A direct confrontation is with the small marble of the 18th century Hercules resting (A), bequest of the Viscount Robert Fitzwilliam and now held in the homonym museum in Cambridge, of winch the painting must be a study from live. The dissimilarity between our work and the sculpture is in the background, painter’s idea, that outdistance the Neoclassicism of the figure and look at the Romanticism lesson, filtered by John Constable and, most of all, by the “painter of light” William Turner, to whom the artist seems being inspired in the fast and rapid brush strokes and in the intensity of light and shadow (aimed to mark the body structure and the epidermis). The composition so made reminds of the engraving of the 16th century by Giorgio Ghisi after Giulio Romano’s drawing, of which one exemplar is held in the British Museum collection from the 18th.

Excerpt of the essay by Doc. Chiara Fiorini.