In this episode, which baltasar de vitoria narrated in extensive detail, the death of jupiter's son is illustrated. The text tells how the hero killed the centaur nessus for trying to force himself on deianira, who had recently married hercules. After the wedding, when crossing the eveno river that runs through etholia, it was not possible to ford it, as it was very swollen. It happened that the centaur nessus was there and offered to go to deianira, [. . ] when he reached the other side, he heard voices and screams from deianira because nessus wanted to force her, to whose defense hercules came and, wanting to escape, the centaur threw him one of the arrows he had bloodied with the blood of the poisonous hydra. Zurbarán suggests this sequence in the lush landscape in the background, where nessus, who repeats the figure of the centaur from the series recorded by hans sebald beham, flees, with his arms raised, mortally wounded by the arrow just stuck in his back. Before bleeding to death, nessus gives a poisoned shirt to deianira, with the lie that, if hercules used it, it would make the rest of the women hateful. Deyanira gives her husband the garment in a fit of jealousy against iole, the daughter of the king of aetolia: he dressed it for her, and since the poison was so active and so effective, it then entered her flesh, penetrating her bones so that she was burned by live fire. Then he made a bonfire with large trees that he uprooted and, laying there the skin of the nemean lion that had served as a defensive weapon in his battles, and placing the club or club as the head, he gave his arrows and bow to phiocteres, saying that troy could not be won without them, he set fire to the wood and there it was consumed and burned. And the fire burning the human part of him, by order of jupiter and consent of the other gods, they took him up to heaven and he was counted among their number. This episode has been given a meaning in a dynastic and glorifying key in which fire provides a ritual element to the apotheosis of the mythical ascendancy of the spanish king. Serrera justified the fact that zurbarán preferred to represent hercules suffering because of his christian symbolism. Furthermore, the image of the deified hero could deviate from the general vision of the series, requiring a very differentiated compositional treatment that, perhaps, exceeded the expressive possibilities of the artist. To form the figure of hercules, specialists have suggested different sources. Soria advanced a probable inspiration in the sculpture of saint jerome penitent by pietro torrigiano (seville, museum of fine arts), while guinard proposed a print by the frenchman gabriel salmon, dated 1528, which is a more direct inspiration, since it includes the twitching gesture of hercules, the trunks of the pyre that in the painting appear behind the hero, or the representation of the bow and the nail in the foreground, to which he also alludes. Vitoria's text. The artist must have studied this matter very well, and the care with which it was made is appreciated. The white clothing is reminiscent of the exquisite painter of habits that zurbarán was and the head has details that are surprising if you think about the destination of the cloth - being placed about three meters high - since the painter took care to illuminate the eye, nose and teeth with very fine brush touches. We could say something similar about the numerous and tiny brushstrokes that try to reproduce the flames that emerge from the figure of hercules, and that contrast with the sketched solutions with which he paints a large part of the canvases in this series (text extracted from ruiz, l. In: el palacio del rey planeta. Felipe iv y el buen retiro, museo nacional del prado, 2005, p. 165). Object Type: painting. Genre: mythological painting. Date: 1634. Place of creation: Spain. Dimensions: height: 136 cm (53.5 in); width: 167 cm (65.7 in). Medium: oil on canvas. Collection: Museo del Prado. Muerte de Hércules, por Zurbarán
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