Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio

Raising a club with both arms above his head, his lion skin aflutter behind him, the Greek hero Hercules is dynamically depicted about strike Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld. To atone for killing his wife and children, Hercules was forced to carry out twelve arduous feats. Six of these tasks were depicted in prints by Caraglio, after designs by Rosso, when both artists were working in Rome. The elongated proportions and complicated poses of the bodies—both human and canine—are typical of Rosso’s mannerist style, which privileged complex, elegant compositions over the tidy realism of his predecessors.