Landscape with Hercules Dragging Cacus from His Cave

Ovid tells this story in his poem on the Roman calendar, and it belongs to the ground of Rome itself. Hercules, driving home the cattle he had taken from the giant Geryon, rested them by the Tiber. In the night Cacus, a fire-breathing son of Vulcan who lived in a cave on the Aventine hill, stole some of them and dragged them in backwards by their tails, so that the hoofprints pointed the wrong way. Their lowing gave him away. Domenichino paints the end of it: Hercules hauling the thief out by one foot while the herdsmen hurry after him and the recovered cattle graze on the right, under a great outcrop of rock.

He painted it around 1621 or 1622 for the villa Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi was laying out in Rome, as a pair with the Hercules and Achelous that hangs beside it, and both canvases were later enlarged with narrow strips along their edges. The two have not always been together. From 1875 to 1928 this one was sent on deposit to the château of Fontainebleau, while its partner stayed at the Louvre.