Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Omphale.
The gallery
Hercules and Omphale
Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1537
In this oil-on-panel by Lucas Cranach the Elder, now in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Brunswick, the great hero of Greek myth is shown emasculated by his bondage to Omphale, queen of Lydia. Sold into a year's (or three years') servitude by Hermes as penance for the murder of Iphitus, Heracles sits among Omphale's smiling maidservants, his lion-skin set aside, a sheer veil placed on his head and a distaff thrust into his hands as the women set him to spinning wool. Cranach turns the ancient theme of the strong man unmanned by a woman into a courtly Northern Renaissance moralizing allegory, the inscription warning of the power of female charm over masculine reason.
Hercules at the Feet of Omphale (Hercule aux pieds d'Omphale)
Édouard Joseph Dantan, 1874
Exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1874, where it won a third-class medal, this academic canvas by Édouard Joseph Dantan dramatizes the reversal of roles at the heart of the Omphale episode. The Lydian queen reclines enthroned and draped in Heracles' own lion-skin, while the hero, stripped of his attributes, kneels submissively at her feet amid her attendants. The painting belongs to the nineteenth-century French taste for sensuous mythological subjects, using the servitude of the strongest of mortals to a foreign queen as an elegant study of dominance, languor, and desire.
Drunken Hercules and Queen Omphale (Pompeian fresco)
Unknown, 1st century AD
This Roman wall painting from Pompeii preserves an ancient version of the Heracles-and-Omphale theme, centuries before the subject was revived by Renaissance and Baroque masters. The intoxicated hero staggers as winged cupids make off with his club and bow, while the composed queen of Lydia looks on. The fresco illustrates how the servitude tradition recorded by Apollodorus had already, by the early Imperial period, been elaborated into a comic spectacle of the demigod's weakness, his weapons and self-control surrendered in Omphale's court.
Omphale and Hercules (fresco tondo)
Unknown, 45–79 AD
A circular fresco panel of the mid-first century AD showing Heracles and Omphale in their famous exchange of clothing: the hero wears the queen's feminine garb while she takes up his lion-skin and club. Recovered from a Roman house, the tondo testifies to the popularity of the cross-dressing elaboration of the myth in Roman domestic decoration, where the year of the hero's bondage to the Lydian queen became a favorite emblem of love's power to overturn the natural order.