At the direction of eurystheus, hercules killed the minotaur, a dangerous and ferocious animal that caused desolation and death in crete. The minotaur had been born from the union between pasipha, wife of king minos, and a beautiful bull whose ritual sacrifice poseidon had requested from the king of crete. He preferred to sacrifice another animal, thereby arousing the anger of the god, who took revenge by causing the carnal union of his wife and the bull, and the subsequent birth of the minotaur. Hercules pursued and defeated the extraordinary animal, and took it to mycenae. As rosa lópez torrijos already suggested, just as in the fights against antaeus, cancerberus, the nemean lion, the lernaean hydra or the erymanthian boar, this episode can be seen as a mythological reference to the battles that the armies of the spanish crown maintained with the dutch, english or french throughout the philippine reign, to which philip iv subjected, and whose victorious representation was reflected on the walls of the hall of kingdoms. Serrera, for his part, gives a special nuance to this episode by underlining the markedly spanish symbolism of the bull, so that a reading in a peninsular key could be derived from the painting: just as hercules was the one who controlled the brute force of the animal, the wise and powerful ruler is the only one who can control the people, in this case the kingdoms. The haughty air of the hero and the submissive air of the bull demonstrate olivares' political ideals. The placement of hercules in the center of the painting, with his body strongly illuminated and his head in shadow, highlighted against the dark background, follows the same arrangement of the figures in the entire series, although it is one of the most interesting examples of the entire set. Zurbarán turned, as in other works in the series, to cornelis cort for the positions of the main character and the bull. For the first, he was partially based on the figure of the hero attacking the hydra, although he softened the anatomical treatment through subtle pictorial modeling. The bull, only sketched, made with very few strokes, must be related to the print where the fight with achelous is represented. A very important element in the canvas is the river landscape, a body of water surrounded by a leafy grove of trees, behind the son of jupiter, on the right side. The conception of the treetops or the meticulous treatment given to the branch in the foreground certainly recalls other fragments of the landscape included by zurbarán in his religious compositions. Serrera believed it to be derived from both the flamenco world and velázquez: the painter delights in its execution, achieving one of his best achievements as a landscape painter, although he also seems to be imbued with the italian classicist landscape (text extracted from ruiz, l. In: el palacio del rey planeta. Felipe iv y el buen retiro, museo nacional del prado, 2005, p. 156). Object Type: painting. Genre: mythological painting. Date: 1634. Dimensions: 133 × 152 cm (52.3 × 59.8 in). Medium: oil on canvas. Collection: Museo del Prado. Hércules y el toro de Creta, por Zurbarán
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