Sisyphus

In Greek myth Sisyphus, a king of Corinth, was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for ever, only to watch it roll back down each time he neared the top. Zanchi shows him at full strain, a heavy bare body pressed against the rock, caught in hard light against a dark ground.

The canvas has a partner. Tityus, by Zanchi's contemporary Giovanni Battista Langetti, a Genoese painter working in Venice, shows another figure punished without end, a giant whose liver is torn by a vulture. The two pictures share their format, their manner and their sharp contrasts of light and shade, and both date from the early 1660s. Both belonged to the dukes of Mantua. By 1826 they were with the collector Martial Reghellini in Venice and Brussels, and in 1831 King William I of the Netherlands bought the pair for the Mauritshuis. The two now hang in the Gallery Prince Willem V.