Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Brontes.
The gallery
The Forge of Vulcan (La Fragua de Vulcano)
Diego Velázquez, 1630
Painted in Rome in 1630 and now in the Museo del Prado, Velázquez's canvas stages the moment the radiant god Apollo arrives at the smithy to tell Vulcan of Venus's infidelity. The lame smith-god freezes at his anvil while his half-naked workmen — the Cyclopes who serve as his forge-hands — pause mid-stroke, hammers raised, their muscular bodies lit by the glow of the hearth. In the Hesiodic tradition the three Cyclopes of the forge are named Brontes ('Thunder'), Steropes ('Lightning') and Arges ('Bright'), the makers of Zeus's thunderbolt; Velázquez renders them as flesh-and-blood labourers, giving the eldest and first-named of the trio, Brontes, his most familiar guise as a sweating ironworker at the divine furnace.
Vulcan's Forge (The Forge of Vulcan)
Luca Giordano, c. 1660
In this Baroque painting of about 1660 the Neapolitan master Luca Giordano shows the underground workshop of Vulcan as a scene of tremendous physical labour: the Cyclopes, the god's gigantic one-eyed assistants, swing their hammers in unison to beat out the thunderbolts of Jupiter on a glowing anvil. Hesiod's Theogony makes these forge-Cyclopes — Brontes, Steropes and Arges — the very smiths who armed the sky-god with his lightning, and Giordano captures the din of their work, the sparks and the strain of their bodies, turning the myth of Brontes and his brothers into a study of heat, muscle and elemental force.
Venus Supervises the Work of the Cyclopes in the Forge of Vulcan
Andrea Vicentino, c. 1580–1600
This canvas by the Venetian painter Andrea Vicentino, set into the ceiling of the Sala del Senato in the Doge's Palace, shows the goddess Venus presiding over the labour of the Cyclopes as they work in Vulcan's forge. The hulking smiths — Brontes and his brothers in the Hesiodic naming — hammer at the anvil and tend the fire while the goddess looks on, an allegory of arms forged under the gaze of love. Vicentino renders the forge-Cyclopes as the brawny, half-divine craftsmen of myth, the same beings whose names mean Thunder, Lightning and Brightness and who hammered Zeus's bolts into shape.