Date: 21-04-2002
Owning Institution: The Uffizi Gallery
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     Renaissance    

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 look favourably on the request because “34 years ago I made the ‘Exploits of Hercules’ which are in the hall of their palace, made by me and my brother”. However, shortly after he wrote that letter, the Medici were expelled from Florence during one of the city’s periodic outbursts of democratic fervour, and the paintings in question – numbering three in all – were removed to the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio on the orders of the governing Commune, or Signoria. They were still there some half a century later, although they have since disappeared. The Florentine art historian Giorgio Vasari was deeply impressed by them, singling out Hercules Slaying Antaeus for particular praise:

 “In the Medici Palace Antonio painted three Hercules scenes of 5 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, that his muscles and nerves are all gathered in the effort to finish Antaeus; and in the head of this Hercules one can see the gnashing of the teeth, in accordance with other parts, which right down to the toes swell with effort. 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.

Vasari’s remarks confirm that the picture reproduced here is a copy of that admired original. The sinewy realism of the struggling figures’ anatomies (epitomised by the knotted calves of Hercules and the effortful toes so keenly observed by Vasari) and the lucid, beautiful handling of the Tuscan landscape spread out beneath them has led most scholars to believe that only Antonio del Pollaiuolo himself could have been responsible for the work. The artist, having chosen to depict the climax of the story, has imagined himself fully into its drama, seeing and depicting above all the sheer physical awkwardness suggested by the myth he was given to illustrate. Hercules, having attempted to fight Antaeus conventionally, had found that each time he felled him his opponent sprang up renewed and refreshed by contact with the earth: Gaia, Antaeus’s mother, had been sustaining him. To kill him Hercules has to hold him off the ground while simultaneously squeezing him to death. In doing so Pollaiuolo’s hero, a feral and wiry man in a lionskin loincloth, grunts like an olympic weightlifter.

The Hercules paintings for the Medici are among the earliest pure mythologies in Renaissance art, predating other famous Florentine examples of the genre, such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, by some twenty years. Why, in 1460, should Cosimo de Medici have wanted to decorate the grand hall of his palace with three paintings of Hercules vanquishing his foes? A new taste for classically derived subjects was developing among the wealthy, humanist-educated Italian patrons of the fifteenth century. But there was probably more behind this particular commission than that alone. During the middle years of the fifteenth century, the immensely wealthy Medici, with Cosimo at the helm of family affairs, had in effect become the absolute rulers of the nominally republican Florentine state. The construction of a vast new Medici palace, on the scale of a town hall, subtly underscored the family’s status. So too did Pollaiuolo’s paintings, done for the grand hall of that palace just after its completion. Hercules was a favourite Florentine hero. Like David the slayer of Goliath, famously carved by Michelangelo at the end of the century, he was regarded as an alter-ego of the Florentine state: the embodiment of that ruthless and warlike spirit which (according at least to Florence’s mythology of itself) lay behind its great political and economic success.

In commissioning pictures with such a public propaganda message for his own private palace Cosimo de Medici was, I suspect, announcing his takeover of the city. He and his successors were to be the Herculean guarantors of the state’s wealth and security. This supposition cannot be proved, but is strongly supported by the Commune’s later decision not only to confiscate the pictures but exhibit them prominently in the Palazzo Vecchio, or town hall – as if to say that the heroism of Hercules belonged to the city as a whole and not, as they had thought, to the Medici. How better to reprove them for their presumption?

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