Hercules diverting the Course of the River Alpheus
1634.Room 009A
Hercules looks at the viewer from the left side of the composition, cheerful after having rerouted the Alpheus river in response to a challenge by Augeas, King of Elis. The description of this episode in Charles II’s will as the cleaning of the Augean stables refers to what Pérez de Moya defined as stables where three thousand oxen slept, and very full of manure. As they had never been cleaned, they were contaminating the entire region and interfering with the husbandry of livestock there. Hercules promised to clean them in a single day in return for Augeas’ offer of the tenth part of the herd. The hero’s success reflects a clever use of his considerable strength, but it went unrewarded, as the king maintained that he barely had to work to clean those stables, because only a fool rewards the efforts and strength of the body, rather than those of the spirit. In the context of the Spanish iconography at the Hall of Realms, this story has been interpreted as an allusion to a powerful and victorious ruler who frees his country. As Juan Miguel Serrera put it: the manure in the Augean stables should be seen as a representation of the evils that beset Spain, whose eradication depended on its powerful yet magnanimous rulers. For Brown and Elliot, it could allude to the act of freeing the world of discord. This canvas is considered one of the finest of the series. Its composition is certainly well resolved, with Hercules at one side, in a foreshortened presentation emphasized by lighting from the lower left corner. Serrera considers his position rather forced, but understandable in terms of the height at which the canvas must have hung in that hall, which would have corrected its anatomical exaggeration. In any case, it seems clear that Zurbarán’s conception of the hero’s figure was less than idealized, given his bulging belly and markedly wrinkled face -thus, a Hercules Hispanicus, with an ironic and somewhat skeptical expression. His posture seems to draw on a print of Hercules by Schelte à Bolswert that appears in Girard Thibault’s 1628 book, L’Académie de l’espée. This was first noticed by Benito Navarrete, who called the conception of its landscape of boulders and water a cavernous setting with an almost romantic mood. Serrera pointed out that the river was rendered in a similar manner to the one appearing in the Saint Anthony Abbot that Zurbarán painted for the Barefoot Sisters of Mercy in Seville (now at a private collection in Barcelona). It also resembles the river in the Saint John the Baptist’s Vision (Barcelona, private collection), and all three were painted around the same time.
Ruiz Gómez, Leticia, En El Palacio del Rey Planeta, Úbeda de los Cobos, A. (ed), Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2005, p.153
