La morte di Ercole

In 1634 Philip IV was fitting out a new pleasure palace on the edge of Madrid, the Buen Retiro, and its grandest room was hung with the labours of Hercules, a hero the Spanish kings claimed as their own ancestor. Zurbarán, working down in Seville, was the one outsider called in to paint them, ten canvases set high above the windows. This is the last of the cycle: Hercules dying, wrapped in a shirt smeared with the poisoned blood of the centaur Nessus, whom you can just make out expiring in the dark behind him. Zurbarán left out the funeral pyre the myth calls for, so the hero seems to burn from within. Velázquez oversaw the whole decoration.