Questions of Representation in "Hercules and Antaeus" from the Ackland Art Museum (2015)

Undergraduate: Phillip Cox

Faculty Advisor: Tatiana String
Department: Art

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A scene of complexity, movement, and emotion, "Hercules and Antaeus" is an engraving attributed to Agostino Veneziano, a Venetian printmaker born around 1490. Biographical information on the artist is lacking, for what is known of Veneziano is more determinant on accounts of the prominent artists he worked with. Veneziano was a student, alongside Marco Dente de Ravenna, of the celebrated engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, all three members of Raphael¿¿¿s circle in Rome. The engraving, from the Burton Emmett Collection of the Ackland Art Museum, shows the classical hero Hercules grappling with the giant Antaeus as an episode of his labors. While the Hercules and Antaeus trope is well documented by art historical scholarship, this specific print has resisted virtually any mention, a pity since its composition holds a series of puzzles waiting to be solved. I mean to contextualize the work by tracing the iconography of the Hercules and Antaeus story, in both text and image, from its genesis in antiquity to its proliferation in the Renaissance. I will locate the print within the environment of its creation and discuss how an atmosphere of collaboration, repetition, and reproduction in the Raimondi workshop raises questions of its originality. Then, I shall explore and elucidate the print¿¿¿s curious idiosyncrasies, which only become more intriguing once the backdrop of its origins is constructed. This print shows important divergences from the canonical representations of the myth, principally in the unusual arrangement of the fighters¿¿¿ bodies and the inclusion of a third figure. These apparent innovations seem incongruous with what is known of the Raimondi workshop and its penchant for appropriation. I will prove that there must have existed a now-missing image from which our print was derived.