Hércules y los pigmeos

In Ferrara in the 1530s Dosso Dossi was court painter to the Este dukes, and their ruler was named Ercole, the Italian for Hercules. That coincidence gave a Hercules picture a flattery built in. Here the hero has just wrestled the giant Antaeus to death and dropped into an exhausted sleep, and while he sleeps an army of thumb-sized pygmies swarms over him with tiny spears. In the old story he wakes, laughs, and scoops the whole militia up in his lion skin. Dossi paints it under a strange dusk light, with a landscape that seems half-dreamed, the sort of poetic mood the Ferrara court prized. The little warriors are set at real ant-scale, easy to miss against the sleeping giant's arm.