The Infant Hercules in his Cradle

Hercules, a mortal son of the Roman god Jupiter, first demonstrated his powers in the episode illustrated here. Hercules effortlessly strangled two serpents sent by his jealous stepmother Juno to attack him in his cradle. Although his body is that of a dimpled infant, Hercules’s pose mimics that of classical heroes at rest (see the engraving of Meleager, also on view), an attitude often used to highlight the beauty of the perfected body. Said from ancient times to be “already worthy of Jupiter in his cradle,” Hercules was famed not only for his brain and brawn but also for his virtue. These qualities heighten the moral value of the scene. This image of the infant Hercules, borrowed from Roman antiquity, is not unlike contemporary images of the infant Christ, for example in Simone Cantarini’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt elsewhere in the gallery.