WSJ article with additional info.
Annibale Carracci’s ‘Hercules at the Crossroads’: A Vividly Painted Parable
The Italian artist’s depiction of the young hero torn between virtue and pleasure, rendered in pioneering post-Renaissance style, calls on us to consider the dilemma for ourselves.
Sept. 5, 2025
These days, the mythological figure of Hercules—son of Zeus, slayer of hydras, cleaner of famously filthy stables—is associated with heroic demonstrations of strength. But for a good part of the past millennium, Western artists concerned themselves with the prelude to his wondrous feats: the youthful Hercules’ predicament of whether to choose an honorable life marked by hardship or an easier life given over to pleasure.
A classical parable revisited by Petrarch in the 1340s—and later depicted by, among others, Albrecht Dürer in the 1490s and Paolo Veronese in the 1560s—this Herculean moral dilemma received its most celebrated treatment in 1596, when the Bolognese-born artist Annibale Carracci made it the subject of a ceiling painting in a cardinal’s study in Rome’s Palazzo Farnese. Carracci’s “Hercules at the Crossroads” later made its way to Naples, where it has become a signature work at the Capodimonte Museum.
With its masterly synthesis of previous styles and its subtle but monumental execution, the painting has taken on a kind of cult status. Erwin Panofsky, one of the 20th century’s most influential art historians, devoted an early and foundational book to it in 1930, and Eike Schmidt, former director of Florence’s Uffizi Galleries and director of the Capodimonte since 2024, counts it among his favorites at the museum.
Carracci’s beardless, adolescent Hercules is perched on a rock, in an apparent state of indecision. At left, the figure of Virtue, bearing a sword, points up at a stark and vertiginous path that culminates with Pegasus, the legendary winged horse associated with heroic deeds and immortality. At right, the figure of Voluptas, the goddess of pleasure, depicted in diaphanous drapery, is gesturing toward a lush and mysterious garden.
Voluptas’s side of the canvas is more engaging and—more than four centuries out—more familiar. A civilizing table in the far-right corner is a still life in miniature, with references to theater-going, music-making and card-playing; above, just lurking in the garden, are beguiling clusters of grapes.
By comparison, Virtue’s dull path is not just harder to endure, but harder to look at, its beginning marked by a desolate, off-putting tree stump. An alert poet figure, in the lower left, is recording the scene in real time, as though the outcome were still uncertain. But we know what Hercules will do, which Carracci hints at with the hero-to-be’s glance and overall body language drifting, it seems, to Virtue’s side.
Carracci (1560-1609) is the great transitional figure in the history of Italian art, credited with providing a way past the dead end of post-Renaissance Mannerism and then forward to Classicism and the Baroque. In the process, he managed to reflect, absorb and somehow sum up predecessors ranging from Michelangelo and Raphael to Correggio and Tintoretto, inspiring the likes of Guido Reni, Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens.
To a specialist, the Carracci approach, with its clues and references to what came before and what would come after, abounds in “Hercules at the Crossroads.” The “huge muscles” on the legs of Hercules recall the figures of Michelangelo, Vincenzo Sorrentino, a curator of 17th-century art affiliated with the Capodimonte, told me. Those veils of Voluptas recall a figure in Raphael’s last painting, “Transfiguration” (1516-20), he said, adding that the rich but realistic greenery anticipates the landscapes of Poussin. Then there is the medium itself—a painting meant to hang on the ceiling but, in its original installation, surrounded by frescoes. “A Venetian thing,” said Mr. Sorrentino of the oil-on-canvas format, invoking damp Venice’s lack of a fresco tradition, which dominated in drier Tuscany and Rome.
The early art historians, starting with Giorgio Vasari, distinguished the Venetian use of color, or colore, from the Tuscan and Roman emphasis on drawing, or disegno. Carracci, who could use color as well as any Venetian, was also arguably his era’s leading draftsman, and his impact derives perhaps from this fusion—of making Italian art, at least for a time, whole.
During a visit to the Capodimonte this past spring, it occurred to me that, unlike the now nearby portraits by Titian or the museum’s celebrated religious scene by Caravaggio, the Carracci painting might do without its back story or its context, or even its title—it speaks for itself. Some versions of the Hercules parable, like Dürer’s, are more disturbing (and indeed Carracci’s own Voluptas figure stands for vice, contends Mr. Schmidt), while others, like that of Venetian late Baroque painter Sebastiano Ricci, are more fanciful. Carracci’s is “an exhortation,” in the words of art historian John Rupert Martin. The Hercules figure’s dilemma is also, really, ours.
With the history of art in mind, “Hercules at the Crossroads” may have extraordinary origins and implications. But its power today at the Capodimonte has to do with an imperative call to us ordinary museum-goers, who are the heroes of our own stories: Re-examine how to live your life.
Mr. Marcus writes about art and design for the Journal and other publications.
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Appeared in the September 6, 2025, print edition as 'A Vividly Painted Parable'.
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Hercules at the Crossroad by Albrecht Dürer, German, ca. 1498
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/351295
Veronese The Choice of Hercules, circa 1565
In the painting, Virtue appears to be winning the struggle over Hercules, but Vice has torn Hercules' stocking and still reaches out her hand toward him. Concealed behind her skirt is a dagger and a statue of a sphinx. On the stonework above the scene, an inscription reads "[HO]NOR ET VIRTUS/[P]OST MORTÊ FLORET (Honor and Virtue Flourish after Death)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_Virtue_and_Vice_(Veronese)
RICCI, Sebastiano, Hercules at the Crossroads
1706-07
Fresco
Palazzo Marucelli-Fenzi, Florence
The largest room on the ground floor is the Sala d'Ercole, a hall with two window bays. It has three entrances and presents an elaborate painted decoration extending across all four walls and the entire ceiling. The decoration was executed with the collaboration of Giuseppe Tonelli (1668-1732), one of the best known quadratura painters in Florence. The pictorial program contains the Labours and Apotheosis of Hercules.
A simple, rhythmic arrangement of columns, backed by a gilt ground, structures all four walls in the room. On three sides it is interrupted by a large, arched centre opening. The compositions for these imaginary openings are three of Hercules's more significant labours. Prominent on the end wall is the depiction of the young Hercules at the Crossroads between Vice and Virtue, the other two openings contains Hercules and Cacus, and Hercules and Nessus. On the window wall a painted sculpture depicting Hercules and Antheus can be found.
In the Sala d'Ercole Ricci's fluid, elegant, and atmospheric style attains a brilliance and airiness that set him apart from all his famous contemporaries, and has been shown to anticipate features of Rococo painting.
https://www.wga.hu/html_m/r/ricci/sebastia/3/maruce03.html
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