferma than ancient Phrygia. The Gardner Museum's series of Veronese mythological panels represents one of the finest groupings of the artist's smaller-scale work outside Venice, assembled by Gardner through the art market with Berenson's assistance in the 1890s and early 1900s.

The multi-figure composition groups the divine musicians and their royal judge in a landscape setting. Veronese's luminous palette and attention to varied figure types create a lively narrative scene.