Hercules and the Nemean Lion

Author: Surya Stemerding

For a long time the ‘Gosmé’ inscription that was later added to this drawing gave rise to its attribution to Cosmè Tura, and this assumption was retained after it was first published (Lees 1913). It took until the 1990s before scholars realized that the drawing had been reworked and was thus not fully autograph. The overdrawing with pen and brush in brown ink with white highlights probably dates from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, when the original pen-and-ink sheet was roughly cut out along its contours from a larger composition.^[1] The fragment was then made up all around and lined on a secondary sheet. The annotation probably dates from that period.

The scene of Hercules grappling with the Nemean lion is difficult to date within Cosmè’s oeuvre.^[2] Manca (2000) has called Hercules’ complex pose, his superbly delineated musculature and his implicit aggression as typical of the ‘mannered narrative draughtsmanship’ of Cosmè’s later years.^[3] It is unclear, though, how his original draughtsmanship can be assessed through the overdrawing.

It is generally assumed that the subject is connected with the war between Ferrara and Venice in 1482-84. If that is the case, Hercules would symbolize Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara, with the lion standing for Mark the Apostle, the patron saint of Venice. This could mean that the sheet is a preliminary study for a painted or engraved work made for or commissioned by the Ferraran ruler. That would make it one of the first depictions of the subject in the Renaissance, but of a later date than the more restrained version that Andrea Mantegna (c.1431-1506) made between 1465 and 1474 for the ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua. There is not the slightest similarity between the painting and this drawing.