Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Labours of Hercules Tapestries in the Renaissance

The Labours of Hercules, one of the most popular literary and artistic themes of the Renaissance, was a particularly prolific motif for Flemish tapestries. The iconographic scheme of the Hercules series synthesized an enormous range of ancient and medieval philosophical and didactic erudition, the roots of which stretchted back to works like Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Boccaccio’s Genealogy of the Gods or the Ovide moralisé. This paper will examine an episode especially favoured in the sixteenth-century series: the fight between Hercules and the river-God Achelous (Metamorphoses, IX, 1-100).