Argos Painter
Ancient Greece · Archaic Greek art
The story
The Argos Painter is a modern name for an Athenian vase painter of the early 5th century BC whose own name is lost. The Oxford scholar John Beazley named him after a wine jar of the kind called a stamnos, now in Vienna. On it the god Hermes grabs the giant Argos by the beard and draws his sword. Argos had eyes all over his body, and the goddess Hera had set him to guard Io, a young woman loved by Zeus, who appears on the jar as a heifer while Zeus watches from the edge of the scene.
That jar was found at Cerveteri in Etruria, and an inscription on it praises a youth called Damas as handsome. Several of the other vases attributed to him are stamnoi too. On the back of the Vienna jar he painted a quieter scene, draped youths and a man leaning on his staff, one of the youths holding a hare.
