醉酒的赫拉克勒斯

Rubens had spent eight years in Italy soaking up antique sculpture and Titian, and here he turns all that learning onto a joke. The mightiest hero of myth, Hercules, who strangled lions and once held up the sky, is falling-down drunk, propped between a young nymph and a grinning satyr so he doesn't topple over. Rubens painted it on an oak panel around 1613, not long after he had settled back in Antwerp as the city's leading master. The heavy, unsteady body is the whole point. He knew the ancient statues of a muscled demigod perfectly well, and he chose to show that same body helpless. Ancient writers had told the story of Hercules undone by wine and women, and Rubens gives it to us at the exact moment the legend sags.