Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Talos.
The gallery
Death of Talos (volute-krater)
Talos Painter, c. 400–390 BC
The name-vase in Ruvo: winged figures pull the bronze pin from Talos' ankle as ichor drains — Apollonius' Crete automaton dying on Attic red-figure clay.
Jason and Medea beside Talos
Pieter van der Borcht, c. 16th century
Van der Borcht's engraving stages the Argonauts before the bronze giant — Renaissance print culture keeping Talos' ankle-pin death in circulation.
Talos (Argonaut cycle)
Asmus Jacob Carstens, c. 1790s
Carstens' neoclassical plate from the Argonautenzug: Talos as monumental bronze threat — late-eighteenth-century line for the guardian of Crete.
Didrachm of Phaistos (Talos)
Unknown (Cretan), c. 4th–3rd century BC
Silver didrachm of Phaistos in the Cabinet des Médailles: winged Talos as the city's bronze guardian — Crete minting its automaton into civic identity.
Talos (sculpture, Cambridge)
Michael Ayrton, 1971
Ayrton's bronze Talos in Cambridge — modern sculpture returning the Cretan automaton as a striding metal body in the open air.
On screen
In play
Argonautica
Apollonius of Rhodes
Book IV — Medea's enchantment, the ankle pin, and ichor draining from bronze: the canonical death of Talos.
Talos
Hephaestus' bronze guardian of Crete — circling the island three times a day until the Argonauts unpinned his life.