Hercules defeats King Geryon

The hero has his back to us, which is unusual, and the body we see is nobody's ideal. The shoulders are heavy, the waist has thickened, there are folds of middle age above the hip. Zurbarán built the figure from the proportion studies of Dürer, the German painter whose anatomy books were working tools in Spanish studios a century after his death. In front of him lies Geryon, the king whose cattle Hercules had been sent to steal and who came out to defend his herd. You know him by the crown. Zurbarán painted this in 1634 as one of ten canvases on the hero's exploits, and behind the two figures he put a broad classical landscape with what look like the remains of an old tower.