The Death of Hercules

1634. Oil on canvas. Not on display

This episode, which illustrates Hercules’s death, was narrated in great detail by Baltasar de Victoria, who tells how the hero killed Nessus the centaur for having attempted to rape Hercules’s bride, Deianira. After the wedding, when it came time to cross the Evinos River that runs through Aetolia, it could not be forded as the water was quite deep. Nessus the Centaur happed to be there and offered to carry Deianira across, [...] On the other bank, he [Hercules] heard voices, and Deianira’s screams as Nessus attempted to rape her. Seeking to defend her and to allow her to escape the Centaur, Hercules shot him with an arrow stained with the poison blood of the hydra. Zurbarán suggests this sequence of events in the lush background, where we see a figure of Nessus taken from an engraving by Hans Sebald Beham, fleeing with arms aloft and mortally wounded by the arrow that has just pierced his back. Before dying, Nessus gives Deianira a bloodstained shirt with the false promise that, if Hercules wears it, he will find all other women abhorrent. Later, stricken with jealousy by the presence of Iole, the beautiful daughter of the king of Oechalia, Deianira gives her husband the garment. He put it on, and as the venom was so active and efficient, it entered his flesh, reaching his bones in such a way that he was burning alive. He then made a bonfire from huge trees that he pulled out of the ground, and laying upon it the Nemean lion’s pelt that had defended him in his battles, with his club for a pillow, he gave his bow and arrows to Philoctetes, saying that it was impossible to win Troy without them. He set the fire and was consumed. The fire destroyed his human part, but by order of Jupiter, with the consent of all the other gods, he ascended to heaven and became one of them. This episode has been assigned a dynastic and glorifying meaning in which fire brings a ritual element to the apotheosis of the Spanish king’s mythical forbear. Serrera justified Zurbarán’s representation of Hercules suffering as a form of Christian symbolism. Moreover, the image of a deified hero would distance this work from the series’ overall viewpoint, calling for a clearly differentiated compositional treatment that may have exceeded the artist’s expressive capacities. Specialists have suggested a variety of models for this figure of Hercules. Soria proposed Pietro Torrigiano’s sculpture of the Penitent Saint Jerome (Seville, Museo de Bellas Artes), while Guinard suggested a print by French engraver Gabriel Salomon, dated 1528, which appears to be Zurbarán’s most direct model, as it includes Hercules’s strained expression, the logs on the pyre, which are barely visible behind the hero in the painting, and the bow and club in the foreground, which are also mentioned in Vitoria’s text. The artist must have closely studied this subject, and the care with which he depicted it is appreciable. The white clothing recall’s Zurbarán’s meticulous renderings of religious habits, and the head has details that are surprising, given the canvas’s intended location three meters above the ground: for example, the very fine brushstrokes with which the painter lights the eye, nose and teeth. The same could be said of the numerous tiny brushstrokes that represent the flames on Hercules’s body, which contrast with the sketchy rendering of innumerable parts of many other canvases from this series.