Hercules’s encounter with the Erimanthean bore is not the best known of his labors. At first glance, it would appear to be nothing more than a new demonstration of his capacity to vanquish evil and save humanity from its excesses. Zurbarán’s depiction places the hero in the foreground at the center of the composition. He is about to kill the colossal wild bore that was laying waste to the land around Mount Erymanthus in Arcadia, terrifying its shepherds and attacking their herds. Hercules kills the fierce creature with his club, bringing peace to the previously haunted land. To satisfy the curiosity of Eurystheus, king of Tiryns, he carries the animal’s body on his shoulders to that Greek city. That part of the story appears in the right corner of the composition. Baltasar de Victoria relates this episode with that of the Calydonian bore, emphasizing Hercules’s deed by defining the bore as a furious, vengeful animal, and adding that poets compare vengeful and overly daring men to bold bores. Thus, in this approach to the Spanish monarch’s mythical ancestor, the emphasis is placed on his capacity to vanquish his worst enemies. It has been suggested that the basis for this depiction of Hercules’s figure is Cornelis Cort’s print of that hero’s defeat of the hydra of Lerna, in which his posture is a mirror image of the painting. However, Zurbarán’s most directly available model may have been Cort’s print of Hercules with the Pygmies, in which the hero appears with almost the same posture. In any case, this painting’s composition is very similar to Zurbarán’s Hydra of Lerna (P1249), in which the protagonist’s posture is very open as a result of the forced position of his arms and legs and his carefully modeled musculature, emphasized by exaggerated lighting that clearly distinguishes his figure out from its surroundings. His head is rendered with small touches of color applied over the red priming to achieve a straightforward though rather showy pictorial resolution. That priming, which also shows through in his hands, gives the hero a peculiar, almost sunburned appearance. Moreover, his very dark hair adds a deeply Spanish air.

Ruiz Gómez, Leticia, En El Palacio del Rey Planeta, Úbeda de los Cobos, A. (ed), Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2005, p.152