Hercules and the Hydra (Pollaiuolo)

Hercules and the Hydra is a c. 1475 tempera grassa-on-panel painting by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, forming a pair with the same artist's Hercules slaying Antaeus.^[1] Both works are now in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence.^[2] It measures 17 cm (6.6 in) by 12 cm (4.7 in), small like all his surviving mythological paintings. It is assumed that both these are miniature copies by the artist of two out of the three enormous (some 12 feet square) paintings on canvas of the Labours of Hercules commissioned from Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo by Piero di Cosimo de' Medici for the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Medici in the 1460s, which have now been lost.

The originals were in a large room designed to impress visitors. They were 6 braccia square or high—about 3.5 metres, on cloth, so with over-life size figures; Hercules and the Nemean lion was the third.^[3] For some fifty years after their completion, these "were amongst the most famous and influential works of their time", but are now lost, "like nearly every canvas of the date".^[4]

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.^[5]

In 1494, Antonio Pollaiulo wrote a letter to Gentil Virginio Orsini from Rome, which was 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."^[6][7] They were in the Palazzo Medici inventory after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine art historian praised the series of paintings, especially 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."

They were mentioned again in Raffaello Borghini's Riposo of 1584 before vanishing from the documentary record.

They show the influence of the Neoplatonic Academy, harking back to classical art and interpreting Greek and Roman myth in the light of Christian philosophy.^[8]

Possibly produced for a private study, the two works now in the Uffizi are now generally thought to be copies after two of the works in the Labours set, done many years later, possibly for the Medici. One relates to Antonio's bronze sculpture Hercules slaying Antaeus, which was commissioned by Lorenzo around 1475 and is now in the Museo nazionale del Bargello.

The two paintings in the Uffizi 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. They were lost in 1943 during the Second World War but recovered in Los Angeles in 1963 by Rodolfo Siviero. They were restored in 1991.

• Clark, Kenneth, The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form, orig. 1949, various edns, page refs from Pelican edn of 1960
• Hartt, Frederick, History of Italian Renaissance Art, (2nd edn.)1987, Thames & Hudson (US Harry N Abrams), ISBN 0500235104
• "Vasari": Giorgio Vasari's joint biography of the Pollaiuolo brothers, in his Lives of the Artists.
• Wright, Alison, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome, 2005, Yale, ISBN 9780300106251, google books

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