Mercury and Argus

Mercury has a sword in his right hand and, in his left, the pipe he has just been playing. That is the whole plot. Argus, the herdsman Juno set to guard the nymph Io after she was turned into a heifer, could not be taken by surprise because of his many eyes, so Jupiter sent Mercury to play him to sleep and then cut off his head. The heifer stands in the middle distance and a small stream runs through the wood on the right. The instrument is a double-reed shawm of the kind Spain calls a dulzaina, painted precisely enough that its bell and three finger holes can be counted. The canvas repeats a Mercury and Argus by Rubens and his workshop from 1636 to 1638. The Prado gives the copy to Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo and dates it no more closely than the 17th century.