Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Amphitryon.
The gallery
Frontispiece of Molière's Amphitryon (1682 edition)
Pierre Brissart, 1682
Engraved frontispiece for the 1682 printed edition of Molière's comedy Amphitryon, itself drawn from Plautus's comic treatment of the myth. The scene crystallizes the legend's central deception: the god Jupiter (Zeus), having taken on the exact likeness of the Theban general Amphitryon, descends from Olympus borne on an eagle, with Mercury (Hermes) beside him, to intrude upon the mortal household. Amphitryon's identity — usurped and doubled by the disguised god while Alcmene is misled — is the engine of the whole drama, making this image one of the most reproduced early-modern depictions of the Amphitryon story.
Jupiter and Alcmene (after Michiel Coxie)
Cornelis Bos, after Michiel Coxie, c. 1537–1555
A Southern Netherlandish engraving by Cornelis Bos after a design by Michiel Coxie, depicting the night of the threefold darkness when Zeus, assuming the form of Alcmene's husband Amphitryon, comes to her bed — the union from which Heracles is conceived. Amphitryon appears here only by impersonation: the figure embracing Alcmene wears his shape while being the god in disguise, the very confusion of identities that drives the myth. The small, finely worked plate belongs to the Renaissance fascination with Ovidian and mythological seductions.
L'Enfance d'Hercule (The Infancy of Hercules)
Bertholet Flémal, c. 1650
An oil painting (65 × 88 cm, Musée départemental Georges de La Tour, Vic-sur-Seille) by the Liégeois Baroque master Bertholet Flémal showing the infant Heracles strangling the two serpents Hera sent to kill him in his cradle. The scene is set in the Theban household of Amphitryon, the mortal foster-father who reared the child after his exile from Tiryns; the alarmed adult onlookers belong to that household drama, with Amphitryon's distinction from the divinely sired twin (his own son Iphicles cowers while Heracles triumphs) at the heart of the moment depicted.
The Labours of Hercules: Alcmene and Amphitryon witness the infant Hercules strangle the snakes
Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, c. 1550–1590
A narrative engraving from the Flemish-English artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder's series on the Labours of Hercules. Within a single sheet it combines the grown hero battling centaurs with the famous childhood prodigy: Alcmene and her husband Amphitryon look on as the infant Hercules throttles the two snakes Hera dispatched against him. Amphitryon is explicitly named as one of the witnessing parents in the print's own inscription, making this one of the clearer narrative images to place him by name within the Heracles birth-and-infancy cycle.