Hercules at the Crossroads

The subject is an old moral test. As a young man, Hercules is said to have met two women at a fork in the road, one offering an easy life of pleasure, the other a hard road of virtue and lasting honour. He chooses the hard road. Giovanni De Min painted this in 1812, when he was 26 and formed in the neoclassical world then centred on the sculptor Antonio Canova, the most famous artist in Europe. That taste wanted clear outlines, calm bodies borrowed from ancient statues, and stories that taught something. A young hero choosing effort over ease was exactly the kind of lesson the academies liked to set before their students. De Min lays the two paths out plainly, the figures posed and modelled like a relief carved in stone.