Hercule tuant les oiseaux du lac Stymphale

This is the only painting of a pagan myth Albrecht Duerer ever made, which is part of why it feels like an experiment. He finished it in 1500, not long after his first journey to Venice, and the dark Italian landscape with its flashes of red comes straight out of what he had seen in the south. Hercules draws his bow at two of the man-eating birds of Lake Stymphalia, one of his 12 labours. The picture was most likely ordered by Frederick the Wise, the Saxon elector, for a room at his castle in Wittenberg hung with other scenes of Hercules. Duerer was building his name in Nuremberg then, and mythology was a language his German patrons were only beginning to want.