Herkules farnese michelangelo biography

The heroically-scaled Hercules is one of the most famous sculptures of Antiquity, and has fixed the image of the mythic hero in the European imagination. Alessandro Farnese was well placed to form one of the greatest collections of classical sculpture that has been assembled since Antiquity.

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It stood for generations in its own room at Palazzo Farnese, Rome, where the hero was surrounded by frescoed depictions of his feats by Annibale Carracci and his studio, executed in the s. The Farnese statue was moved to Naples in and is now displayed in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale. The Farnese Hercules is a massive and muscular marble statue, following a lost original cast in bronze through a method called lost wax casting.

It depicts a weary Hercules leaning on his club, which has his lion-skin draped over it. He is performing one of the last of The Twelve Labours, which is suggested by the apples of the Hesperides he holds behind his back. This prominently-sited statue was well liked by the Romans, and copies have been found in Roman palaces and gymnasiums: another, coarser, stood in the courtyard of Palazzo Farnese; one with the feigned but probably ancient inscription "Lykippos" has stood in the court of Palazzo Pitti, Florence, since the sixteenth century.

The sculpture has been reassembled and restored by degrees. According to a letter of Guglielmo della Porta, the head had been recovered separately, from a well in Trastevere, and was bought for Farnese through the agency of della Porta, whose legs made to complete the figure were so well regarded that when the original legs were recovered from ongoing excavations in the Baths of Caracalla, della Porta's were retained, on Michelangelo's advice, in part to demonstrate that modern sculptors could bear direct comparison with the ancients.

The original legs, from the Borghese collection, were not reunited with the sculpture until Goethe, in his Italian Journey, recounts his differing impressions upon seeing the Hercules with each set of legs, marvelling at the clear superiority of the original ones.

When was the farnese hercules made

Hercules is caught in a rare moment of repose. Leaning on his knobby club which is draped with the pelt of the Nemean Lion, he holds the apples of the Hesperides in his right hand, but conceals them behind his back like a baseball pitcher with a knuckleball. Many engravings and woodcuts spread the fame of the Farnese's Hercules.

By the find was already included in the set of engravings for Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae "Mirror of Rome's Magnificence" and connoisseurs, artists and tourists gaped at the original, which stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Farnese, protected under the arcade. In , during his trip to Rome, Hendrik Goltzius sketched the statue in the palazzo courtyard.