Hercules Killing Cacus (1588): Artwork and History

Hercules Killing Cacus (1588) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as Hendrick Goltzius Dutch, 1558-1617.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

To make a chiaroscuro woodcut, an artist uses a separate woodblock for printing each different color of ink. Often, as was the case for both of these prints, the image was rendered primarily in a line block, usually in black. The additional colors—together with the color of the paper itself—provide more definition to the forms and more dramatic light effects. The virtuoso graphic artist Hendrick Goltzius used the chiaroscuro woodcut technique to great effect in his depiction of Hercules completing the 10th of his 12 labors: the capture of the cattle of Geryon. To accomplish this feat, he had to vanquish the giant Cacus. Goltzius shows the moment just before Hercules violently clubs the giant, which is made especially dramatic by the vivid conjunction of yellow and green. Although Goltzius's advances in line engraving found many followers, few artists pursued his equally original exploration of chiaroscuro woodcuts printed from one line block and multiple tone blocks. The largest, and one of the earliest of the chiaroscuro woodcuts from Goltzius's workshop, this dramatic print is also the only one to have a date cut into the block. Here Hercules slays Cacus, a cattle thief, in his cave in the Aventine hills.

Object facts

• Title: Hercules Killing Cacus
• Date: 1588
• Artist attribution: Hendrick Goltzius Dutch, 1558-1617
• Place of origin: Netherlands
• Medium: Chiaroscuro woodcut from three blocks in black, yellow and olive-green, on ivory laid paper
• Dimensions: Image/plate/sheet trimmed to platemark: 41 × 33.2 cm (16 3/16 × 13 1/8 in.)
• Type: Print
• Department: Prints and Drawings
• Reference number: 1930.795

Collection credit

Gift of Alfred E. Hamill

View the original

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.