Aided by Eeriboia, Hermes Carries Off the Exhausted Ares from the Sleeping Sons of Aloeus (recto); Sketch of One of the Sleeping Sons of Aloeus (verso)
Henry Fuseli (Swiss, active in England, 1741-1825)
1819
- Medium
- Graphite and brush and black wash, with touches of charcoal (recto), and graphite (verso), on cream wove paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 52.3 × 73 cm (20 5/8 × 28 3/4 in.)
- Culture
- England
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- The Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
In book 5 of the Iliad, Homer tells the ancient Greek myth of Ares, god of war, captured by the giants Otos and Ephialtes: “Ares suffered when . . . the sons of Aloeus imprisoned [him] in a vessel of bronze. Ares would have perished had not fair Eeriboia, stepmother of the sons of Aloeus, told Hermes, who stole him away when he was already worn out by the severity of his bondage.” Fuseli, who was a scholar as well as an artist, delighted in flaunting his classical learning. In the background, Hermes lifts the exhausted Ares, whose elegant pose Fuseli appropriated from one of Michelangelo’s late drawings, a study for theColonna Pietà.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
