Mercury and Argus

Around 1620 the young Antwerp painter Jacob Jordaens took up a story from Ovid he would return to again and again. The god Mercury has been sent to free Io, a woman turned into a heifer and watched over by Argus, a giant with 100 eyes. Mercury first plays his flute to lull every one of those eyes to sleep, then kills him. Jordaens paints the moment just before the violence, under a sky the colour of an approaching thunderstorm, the light raw and low. This was his first attempt at the subject, and the first of many versions he would make. The city of Lyon bought the canvas in 1843 for 2,000 francs, and it still hangs in its Museum of Fine Arts.