The labours of the young Herzog
Ercole’s popularity in the peplum films came from his bodily spectacle
Between the late 1950s and the 1960s and 1970s, at least a hundred pepla (or peplum films) were made, mostly in Italy: costume films in which Heracles, turned into Ercole, becomes a pop myth called to fight against anyone – from Samson (Ercole sfida Sansone, 1963) to Franchi and Ingrassia (Franco e Ciccio e Maciste contro Ercole nella valle dei guai, 1961). The film traditionally seen as marking the start of the boom is, rightly, Le fatiche di Ercole by Pietro Francisci (1958).
Ercole’s popularity in the peplum came from his bodily spectacle: the bodybuilder-hero offered a simple visual model, instantly recognisable and easy to export. The myth, narratively elastic, suited quick, low-budget productions perfectly.
An anti-peplum between muscles and everyday reality
In this fanciful landscape, Herakles (1962) stands out: an early short film by Werner Herzog (b. 1942) that alternates the heroic poses of a bodybuilder with documentary footage of reality: traffic, military exercises, accidents, destruction. The silent film, shot on 16 mm and twelve minutes long, uses superimposed titles: the question “Will he clean the Augean stables?” is followed by images of rubbish dumps. To each of the six “feats” evoked, Herzog replies with fragments of the present that show the fragility, violence and absurdity of the modern world. The result is an anti-peplum: an Ercole powerless before reality, a hero already made obsolete by the present.
His myth travels as far as the Buddhist world, where Heracles becomes Vajrapani, guardian and protector of the Buddha
Heracles – “glory of Hera” – is, in the Greek tradition, an intrinsically ambiguous figure: hero and god, mortal and immortal, a universal figure for all seasons. In the Roman version he becomes Hercules, keeping his genealogy but pragmatically adapted: protector of soldiers and of commerce. And more: between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD, his myth travels as far as the Buddhist world, where Heracles becomes Vajrapani, guardian and protector of the Buddha.
The enduring presence of Hercules in the Western world
In painting he was portrayed by Antonio del Pollaiolo, Tintoretto, Rubens and Annibale Carracci; in sculpture by Lysippos (of whose work Roman copies survive), Canova and Bandinelli. In literature he is everywhere: in Homer, in the Divine Comedy, in the tragedies of Sophocles, Aristophanes, Euripides and Seneca, down to 1954 and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Hercules und der Stall des Augias.
Our hero was born of the union between Zeus and Alcmene, wife of Amphitryon: he is therefore a demigod destined, after his feats and a final purification, to be received among the gods. Zeus decrees his apotheosis and Athena, at his will, takes him from the pyre and leads him to Olympus. Zeus, as is well known, did not shy away from love affairs with immortal and mortal women, married or not: ideal material to feed Hera’s jealousy. The most famous of the god’s lovers is Europa, whom he abducted after turning himself into a placid white bull. He seduces, rapes, abandons, begets – without any pedagogical or moralising vocation.
Birth, wonders and the twelve labours
Diodorus Siculus tells that Zeus, to win Hera over, persuaded her to adopt Heracles: to imitate a birth, the goddess held him to her breast and then let him fall from the bed. We do not know whether he landed on his head or his bottom; what is certain is that the beginnings were not promising. At eight months Hera sends two snakes into his cradle: Heracles strangles them without batting an eyelid.
He grows as strong as Schwarzenegger, highly skilled in the arts of war, rather less in music. Offended by a reproach, he kills his teacher Linus with a lyre; as punishment he is sent to tend flocks until the age of eighteen. There he kills a lion that is terrorising the area. From then on, no one can stop him.
Then comes his cousin Eurystheus, king of Tiryns, who imposes on him – by decree of Zeus and to atone for the crimes of his madness – the famous twelve labours. Heracles consults the oracle at Delphi, which confirms his sentence with the usual unflappable certainty of the “oracle’s handbook”.
Heracles strangling the snakes before the eyes of Amphitryon and Alcmene. Fragment.
Fresco in the Fourth Style. AD 60–79
Pompeii, Archaeological Park, House of the Vettii (VI. 15. 1. n)
Fresco in the Fourth Style. AD 60–79
Pompeii, Archaeological Park, House of the Vettii (VI. 15. 1. n)
The Nemean lion and the uncertain order of the twelve labours
He deals with the first labour, The Nemean lion, with relative ease: unable to pierce its invulnerable hide, he chokes it and wears its skin as a cloak and headdress – an iconic, almost “transitional” object, somewhere between Linus’s blanket and Beuys’s felt. Originally there were to be ten labours, but Eurystheus disallows two: the Lernaean Hydra – because Heracles is helped by Iolaus – and the Augean stables, because Heracles allegedly accepted payment for the work. And so they become twelve.
