Farnese Hercules

Farnese HerculesA black and white print of the Farnese Hercules the colossal, ten foot marble statue of Hercules leaning on his club after completing the twelve labours, the golden apples of the Hesperides just visible in his hand behind his back. The marble was signed by Glykon of Athens in the early 3rd century AD, a Roman copy after a bronze by Lysippos of Sicyon from the 4th century BC. The statue was unearthed in the 16th century in the Baths of Caracalla in

Celsus himself was entombed in a sarcophagus beneath the library floor

and divided rulership of the cosmos — sky for himself

the second of the two great foundational poems of Western literature

Where the closest detail shot reveals Pluto's hand sinking into marble

Leyendecker's Hermes — the German-American illustrator's rendering of the Greek messenger god

A print of Richard Roland Holst's Apollo — the Dutch Symbolist's rendering of the Olympian god of light

In the Fourth Style that dominated Roman wall-decoration from roughly 60 AD until the eruption of Vesuvius in 79

The Ionic developed in the Greek colonies of western Asia Minor (ancient Ionia

the raised thunderbolt

the tilt of a spear

a tangle of four bodies that translates Dante's Inferno Canto XXXIII into marble

its fortifications