Mercure, Argus et Io

Mercury has just lulled the herdsman Argus to sleep with the music of his flute, and the figures gather around the great oak that forms the axis of the composition — while beside the two seated men a herd of cows and goats grazes. The episode, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, tells how Jupiter ordered Mercury to free Io, the god’s love who had been turned into a white heifer and set by Juno under the watch of the hundred-eyed Argus; once Argus slept, Mercury cut off his head and Io was delivered. Adriaen van de Velde, best known as the finest pastoral landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, set the myth in the sunlit meadow country he painted so lovingly, and dated it 1665. The painting is held in the Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.