Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Arges.
The gallery
The Forge of the Cyclopes
Cornelis Cort, after Titian, 1572
This engraving by Cornelis Cort, made in Rome in 1572 after a ceiling painting by Titian, shows the one-eyed Cyclopes laboring in their underground smithy: several hammer a glowing mass on the anvil while another draws iron from the fire, a lion watching at the side. The subject is the very trio Hesiod names in the Theogony — Brontes, Steropes, and Arges ("Bright") — the divine smiths who forged the thunderbolt of Zeus, here imagined as Vulcan's forge-hands. As one of these labeled thunderbolt-makers, Arges belongs to the company of single-eyed craftsmen the print celebrates. Now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.88.91.96).
Vulcan's Forge (La fucina di Vulcano)
Giorgio Vasari, c. 1564
Giorgio Vasari's oil-on-copper Vulcan's Forge (c. 1564), now in the Uffizi in Florence, sets the smith-god Vulcan and his Cyclops assistants at the anvil while Minerva looks on. From the third-century BC poet Callimachus onward, the Hesiodic Cyclopes — Brontes, Steropes, and Arges — were imagined as the smiths who served at the divine forge, hammering the thunderbolts of Zeus and the weapons of the gods. Vasari's muscular forge-workers carry forward this tradition, and Arges, "the Bright," stands among the brotherhood of single-eyed craftsmen the painting depicts.
Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (La fragua de Vulcano)
Diego Velázquez, 1630
Painted by Diego Velázquez in 1630 and now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid, this canvas shows the radiant Apollo arriving at Vulcan's smithy to break the news of Venus's infidelity, the smith and his Cyclopean assistants frozen mid-labor around the anvil. The brawny forge-hands are the Cyclopes of later tradition — the same divine smiths whom Hesiod names Brontes, Steropes, and Arges, makers of the thunderbolt — recast here as Vulcan's underground workmen. Arges, one of this thunderbolt-forging trio, is represented among the muscular craftsmen whose interrupted toil gives the scene its drama.