philippe caudroit

Hercules Farnese Bronze with brown patina, Italian school of the19th century

Height 74 cm
Width 34 cm

Our sculpture represents a muscular, but tired Hercules (Heracles), leaning on his club on which is partly draped the skin of the Nemean lion. Heracles' fight against the Nemean lion is the first of the twelve labors of Hercules. In the vast forest of Nemea in Argolis, a region of the Peloponnese, there lived a lion that devoured herds of cattle. This lion, son of Selene the goddess of the moon, benefiting from a gigantic force, had a very hard skin, impenetrable by the arrows. Heracles is ordered to kill the lion. The arrows he shoots at him fall broken around the beast. With his club Heracles tries to knock him out. But this is useless because the lion's skull is protected by the thick skin. Heracles must then resolve to strangle the lion with his hands. A hand-to-hand combat ensues. The animal resists but is ultimately defeated. With the claws of the animal Heracles dismembers it. From the skin he makes a cuirass coat held on his head by the lion's skull. This representation of Hercules was well known in antiquity, and among many other versions, a Hellenistic or Roman bronze reduction, found at Folignio is in the Louvre Museum. A small Roman marble copy can be seen in the Museum of the Ancient Agora in Athens. The original work is a marble sculpture from the High Hellenistic period more than three meters high, made by Glycon of Athens. It can still be admired at the Archaeological Museum of Naples.