Icarus Atlas

Cyclops Laboring at the Forge (Vergilius Vaticanus, folio 8v)

Anonymous late-antique illuminator, c. 400 CE

A detail from the Vatican Vergil (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 3225), one of the oldest surviving illustrated manuscripts of classical literature, made around 400 CE. The folio illuminates Virgil's Georgics, showing a one-eyed Cyclops bent over the forge with hammer in hand. In Hesiod's Theogony, Steropes ("Lightning-maker") is one of the three smith-Cyclopes — alongside Brontes and Arges — who hammered out the thunderbolt for Zeus in the fiery workshop; ancient art rarely names them individually, so a laboring forge-Cyclops such as this stands for the type to which Steropes belongs.

Hephaestus and the Cyclopes Forging the Shield of Achilles

Unknown Greco-Roman sculptor, Greco-Roman period

A marble bas-relief in the Capitoline Museums (Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome) showing Hephaestus and his Cyclopes hammering at the anvil, with Athena watching at left and a goddess (Thetis or Hera) at right. The Cyclopes are the divine smith Hephaestus' assistants at the forge — the same brawny one-eyed craftsmen Hesiod names Brontes, Steropes, and Arges. Steropes embodies the forge-Cyclops as a metalworking power, and reliefs of the workshop of Hephaestus/Vulcan are the principal surviving way the three smiths, him among them, were pictured.

Vulcan's Forge (The Forge of Vulcan)

Luca Giordano, c. 1660

Oil on canvas by the Neapolitan Baroque painter Luca Giordano (1634–1705), now in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. The museum describes the scene as the forge of Vulcan, god of fire, "in which his assistants the Cyclopes are hammering out lightning for the thunderer god, Jupiter." The thunderbolt-forging Cyclopes are exactly Hesiod's Brontes, Steropes, and Arges: Steropes ("Lightning") personifies the flash that crowns the bolt, and Baroque forge-of-Vulcan pictures like this dramatize the very labor — beating out Zeus' lightning — that defines him.