Hercules and Antaeus with a lion

Domenico explored the subject of Hercules and Antaeus repeatedly towards the end of his career, adapting and varying it in a long series of studies. An album from the Bordes collection containing 38 studies of Hercules and Antaeus was bought by P. and D. Colnaghi in 1936 from Paul Prouté, before being dismembered and sold between 1936-41 (see J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, London, 1962, p. 38). One of these sheets is now in the Robert Lehman collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, The Robert Lehman Collection: Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings, New York, 1987, I, no. 134).

James Byam Shaw recognized a black chalk study of Hercules and Antaeus under a pen and wash drawing of a bullock, also in the Robert Lehman collection, which can be directly connected with the same bullock in a fresco in the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo (Inv. 1975.1.520; J. Byam Shaw and G. Knox, op. cit., no. 148). He also pointed out that several of the drawings from the series have a ledge or dado as here, which also can be found on the preliminary drawings for the animal subjects for the Villa Tiepolo. Based on these similarities and connections, Byam Shaw suggested that the subject of Hercules and Antaeus was at least conceived as a suitable decoration for the Villa Tiepolo, and that the drawings from the series were executed in the same period, relatively late in the artist’s career.