Hercules's Dog Discovers Purple Dye

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Hercules's Dog Discovers Purple Dye, by Peter Paul Rubens. 28 × 34 cm; oil on panel. Musée Bonnat, Bayonne, France

Hercules's Dog Discovers Purple Dye or The Discovery of Purple by Hercules's Dog is an oil painting by

Prado Museum.[1]

Description

Detail showing the dog with what appears to be a nautilus rather than a dye murex
A Phoenician coin depicting the legend of the dog biting the sea snail

The painting shows a scene from an origin myth in the Onomasticon (a collection of names, similar to a thesaurus) of Julius Pollux, a 2nd-century Graeco-Roman sophist. In Pollux's story, Hercules and his dog were walking on the beach on their way to court a nymph named Tyro. The dog bit a sea snail, and the snail's blood dyed the dog's mouth Tyrian purple. Seeing this, the nymph demanded a gown of the same color, and the result was the origin of purple dye.[2][3][4] (Some ancient sources attribute the myth to Melqart, a Tyrian deity identified with Heracles.)

Rubens's painting of this story depicts Hercules and the dog on the beach, with the dog's mouth stained.[2][3][4] Although the snail in the story should be a spiny murex, the kind of snail from which Tyrian purple was made, Rubens instead depicts a large smooth shell that resembles a nautilus.[5]

Context

Rubens's painting was originally part of a cycle of paintings of Hercules, which Rubens painted for the

Habsburg rulers of Spain as sketch for a painting intended to decorate their Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge. The paintings of the cycle contain allegorical references to the Habsburgs and the wealth they had obtained from the conquest of Peru.[2]

The "royal purple" whose origin story this particular painting depicts was used to clothe emperors, and by the time of Rubens it had become a standard aspect of the depiction of royalty and divinity.[6] By showing a scene of Hercules's travels to Phoenicia, the painting also refers to a traditional warning, attributed to the Phoenicians, to stay within the bounds of the Pillars of Hercules, and to the Habsburgs' own passage beyond that limit.[2]

Location and related works

Rubens's sketch painting is in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne[2] and is one of several works on Herculean subjects there. Others include a drawing of Hercules killing the Lernaean Hydra by Italian Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo[7] and a painting of Hercules killing Diomedes (c.1639–1641) by Charles Le Brun.[8]

Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany; his version is in Studiolo of Francesco I of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.[2]

An oil painting based on Rubens's sketch by

Prado Museum.[9]

References

  1. ^ Theodoor van Thulden, El descubrimiento de la púrpura at the Prado (Spanish)
  2. ^
    ISBN 9781351550390
  3. ^ a b Rubens, Snoeck, 2004, p. 170. Published on the occasion of Rubens, an exhibition at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille, France.
  4. ^ a b Held, Julius Samuel (1980), The Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens: A Critical Catalogue, Volume 1, Kress Foundation Studies in the History of European Art, vol. 7, National Gallery of Art, p. 279
  5. ISBN 9781351782494
  6. ISBN 9781315298368
  7. ^ Hercule tuant l'Hydra de Lerne, Musée Bonnat, retrieved 2018-04-21
  8. ^ Hercule terrassant Diomède, Musée Bonnat, retrieved 2018-04-21
  9. ^ Balis, Arnout (1986), Rubens Hunting Scenes, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, Harvey Miller, p. 211

External links

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