The painting illustrates an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Mercury prepares to send Argus to sleep, with the alluring melodies of his flute, and then to kill him at Jove’s command. Argus, the shepherd with a hundred eyes and immense strength, was entrusted by Juno to keep watch over the young Io, who was loved by Jove and transformed by him into a heifer. The painting entered the Ambrosiana collection as a work by the Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa, but is now attributed to a late-seventeenth-century Genoese painter.
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