When on a visit to Rome in the spring of 1784, Gustavus III purchased a collection of the nine Muses and an Apollo Musagetes from Giovanni Volpato, the engraver. It is a fairly well-known fact that, when planning how to arrange his recently acquired antiques, the King was influenced both by the Sala delle Muse in the Museo Pio-Clementino and by Queen Christina's Stanza delle Muse in the Palazzo Riario (Corsini), in which her Muses formerly stood. Plans for a Gallery of the Muses formed part of several projects for a palace at Haga, the earliest being the sketch of a casino made by Gustavus himself during his stay in Rome (Fig. 2). The King also commissioned the French architect Leon Dufourny to submit designs for this kind of building (Fig. 3). The King soon abandoned the idea of a casino in favour of a large palace at Haga which, however, was never completed. Eventually, the statues were to be housed in a special Gallery of the Muses, which was put in order for the inauguration in 1794 of the Royal Museum—the predecessor of the National Museum—in the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Although the origins of the scheme for a Gallery thus seem to be obvious, a letter from Francesco Piranesi, Gustavus Ill's agent in Rome for Fine Arts and Antiquities, contains the information that the King had first intended to incorporate the Muses in a garden design. The letter also makes it clear that the project had been abandoned, since Sergei had stated that the climate of Scandinavia would severely damage the statues. A recently discovered sketch by Gustavus himself reveals that the King intended to create a Swedish Mount Parnassus in the gardens of the Royal Palace at Drott-ningholm (Fig. 1). The site the King had chosen was the natural mound at the further end of the French Garden. The main emphasis was to be on a statue of Pegasus placed on the summit of the mound, down the sides of which was to rush a cascade like the mythical Castalian Spring. At the foot of the mound, framed in ' dense greenery, the King placed the Muses in a circle round Apollo Musagetes. Gustavus had clearly been influenced by the Renaissance gardens in Frascati and the Tivoli, but he wished to add to his Parnassus the terrestrial representatives of the divine body: the poets, tragedians and comedy-writers of Antiquity were grouped and contrasted with their modern counterparts. The originality of the project lies not so much in giving this form to an old motif as in its location, in the old French Garden at Drottningholm, on a site that gave it clear associations with its antipode, the Parnassus of the 1670's-80's in the main staircase of the palace. Gustavus III, who was compared to Apollo and hailed as a new Louis XIV by his court poets, must have been aware of the analogies it was possible to draw from this symbolic theme.
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