The order varies with the sources: Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus and the modern tradition do not agree. Apollodorus gives The Augean stables as the fifth, Diodorus Siculus The Stymphalian birds; the modern tradition (Treccani) places The Cretan bull fifth and The Augean stables sixth. Great confusion under the skies of Mount Olympus. After cleaning the stables, Heracles is said to have founded the Olympic Games. Here too, however, the sources diverge: the myths about the origin of the Olympics change with the time and place in which they are told, making it hard to establish a shared “official version”. The Greeks practised a retroactive mythopoeia: every city, every sanctuary, every poet sought to claim an older origin for their own city, linking the games to local heroes and, often, to Heracles, “the hero par excellence”.
The order varies with the sources: Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus and the modern tradition do not agree. Apollodorus gives The Augean stables as the fifth, Diodorus Siculus The Stymphalian birds; the modern tradition (Treccani) places The Cretan bull fifth and The Augean stables sixth. Great confusion under the skies of Mount Olympus. After cleaning the stables, Heracles is said to have founded the Olympic Games. Here too, however, the sources diverge: the myths about the origin of the Olympics change with the time and place in which they are told, making it hard to establish a shared “official version”. The Greeks practised a retroactive mythopoeia: every city, every sanctuary, every poet sought to claim an older origin for their own city, linking the games to local heroes and, often, to Heracles, “the hero par excellence”.
Hércules lucha con el león de Nemea
Artist: Francisco de Zurbarán
Completed: 1634
Dimensions: 151 × 166 cm
Location: Museo del Prado
Completed: 1634
Dimensions: 151 × 166 cm
Location: Museo del Prado
Description:
The painting shows Heracles fighting the Nemean lion. The Spanish art critic Soria suggests a comparison with a woodcut by Cornelis Cort after a work by Frans Floris, based on the hero's pose. The rocky setting follows a woodcut by Barthel Beham, Fight against the Centaur (1542).
The painting shows Heracles fighting the Nemean lion. The Spanish art critic Soria suggests a comparison with a woodcut by Cornelis Cort after a work by Frans Floris, based on the hero's pose. The rocky setting follows a woodcut by Barthel Beham, Fight against the Centaur (1542).
The work belongs to a series of ten paintings on the Labours of Hercules commissioned by Philip IV of Spain to decorate the Hall of Realms in the Buen Retiro Palace. The series is now on display at the Museo del Prado.
Heracles is a perfect hero for our time: a plural, contradictory, post-identity figure. Not a compact subject but a fractured one. Not a moral model but a catalogue of the possibilities of human action. Immensely strong and vulnerable, civiliser and violent, divine and human without ever settling, Heracles is a multiple hero, impossible to reduce to a single image. Even his death takes the form of a paradox: he is alive and dead at the same time, like Schrödinger’s famous cat.
Deianira, afraid of losing him, gives him a tunic soaked in the blood of the centaur Nessus, believing it to be a love potion. But it is poison: the blood is tainted with the venom of the Hydra. Putting it on, Heracles feels his flesh burn to the bone. Realising there is no remedy, he has a pyre built on Mount Oeta, climbs onto it and lets himself be burned. His mortal part dies; his divine part ascends to Olympus.
Deianira, afraid of losing him, gives him a tunic soaked in the blood of the centaur Nessus, believing it to be a love potion. But it is poison: the blood is tainted with the venom of the Hydra. Putting it on, Heracles feels his flesh burn to the bone. Realising there is no remedy, he has a pyre built on Mount Oeta, climbs onto it and lets himself be burned. His mortal part dies; his divine part ascends to Olympus.
So two Heracles coexist: the earthly one and the divine one. No one knows which of the two is the “real” one, because his death is not an event but an overlap of destruction and apotheosis. And so, finally freed from snakes, lions and stinking stables, the immortal Heracles at last finds a home on Olympus: there he marries Hebe, daughter of Zeus and Hera and the embodiment of eternal youth, and is reconciled with Hera in a gesture that goes beyond the logic of conflict. There, among thunderbolts and golden clouds, in the suspended interval between being and transcending, Heracles reaches a calm that is not a reward but a metamorphosis. Only then does the form of being reveal itself in the divine, showing that the divine is nothing other than what being becomes once it has exhausted all its earthly possibilities. And above all, you also had the strength to endure the ever-present judgement of Zeus.
Roberto Pugina