Hercules and Omphale

The hero who killed the Nemean lion has been sold as a slave to Omphale, queen of Lydia, and set to women's work. Hercules crouches in a woman's dress, busy with the wool, while Omphale has taken his lion skin and his club and looks down at him with an easy, almost arrogant glance. Renaissance viewers knew the story as a warning, half joke and half serious, about what happens when women rule men, and Spranger plays it for irony. He painted it around 1585 in Prague for Emperor Rudolf II, on a sheet of copper barely 23 centimetres tall, and it has a companion of the same size, Vulcan and Maia. The little picture was kept in the emperor's treasury among precious objects until 1780, when it was moved to the picture gallery. Down on the left Spranger signed it as a man of Antwerp, BAR. SPRANGERS ANT. FESIT.