Giovanni Battista Bertani

One of Hercules’s mythical 12 labors was the killing of a many-headed monster called the Hydra. Here, the Greek hero stands at rest, towering above the headless body of the creature. A preparatory study for a print, this drawing already contains the final idea for the print’s main figure as well as a number of peripheral sketches, doodles, and even fragments of writing on the other side, visible through the thin sheet. The broad range of finish-from Hercules’s highly defined musculature to the barely suggested marginalia-is typical of sketching sheets used to develop compositional ideas.

Giovanni Battista Bertani made this drawing in preparation for a print engraved by Giorgio Ghisi, which served as the frontispiece for Bertani's 1558 treatise, Gli oscuri e dificili passi dell’opera ionica di Vitruvio, a commentary on the Roman architect Vitruvius’s passage on the Ionic volute (1st century BCE). Bertani’s drawing does not retain any signs of transfer, whether pricking or tracing, which would indicate a direct correlation between the two, but it is clearly a working stage of the composition. The figure of Hercules is the most final, its precise hatching serving as a model for engraved marks, while other elements, such as the sitting female figure, leg, and standing female body at right, are more preliminary in both form and execution.

This drawing served as the design for an engraving executed by Giorgio Ghisi. The double-sided sheet gives insight into Bertani’s working method. On the reverse, a preliminary sketch for Hercules takes form, accompanied by sketches of a Roman soldier’s head, an ornament, and a violin. The artist also wrote notes in Italian, one of which reads “forty-five chemises of the Madonna (or My Lady)” (quarantacinque camise de Madonna), referring perhaps to a task to complete for his patroness. On this side, Bertani drew a more fully rendered version of Hercules with sure, reinforced contour lines and delicate, feathery hatching. As if not wanting to waste any paper, the artist sketched additional studies of limbs and the back of a woman in drapery.