Hercules diverting the Course of the River Alpheus

The labour shown here is the cleaning of the stables, and there is no dung in sight. Hercules had promised to clear out byres where three thousand oxen had stood for years, and he did it by breaking the bank of the river Alpheus and sending the water through. Zurbarán painted the moment the flood is loosed, in 1634, for the throne room of the new Buen Retiro palace in Madrid, where scenes of the hero hung above a room full of recent Spanish victories. Readers at court took the muck to stand for the country's own troubles and the hero for the ruler who clears them away. The hero himself is not flattered. He has a slack belly and a lined, sceptical face, and he is pushed to the left edge, lit from low down so the foreshortening bites. The rocks and churning water beside him were worked up from the same vocabulary Zurbarán used in a Saint Anthony Abbot painted around the same years, and his pose follows a print of Hercules from the title page of a fencing manual published in 1628.