墨丘利与阿耳戈斯

Velazquez painted this near the end, around 1659, the year before he died, and it is the last of his mythologies to survive. King Philip IV had asked him for four scenes to hang high in the Hall of Mirrors at the royal Alcazar in Madrid. Three of them, along with much of the palace itself, were lost when the Alcazar burned on Christmas Eve of 1734. Only this one came through. The story is from Ovid: Mercury, the god of trickery, has lulled the hundred-eyed giant Argus to sleep with music so he can steal away a nymph that Juno had hidden in the shape of a cow. Velazquez sets it low and wide, the two figures stretched along the canvas as if glimpsed from below, the paint as loose and quick as anything he ever made.