Close Looking: Statue of Hercules (Lansdowne Herakles)

Hi, I'm Nicole Budrovich. I'm a curatorial assistant in the Antiquities Department at the Getty Museum, and today we're at the Getty Villa, and I want to talk about this amazing sculpture of Hercules on display in this fabulous gallery. It's probably one of my favorite objects in the collection, but also it has this really cool history connected both to Getty and the statue was unearthed in the grounds of Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. It was immediately recognized as this masterpiece. It was made from Greek pentelic marble. You'll see that Hercules is standing with his feet planted, but also slightly at a relaxed pose, a little bit of contrapposto, and he's got in one hand a lion skin and in the other a club. He's looking off into the distance with this arresting gaze, and famously he was one of the greatest heroes of Greek mythology in ancient Greece, and he was tasked with completing 12 labors to prove his worth as a hero. The first was to defeat this lion called the Nemean lion that was ravaging the countryside. Its skin was impenetrable to any weapons, so Hercules, ever the strong man, used his wrestling skills to strangle the lion, and then having killed it, he skinned it, and then that lion skin became his emblem, and he would wear it as a protective cape. Another thing you might notice is other than the skin and the club, he is not wearing anything. He's totally nude, no armor, no cape, and this would not have been shocking to an ancient viewer. Nudity was used by ancient Greek and Roman sculptors to signify some sort of divine connection. Getty was such a fan of this piece and an astute student of archaeology and the works from antiquity that he kind of nerded out and wrote a fan fiction novella for it called A Journey from Corinth, and in this novella, he imagines his Hercules sculpture coming from Corinth to Rome to Italy and decorating this lavish villa known as the Villa dei Papiri, and what I love about this is right from the beginning, this shows how much Getty had in his mind the idea that this belonged in a space of a recreation of that Roman villa, and so this gallery even draws directly from that, and this is just a fabulous space with this vaulted ceiling, but specifically the floor, the opus sectile marble floor with varied marbles is an exact replica of a floor from the Villa dei Papiri, and Getty was very keen to have that connection which he'd imagined for this piece in his novella brought to life here on site.