Abraham Jansz. van Diepenbeeck

Tricked into wearing a poisoned robe, the Greek hero Hercules throws himself onto a pyre to end his torment. After his grisly death, depicted in the lower half of the sheet, he ascends to Mount Olympus to join the other gods, as seen at the top of the drawing. The indentations around the figures indicate that they were traced with a stylus to transfer the composition to a copper plate. This carefully finished preparatory design was commissioned to illustrate a publication that interpreted this pagan myth as a prefiguring of Christian salvation.

Divided into two sections, this drawing features the ancient Greek hero Hercules laid on a funeral pyre below a representation of his apotheosis on Olympus. The Death of Hercules was the preparatory drawing for an engraving made to illustrate Michel de Marolles’s Tableaux du Temple des Muses (Pictures of the Temple of Muses), Paris, 1655. The drawing is incised for transfer to the copperplate. Van Diepenbeeck provides linear definition, especially on the body of Hercules, to give the engraver vital information while at the same time creating a painterly atmosphere and range of tones.