The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents

Juno knew whose child he was. Hercules was Jupiter's son by a mortal woman, Alcmene, and the goddess sent two serpents into the nursery to finish him in his sleep. The baby strangled them. Batoni stages the moment as a household emergency: the child with a snake in each fist, Alcmene's husband Amphitryon rushing in with an oil lamp, Alcmene herself behind him.

He signed it at the lower left with his initials and the year, 1743, a year after finishing its companion piece, in which a grown Hercules chooses between virtue and pleasure. Both were painted for the Gerini, a marquis family of Florence.

The picture had a second life in the painter's own country. In 1791 a young artist from Arezzo, Fedele Acciai, copied this canvas and its companion as a pair, and those two copies are still in Arezzo, in the building that houses the prefecture.