Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen The Stymphalian Birds.
The gallery
Heracles and the Stymphalian Birds (Attic black-figure amphora, Louvre F 387)
Attributed to the Diosphos Painter, c. 500–490 BC
On this small Attic black-figure amphora the hero confronts the man-eating birds of the Stymphalian marsh, the sixth of his twelve Labours. Heracles is shown attacking the flock as the birds scatter into flight, the vase compressing the whole episode—the scaring-up of the birds and their destruction—into a single charged image. Acquired by the Louvre with the Campana Collection in 1861, the vessel (about 20 cm high) belongs to the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities and is among the earliest narrative depictions of the Labour to survive.
Heracles Killing the Stymphalian Birds with his Sling (Attic black-figured amphora, British Museum B 163)
Attic, attributed to the E Group; said to be from Vulci, c. 540 BC
This Attic black-figured amphora, said to have come from the Etruscan site of Vulci, shows Heracles bringing down the birds of Lake Stymphalus with a sling rather than the bow of the literary tradition—a variant the early painters favoured for its dynamic silhouette. The dark figures stand out against the reserved clay ground in the classic black-figure technique, the hero braced mid-throw amid the falling birds. The vase entered the British Museum in 1843 (GR 1843.11-3.40) and is a key early witness to how Archaic Athens visualised the sixth Labour.
Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds (detail of the Twelve Labours mosaic from Llíria)
Unknown (Roman, Hispania), c. AD 201–250
This panel comes from a large Roman floor mosaic of the Twelve Labours of Hercules, executed in fine opus tessellatum and excavated at Llíria in the province of Valencia, Spain. In the scene devoted to the sixth Labour, Hercules drives off and shoots the birds that infested the marsh of Stymphalus. Dated to the first half of the third century AD, the mosaic survives in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional de España (M.A.N.) in Madrid and shows how the Greek myth was decorating elite domestic interiors across the Roman West.
Hercules Killing the Stymphalian Birds
Albrecht Dürer, 1500
Dürer's painting (87 × 110 cm) translates the ancient Labour into the visual language of the Northern Renaissance: a muscular, dynamically posed Hercules looses his arrows at the man-eating birds rising from the Arcadian marsh. The work reflects the German humanist fascination with classical mythology and Dürer's study of Italian models of heroic anatomy and movement. It is preserved in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg (inv. Gm 166).