Ovid's next story is about Jupiter's pursuit of Io, and Juno's attempt to foil it with the help of Argus. (Thumbnail of peacock feathers under Creative Commons Attribution 1.0, photographed by Aaron Logan via wikipedia).
This 1532 picture (right) by Corregio, now in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, starts off the story with Io being seduced by Jupiter in the form of a cloud. The seduction is also portrayed by Sir John Hoppner in his 1785 painting. Hoppner's sitter for Io is believed to be the famous Lady Hamilton, mistress of Nelson and wife of Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples and collector of antiquities from Pompeii.
Lambert Sustris shows Jupiter and Io (still in human form) but Juno has seen them while in Lastman's 1681 painting in London's National Gallery Io is now in the form of a heifer, not that that stops Juno from asking for her. Juno then entrusts Io to Argus, a scene painted by Aert Schouman in this 1738 painting from the Dordrechts Museum. Unusually Victor Honoré Janssens took as his subject Inachus's recognition of Io in her new form.
Among
the many artists who took Mercury and Argus for their theme are Rubens
in this 1635 painting (left) and 25 years later or thereabouts
Velazquez in this painting from the Prado.
In the early 1770s Gandolfi painted two pictures of Mercury and Argus, one with Mercury piping to Argus, and the other of Mercury preparing to behead Argus. Once Argus had been beheaded his body was returned to Juno, a point in the story Rubens had already shown in this 1611 picture in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. In Jacopo Amigoni's 1730 version of the scene, it is just Argus' head that is returned to Juno.
