The painting simultaneously describes two scenes of an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses depicted in a wide river landscape. In the foreground, Juno instructs Argus to watch Io (who was transformed into a cow and presented to his wife, Juno, by Jupiter, who had been caught red-handed while seducing his mistress shortly before). In the middle ground we can see Juno adorning the feathers of a peacock with the eyes of Argus, after Mercury had decapitated the latter on Jupiter’s orders. Above the scene appears the silhouette of the now-freed Io.