![]() ![]() Others include a drawing of Hercules killing the Lernaean Hydra by Italian Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo and a painting of Hercules killing Diomedes (c.1639–1641) by Charles Le Brun. Rubens's sketch painting is in the Musée Bonnat in Bayonne and is one of several works on Herculean subjects there. ![]() By showing a scene of Hercules's travels to Phoenicia, the painting also refers to a traditional warning, attributed to the Phoenicians, to stay within the bounds of the Pillars of Hercules, and to the Habsburgs' own passage beyond that limit. The "royal purple" whose origin story this particular painting depicts was used to clothe emperors, and by the time of Rubens it had become a standard aspect of the depiction of royalty and divinity. The paintings of the cycle contain allegorical references to the Habsburgs and the wealth they had obtained from the conquest of Peru. Rubens's painting was originally part of a cycle of paintings of Hercules, which Rubens painted for the Habsburg rulers of Spain as sketch for a painting intended to decorate their Torre de la Parada, a hunting lodge. Although the snail in the story should be a spiny murex, the kind of snail from which Tyrian purple was made, Rubens instead depicts a large smooth shell that resembles a nautilus. Rubens's painting of this story depicts Hercules and the dog on the beach, with the dog's mouth stained. (Some ancient sources attribute the myth to Melqart, a Tyrian deity identified with Heracles.) Seeing this, the nymph demanded a gown of the same color, and the result was the origin of purple dye. ![]() The dog bit a sea snail, and the snail's blood dyed the dog's mouth Tyrian purple. In Pollux's story, Hercules and his dog were walking on the beach on their way to court a nymph named Tyro. The painting shows a scene from an origin myth in the Onomasticon (a collection of names, similar to a thesaurus) of Julius Pollux, a 2nd-century Graeco-Roman sophist. A Phoenician coin depicting the legend of the dog biting the sea snail ![]()
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