Hercules and the Lion

Hercules and the LionA print of Hercules and the Lion the hero wrestling the Nemean Lion in the first of his Twelve Labours. The Nemean Lion was an enormous beast that had been ravaging the countryside around Nemea in the Peloponnese. Its hide was invulnerable to iron, bronze or stone arrows bounced off it, spears shattered against it so Hercules could not kill it with any weapon. Instead he ran it down into its cave, blocked one of the two entrances, went in after it,

Pair with the companion plates: Borghese Vase and Piranesi Vase

and most of those copies survive only as torsos — the arms

where the Temple of Castor and Pollux stood in the Forum

passing through on his way to or from the Garden of the Hesperides

at the Vatican and elsewhere

the nymphs and muses haunted its springs

The subject was painted and sculpted continuously from archaic Greek vase painting onward

An old man crouches at the base

The pose is chiastic — weight on the right leg

The winged hero Pegasus rears beneath his rider

A print of Walter Crane's Bellerophon Riding Pegasus — an illustration from Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (Houghton Mifflin

The radical illusion — the soft give of skin where it should be solid stone — is what makes the sculpture famous