Foolish Midas: Representing Musical Judgement and Moral Judgement in Italy ca.1520

In an ancient story told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, the Phrygian king Midas, freshly released from his famous golden touch, retreats to the hills and becomes a devotee of the rustic god Pan. Enjoying the acclaim of the nymphs and of Midas for his piping, Pan challenges Apollo—another, much greater, god of the countryside—to a musical contest. The judge of the contest, the mountain Tmolus, declares Apollo the winner; but Midas disagrees, holding Pan to be the better musician. In anger, Apollo changes Midas’ ears into those of an ass. The argument of this study is that the myth of the Judgement of Midas was presented and encountered by Italians ca.1520, in both literary and visual modes, reshaped and retold in ways that engaged with the broader contemporary discourse on musical judgement. In studying Renaissance treatments of the myth, we are also studying articulations of the operation of musical judgement, which can reveal important features of elite musical culture in Italy and the values in which it was founded. Ultimately, to study the Judgement of Midas in Italy ca.1520 is to study musical taste and its construction through myth, as a component of the social ideology of elite culture.