Tomorrow is International Earth Day, the start of a week of protests against man’s continuing destruction of the natural environment. Today’s tangentially related but perhaps metaphorically appropriate painting shows the mythical giant Antaeus, son of Gaia, classical goddess of the Earth, having the life crushed out of him by Hercules.

The picture was painted in about 1460 and has been convincingly attributed to the Florentine artist Antonio del Pollaiuolo, possibly with some assistance from his brother Piero. One of two surviving paintings from the Pollaiuolo workshop on the theme of “The Labours of Hercules”, it is a small image, painted in egg tempera on a panel of wood not much larger than a paperback novel.


Now in the Uffizi Gallery, this painting and a depiction of Hercules Slaying the Hydra were presumed lost for some twenty years after disappearing during the German occupation of Florence near the end of World War Two. They resurfaced in mysterious circumstances in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and were returned to their original home, where they are now displayed in a small cabinet behind bulletproof glass. They are all the more precious for constituting, themselves, the only surviving visual record of one of the most ambitious artistic projects carried out in fifteenth-century Florence. The painting reproduced here, like its companion, appears to be a small-scale copy of one of a series of large and ambitious canvases illustrating the legends of Hercules, painted by the selfsame Pollaiuolo brothers for the main hall of Cosimo de’ Medici’s palace in Florence.



The existence of that series is known from various documentary references. In 1494 Antonio del Pollaiuolo wrote a letter from Rome to Florence in which he pleaded to be allowed home to Tuscany to escape an outbreak of plague, hoping that the Medici would...

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