Landscape with Hercules Fighting Achelous Transformed into a Bull

In Ovid's Metamorphoses this fight is told by the loser. Achelous, a river god of western Greece, recalls how he and Hercules both sought to marry Deianira, a king's daughter, and how he tried every shape he had. Beaten as a man and then as a serpent, he became a bull, and Hercules forced his head down into the dust and tore off one of his horns. Water nymphs filled the horn with fruit and flowers, and it became the horn of plenty. Domenichino sets the struggle low on the right, the white bull already down on its knees and two figures watching, and gives the rest of the canvas to a river valley with waterfalls, grazing cattle and a castle on the far bank.

It was painted around 1621 or 1622 as the partner of the Hercules and Cacus beside it, and bought for Louis XIV nearly 50 years later. In 1737 it was proposed for the king's bedchamber at Versailles. In September 1792, a month after the monarchy fell, it was carted from Versailles to the Louvre, and from 1793 it hung in the new public museum there.