At Eurystheus’s behest, Hercules killed the Cretan Bull, a dangerous and ferocious animal that was decimating Crete. The Cretan Bull was a handsome bull that Poseidon had asked the king of Crete to sacrifice. Minos’s decision to sacrifice another animal instead angered the god, who then provoked Pasiphae’s carnal encounter with the bull. Their offspring was the Minotaur, an extraordinary animal pursued and killed by Hercules, who then took to it Mycenae. As Rosa López Torrijos has already suggested, like Hercules’s fights with Antaeus, Cerberus, the Nemean lion, the hydra of Lerma and the Erymanthean bore, this episode can be considered a mythological reference to the Spanish crown’s battles with the Dutch, English and French over the course of Philip’s reign. Philip IV’s victories, and his success at subduing them, are reflected on the walls of the Hall of Realms. Serrera, however, added a particular nuance to the present episode when he pointed out the markedly Spanish symbolism of the bull, leading to a specifically peninsular reading: Just as Hercules controlled the animal’s brute force, a wise and powerful ruler is the only one capable of controlling his people, or in this case, his realms. The hero’s haughty air and the bull’s submissiveness embody the political ideals espoused by Olivares. Hercules’s placement at the center of the composition, with his head in the shadows but his brightly lit body standing out against the dark background, follows the general rule for the entire series, but in this context, it is one of the most interesting of all. As in other paintings from this group, Zurbarán drew on Cornelis Cort for the position of the main figure and of the bull. His placement of Hercules is partially based on that hero’s battle with the hydra, although the anatomy is softened here by subtle pictorial modeling. The bull is sketched in with just a few strokes and can be related to the print showing Hercules’s battle with Acheolous. The riverside landscape -a lush woods with a body of water running behind Hercules’s back at the right of the composition- is also quite important. The conception of the treetops and the meticulous treatment of the branch in the foreground certainly recall other fragments of landscape that appear in Zurbarán’s religious compositions. Serrera places its origins in both Flemish painting and Velázquez: The painter takes pleasure in its execution, obtaining one of his finest achievements as a landscape painter, although this work also appears to be imbued with aspects of the classical Italian landscape.

Ruiz Gómez, Leticia, En El Palacio del Rey Planeta, Úbeda de los Cobos, A. (ed), Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2005, p.156