Hercules, Pt 1: Proteus - Walter Crane

Hercules, Pt 1: Proteus - Walter CraneA print of Walter Crane's Hercules and Proteus the opening plate of the three part Hercules sequence in Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (Houghton Mifflin, 1892). Hercules wrestles Proteus, the old man of the sea, as the shape shifting god cycles through lion, serpent, fire and flood in an attempt to break free. In the myth, Hercules on the trail of the golden apples of the Hesperides seeks out Proteus because the sea god alone

a giant who challenged every traveller passing through Libya to wrestle and killed them when he won

A print of a Hellenistic Prince — the classical bronze type of an idealised nude ruler

A print of Richard Roland Holst's Apollo — the Dutch Symbolist's rendering of the Olympian god of light

He led the Trojan army for nine of the ten years of the Greek siege

and it was painted endlessly from Roman Pompeii onward

Only after completion did the Grand Duke ask him to give the sculpture a subject

A close-up

The Ionic developed in the Greek colonies of western Asia Minor (ancient Ionia

hunting the Calydonian boar

Pair with the companion plates: Medici Vase and Piranesi Vase

and Zeus set the two of them together in the sky as the constellation Gemini

as a household emblem of the wild and of young unmarried womanhood