This bold and assured drawing of Hercules with subsidiary studies for his hand, elbow, leg, and loincloth, is preparatory for Pompeo Batoni’s painting, The Choice of Hercules, executed in the early 1750s. The painting’s whereabouts is unknown, but the composition is recorded in a studio copy in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin (fig. 1).1

Fig. 1 After Pompeo Batoni, The Choice of Hercules, Galleria Sabauda, Turin

Undoubtedly a working drawing in preparation for his canvas, it does, however, have its own distinct mise en page, which is aesthetically appealing, as is the artist’s choice of using red chalk on blue paper. The drawing focuses on the main protagonist, Hercules, and portrays him in the seated pose that he occupies in the painting, with his right arm resting on his thigh and his left leaning on the ledge behind. Batoni uses the surrounding areas of the paper around Hercules to perfect certain parts of his anatomy, focusing on the more challenging aspects of the drawing like the placement of his bent back right hand and the positioning of his leg.

Batoni approached the subject of The Choice of Hercules on several occasions throughout his artistic career, producing canvases that are now in the Galleria d’arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (c. 1740-42), The Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna (1748), the lost painting (early 1750s) and The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg (1763-65).2 The lost Choice of Hercules originally belonged to a set of four paintings that were commissioned by the Republic of Lucca in 1754; all four remain untraced, and only two of the compositions are known, through studio copies in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin: Aeneas’s Flight from Troy and its pendant, discussed above, The Choice of Hercules.  The commission was a diplomatic gift to Luigi Girolamo Malabaila, Count Canale (1704-1773), for his role in intervening and resolving the commercial dispute between the Republic and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.3

1. Bowron, op.cit., vol. 2, p. 216, cat. no. 184, (studio copy) reproduced p. 217

2. Ibid., vol. 2, cat. no. 51 (Palazzo Pitti, Florence), cat. no. 114 (Vienna), cat. no. 184 (lost), cat. no. 295 (Saint Petersburg)

3. Ibid., p. 216, under cat. no. 183