Hercules (Piero della Francesca)

Hercules is a fresco fragment by Piero della Francesca, his only known secular work and probably originally part of a cycle of mythological figures.

[1] It dates to sometime after 1465 and is now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which acquired it from Joseph Lindon Smith, who in turn bought it from the Florentine art dealer Elia Volpi.

[2] It was rediscovered during the second half of the 18th century in a room of the artist's family home on via delle Aggiunte in Sansepolcro.

It depicts Hercules as a nude with a lion-skin, standing in front of a basin, holding a club and with his left hand on his hip and his legs in an asymmetric contraposto pose.

Typical in Piero's work, this solemn, static, languid, and realistic pose has an innate sense of balance.