Hercules and the Lion of Nemea

The first task set for Hercules was to kill a lion that no weapon could wound. Its hide turned aside arrows and blades, so in the end he had to wrestle it down and choke it with his bare arms, and afterwards he wore the unbreakable skin as his armour. That is the moment Rubens takes: not a clean heroic pose but the heavy, close-locked effort of the struggle. He could paint a body under that kind of strain because he had studied it directly. Rubens spent eight years in Italy as a young man, drawing the ancient statues of Rome and the muscular figures of Michelangelo, and that schooling in antique sculpture runs through everything here, in the weight of the limbs and the way the man and the animal seem carved from the same block. The subject was a favourite of his, treated more than once by his hand and by his busy Antwerp workshop.