Hercules at the Crossroads

Museum record 21452: Hercules at the Crossroads by Albrecht Dürer. A verified entry point for discovery.

What to notice

For Hercules at the Crossroads (record 21452), start with modern, expressive, atmospheric. Compare the focal subject, edge treatment, and atmosphere before moving on.

Discover

Renaissance humanists were fascinated by antiquity— its mythic heroes, surviving architecture, coins, and sculpture. Noblemen even demanded that the historians inflating their family trees make them stretch all the way back to Hercules and other demigods. Historical figures were occasionally given mythological nicknames, like the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, who was sometimes known by his supporters as the “German Hercules.” These two Hercules prints by Albrecht Dürer fed the fascination with this…