Mercury and Argos is an oil painting of mythological subject painted by Diego Velázquez for the Hall of Mirrors of the Royal Alcázar of Madrid around 1659, being one of his last works. Saved from the fire of 1734, it went to the Buen Retiro Palace and then to the Royal Palace of Madrid, where when it was inventoried in 1772 the increase in the fabric was noted, due to the addition of two bands, the one affecting its upper part being especially visible. approximately 25.5cm. In 1819 it entered the collections of the Prado Museum.
History of the painting edit
After his appointment as superintendent of works in 1643, Velázquez carried out tasks as a designer or architect in the definition of the interior spaces of the Alcázar. In the last of these interventions, in 1658, he was in charge of the decoration of the Great Hall or of the Mirrors, above the main door, for which according to Antonio Palomino he provided "the floor plan of the ceiling with the divisions, and shape of the paintings, and in each painting written the story, which was to be executed. 2 Agostino Mitelli and Angelo Michele Colonna, brought by Velázquez from Italy, were in charge of the architectural decoration, dealing with their stories, dedicated to the fable of Pandora, Juan Carreño de Miranda and Francisco Rizi. Velázquez himself reserved for these tasks an apparently minor work, the creation of four paintings in landscape format and mythological subject destined for the windows, forgotten by Palomino in his extensive description of the oil and fresco works that were done in the room. and that, as he said, they pleased the kings so much that they frequently went up to see the painters working on them.
The affairs of the Velazquez oil paintings are known from the inventory of 1686, in which the Mercury and Argos is mentioned along with three other canvases lost in the fire of the Alcázar: Apollo skins a satyr (presumably Marsyas), Psyche and Cupid and Adonis and Venus. For Fernando Marías, the four canvases could have in common a "reflection on vision and its absence", culminating in the blindness of the hundred-eyed giant Argos after the dream that the god Mercury causes him with his enchanting music.
Its completion is almost unanimously placed in 1659, the date on which the decoration of the room was completed. For the figure of Argos, the dying Galata from the Capitoline Museums has been proposed as models , one of the classical marbles - then in the Ludovisi collection - of which Velázquez commissioned a cast on his second trip to Italy, combined according to Charles Tolnay with the bronze nude over Hezekiah in Michelangelo 's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel . According to Enriqueta Harris, the same Hellenistic sculpture would have inspired the figure of Mercury in terms of the arms and the position of the shoulders. 4 5 Marías, for his part, points out a certain relationship of dependence between this work and The Dream of Saint Joseph by Giovanni Lanfranco that Velázquez was able to see during his stay in Rome.
Content of the fable edit
The literary source is Ovid 's Metamorphoses (1, 688-721): Jupiter, in order to love Io , secretly spreads an extensive mist over the earth, but a jealous Juno suspects and dissipates it. To avoid being discovered, Jupiter cannot do anything other than transform Io into a beautiful calf. Juno, scaly, claims her and places Argos, the giant with a hundred eyes, who never slept, as one of her eyes was always awake, as her guardian. But Jupiter sends Mercury to rescue her and the god's messenger manages to close her hundred eyes with the sweet music of his flute, a moment represented in Velázquez's painting, then killing her and rescuing the calf.
Velázquez's interpretation of the fable edit
Once Velázquez chose to represent his protagonists in life size, the landscape format of the canvas forced a development in which the recumbent figures had to predominate over the upright ones, which would force him to give a less than heroic treatment to his subjects. Thus Mercury is not the bold soldier who raises the sword, as Rubens conceived when dealing with the same subject in the series of mythological paintings that he provided for the Torre de la Parada , but the devious assassin who approaches, creeping cautiously and using the shadows. . In their primitive state, moreover, those two figures, together with the cow Io receding wrapped in shadows, filled the canvas more than they do today, having been enlarged at the top and bottom.
To understand the Velazquez way of approaching the myth, a comparison with the aforementioned painting by Rubens can be very useful, as Julián Gállego has done in 1990 7 and Jonathan Brown in 1999, especially this one when presenting both paintings together, property of the Museo del Prado , in the Velázquez, Rubens and Van Dyck exhibition . 8 In the same way that Velázquez would do later, Rubens, who is supposed to have a respect for mythological matters denied to the "demystifier" Velázquez, did not make the guardian of the cow Io a giant with a hundred eyes. Rubens' Argos is a rough, bald cowboy, who sleeps unnaturally, with his head drooping due to his own weight sinking into his left shoulder. His only unheroic weapon is the shepherd's crook. Mercury, for his part, seems inspired by the Borghese Gladiator from the Louvre Museum , although wrapped in a red chlamys, stripped of any attribute of his divinity. Velázquez, then, did not deviate from Rubens when presenting these characters as "jayanes", in Julián Gállego's expression. Even in the syringe or seven-reed flute that Mercury has left to take up the sword and in the hat - "an old hat with stiff feathers, typical of that ruffian", according to Gállego, but winged as befits the god -, Velázquez shows greater respect than Rubens for the classical accessories that should allow the mythical narrative to be recognized in the painting. And both, as has been noted, use classical sources in their figures.
It is not, therefore, the way of approaching the mythical characters that distances them, but the different atmosphere that surrounds them. In Rubens, a dramatized landscape reinforces the rhetorical potential established by the violent contrast between the dynamic figure of Mercury, in which flamenco places the accent of his composition, and the passive image of Argos. In Velázquez the landscape is reduced to the essential: an opening between the rocks to a twilight sky that surrounds the cow Io in shadows and accompanies the dream of Argos. An atmosphere of stillness and silence that is not disturbed by Mercury, gliding cautiously. Faced with the pompous tone of Rubens, Velázquez chooses calm, which lies in the different way they have of confronting the myth: for Rubens it is something extraordinary, as are the miracles of the Christian religion, even when it is not accompanied in its translation. plastic representation of those accessories that make gods and heroes superhuman beings, while in Velázquez the miracle, without ceasing to be extraordinary and without ceasing to be recognized, becomes everyday and is received in silence.
Technique edit
Velázquez used very fluid brush strokes in his execution, in which the pigment accumulates at the ends of the stroke. The entire surface has been treated in a similar way, and thus the heads also seem blurred, due to the quick and light way of its execution, only the facial features being noted with brief brown brush strokes. The use of a large quantity of binder also makes these brush strokes almost transparent, especially in the backgrounds, showing through the lower layers of color and the base itself. The variations introduced, the famous pentimentos of Velázquez, mainly affect the cow Io, which in a first solution was painted with its head facing in the opposite direction to the final one, which can only be observed in this case by infrared reflectography due to the lightness of the color layer used in its creation. As for the color, on a slightly brown base, in addition to the white and black, with which he delimited the contours, he used lapis lazuli for the sky, azurite for the grayish blues of the Argos dress, mixing it with black, and mercury vermilion with iron oxide, white lead and enamel in different quantities on the flesh and on the red layer of Mercury, finished with a layer of red lacquer.