Mercury and Argus (sketch for the Torre de la Parada)

In 1636 Philip IV of Spain wanted a hunting lodge in the hills outside Madrid decorated, the Torre de la Parada, and handed the entire job to Rubens in Antwerp. Rubens was 59 and badly troubled by gout, and he took it anyway. He designed some 60 scenes from Ovid, painting each one first at about this size, fast and thin on a small panel, then passed the sketches to a team of Antwerp painters who scaled them up to full canvases for shipping to Spain. This is the design for Mercury and Argus. Argus is the herdsman with a hundred eyes whom the jealous Juno set to guard a girl her husband had turned into a cow. Mercury talks and pipes him to sleep, then kills him. Twelve of these sketches are in Brussels, and the full-size canvas that came out of this one is in the Prado.