Landscape with Mercury and Herse

The story comes from Ovid. Mercury, descending out of the sky, catches sight of Herse among the girls carrying flowers up to the temple of Athena, and falls for her. In another painter's hands that would have been an excuse for gestures and bodies. Here the figures are tiny, set against monumental architecture and an enormous reach of sky, and the temple is losing ground to the plants working into its stone. The Prado reads that as the thought running through the verse of Quevedo, the Madrid poet of the previous generation, where time and nature frame whatever happens to people. Around 1660 landscape was becoming a subject in its own right at the Spanish court, in the hands of Mazo and of his pupil Benito Manuel Agüero, who built their scenes out of colour and atmosphere. A royal inventory of 1794 lists the canvas in the Queen's quarters at Aranjuez, the palace in its gardens south of Madrid.