Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Erymanthian Boar.
The gallery
Heracles, Eurystheus and the Erymanthian Boar
Antimenes Painter (attributed), c. 525 BC
Side A of an Attic black-figure amphora attributed to the Antimenes Painter, now in the Louvre (inv. F 202). The scene captures the comic climax of the Fourth Labour: a striding Heracles hoists the live Erymanthian boar above his head, about to hurl it down upon his taskmaster, while a terrified King Eurystheus has dived into a half-buried bronze storage jar (pithos), throwing up his arms with only his head and hands visible. The motif of the cowering king in the jar, faithful to Apollodorus' account (Bibliotheca 2.5.4), became one of the most popular Heraclean subjects in sixth-century Athenian vase painting.
Herakles carrying the Erymanthian Boar to Eurystheus hiding in a jar
Unknown (Attic black-figure workshop), c. 550–530 BC
An Attic black-figure amphora (inv. 16442) in the Museo Gregoriano Etrusco of the Vatican Museums, painted in Athens in the mid-sixth century BC. Heracles, club at the ready, advances with the bound boar slung across his shoulders toward Eurystheus, who has sunk down into a sunken pithos so that only his head and pleading hands rise above the rim. The painter relishes the contrast between the hero's effortless mastery of the great beast of Mount Erymanthus and the king's undignified panic, illustrating the tradition that the animal was delivered alive to Mycenae.
Hercules and the Erymanthian Boar (Hércules y el jabalí de Erimanto)
Francisco de Zurbarán, 1634
One of the ten canvases Francisco de Zurbarán painted in 1634 for the Hall of Realms of the Buen Retiro palace in Madrid, now in the Museo del Prado. Set against a darkened, tenebrist background, a muscular Heracles bends forward to seize the snarling boar by its haunches, pinning the struggling animal as he drives it through the deep snow into which, according to Apollodorus, the exhausted beast had been chased. Zurbarán reduces the myth to a single charged act of brute physical effort, his stark chiaroscuro and earthy palette transforming the ancient Labour into a Baroque meditation on heroic strength.