Farnese Hercules

The Farnese Hercules shows the strongest man of Greek myth at a moment of total exhaustion. Over life-size and heavily muscled, the hero leans wearily on his knotted club, over which he has thrown the skin of the Nemean lion. Only by walking behind the statue do you discover the point of the story: in his right hand, hidden behind his back, he holds the golden apples of the Hesperides, the prize of one of his last labours. The statue was made in the early third century AD and signed by an Athenian sculptor called Glykon, enlarging a famous bronze by Lysippos or his circle from the fourth century BC.

It was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, where it was excavated in 1546 and went straight into the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III. The head had been found separately, and the legs were missing, so Guglielmo della Porta carved new ones. When the original legs later turned up, the new ones were kept, reportedly on Michelangelo's advice, to show that modern sculptors could match the ancients; the ancient legs were only reunited with the body in the late eighteenth century. For generations the statue stood at Palazzo Farnese, copied and engraved endlessly, and Napoleon regretted not getting it for his Paris museum.

In 1787 it moved to Naples with most of the Farnese collection and is now a centrepiece of the National Archaeological Museum (MANN), one of the great museums of the ancient world, which also holds the finest finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Getting there

MANN is on Piazza Museo in central Naples. Museo station on metro Line 1 is next to the entrance, and Piazza Cavour on Line 2 is linked to it by an underground walkway. Naples International Airport (NAP) is about 5 km away.