Cleveland Museum of Art
Hercules at the Crossroad
Albrecht DürerLinkedCulture matchlcp-91cf98b472c5
- Date
- c. 1498
- Medium
- engraving
- Culture
- Germany, late 15th-early 16th century
- Department
- Prints
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 136609
From LinkedCulture
Dürer called this simply "the Hercules," yet the mythological hero barely appears in his own story. In this engraving from around 1498, a helmeted figure representing Virtue swings a club overhead while Pleasure reclines against a satyr in the lower left, and a rooster sits atop the helmet as a symbol of martial courage. The panoramic landscape behind them, with a winding river and distant mountains, frames the hero's moral choice between two paths. It is one of Dürer's boldest early experiments in bringing classical thought into northern European printmaking.
Written by LinkedCulture for its video on this object. Machine-generated (claude-sonnet-4-6), not yet reviewed by a person. It is not part of the museum’s record.
What the image shows
A group of nude figures in a forested landscape, engaged in various activities.
Generated by LinkedCulture from the photograph alone, without the museum’s catalogue text (Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct), and not yet reviewed by a person. It describes the picture, not the object’s history, and it is not part of the museum’s record.
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
In his journal, Albrecht Dürer referred to this enigmatic engraving as “the Hercules,” but the image is not a typical representation of the mythological hero’s 12 labors. The subject derives from a Greek parable, where Hercules decides between a life of pleasure or one of virtue. The moral dispute plays out here as a battle between two personifications, Virtue, wielding a club, and Pleasure, lying with a satyr. Hercules’s crossroad is a copse of trees between two paths: the ascent to civilization at left (pleasure?), or the winding river to the wilderness at right (virtue?). The rooster on the helmet of Hercules in this image may symbolize the hero's valor.
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Provenance & credit
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- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Provenance
- Richard Fisher (1809-1890), Midhurst (Lugt 2204)
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