Heracles and Antaeus

Pollaiuolo's Heracles and Antaeus from around 1500 depicts the mythological wrestling match between the hero and the giant whose strength was renewed by contact with his mother Earth — Heracles defeated him by lifting him off the ground. The subject was among Pollaiuolo's most characteristic, offering maximum opportunity for depicting the male body in violent exertion. His earlier series of Heracles paintings for Lorenzo de' Medici established this theme at the heart of Florentine humanist culture, the hero's labors serving as metaphors for civic virtue and intellectual conquest of barbarism. This late version, executed near the end of his career, shows Pollaiuolo still committed to exploring the limits of the human body's expressiveness, his figures more sculptural than painterly, anticipating the monumentality Michelangelo would achieve in the following generation.

The straining, interlocked bodies demonstrate Pollaiuolo's pioneering interest in anatomy and muscular tension, with the figures's contorted poses revealing his study of anatomical dissection.