Hercules Slaying Antaeus
Hercules slaying Antaeus, c. 1460, is a painting by the Florentine artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo. It is small at 6 x 3 1/2 inches, painted in egg tempera on a panel of wood. It is now in the Uffizi gallery, Florence.
The painting shows the mythical giant
It is assumed that both this and
Large originals
A series of three large canvases illustrating the legends surrounding the figure of Hercules were painted by the Pollaiulo brothers – Antonio and Piero – for the Sala Grande of the
These were done around 1460, very early in Antonio's independent career, and must have loudly announced his arrival as a painter to Florence and beyond. They were perhaps commissioned by Piero di Cosimo de' Medici rather than his father, and were on cloth, still relatively unusual in Florence at this date.[3]
In 1494, Antonio Pollaiulo wrote a letter from Rome, the city at the time in the grip of an outbreak of plague, asking to be allowed home to Tuscany and hoping the Medicis would consent to the request because – "34 years ago I made the Labours of Hercules which are in the hall of their palace, made by me and my brother."[4][5]
Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine art historian praised the series of paintings and particularly praised Hercules Slaying Antaeus – "In the Medici palace Antonio painted three Hercules scenes of five braccia (about six feet across). In one of them he strangles Antaeus, a most beautiful picture, in which one can really see Hercules's effort in the strangling – And no less care is used for Antaeus, who, held tight in the arms of Hercules, is seen to lose all strength and with open mouth give up the ghost."
Antonio del Pollaiuolo also made a small "table bronze" sculpture of the same couple; Hercules features in others of his paintings and sculptures.
Small versions
The two small Uffizi works are first definitively recorded in a 1609 inventory of works in the Gondi household in Florence, by which time they had been joined together to form a diptych despite originally being separate works with different horizon lines.
The paintings disappeared during the German occupation of Florence in 1943 during World War II. Both re-emerged in San Francisco, in the mid-1960s, and were returned to Florence.
Notes
References
- Clark, Kenneth, The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form, orig. 1949, various edns, page refs from Pelican edn of 1960
- ISBN 0500235104
- "Vasari": Lives of the Artists.
- Wright, Alison, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome, 2005, Yale, ISBN 9780300106251, google books