Hercules and the Nemean Lion

Nicolò Boldrini, after Raphael

National Gallery of Art

Printed with golden tan shading and black outlines on buff-colored paper, a nude, muscular man wrestles a lion in a landscape in this horizontal woodcut. The man and animal’s bodies curl around each other in the lower right quadrant of the scene. The man reaches over the back of the lion’s neck as the latter claws and the man’s leg. They battle on a path that runs across the picture from behind tall trees along the left edge of the composition and beyond rocky ground with scrubby plants along the bottom edge. A club leans against a stone in the lower right corner. Hills and trees roll back in space, reaching the top edge along the way. Closer inspection reveals the back end of a second lion going into a cave near the right edge of the woodcut. An inscription is included on a long rock along the bottom edge of the print. It reads, “RAPHAEL VR. INV.”