Fontana after Gianni after Lairesse. Hercule entre le Vice et la Vertu

Gerard de Lairesse (1640-1711), born in Liege, arrived in Amsterdam in 1665, in the middle of the Second Anglo-Dutch War being documented by the Elder and Younger Willem van de Veldes. By 1672, when the van de Veldes had moved their studio to London, Lairesse was still in Amsterdam, where he abandoned the prevailing aesthetic of Dutch realism by embracing an ornate Italianate classicism he imported from France, eventually becoming known as the “Dutch Poussin.” 

Soon after Lairesse arrived in Amsterdam, Rembrandt painted the portrait that since 1975 has been in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York (fig. 1). 

Forty years after Rembrandt had painted his portrait, Lairesse dismissed the style in which he had painted it as “liquid mud on the canvas” in his treatise on The Art of Painting (Quodbach 55). Published in 1707, this treatise “played an important role in the origin of Neo-classical ideals” throughout Europe. In it, Lairesse “defended the most intransigent form of academicism, which in his eyes was embodied only by Poussin and Le Brun.” He “hardly mentioned” Rubens or Rembrandt and “had nothing but contempt for such minor realist painters as Adriaen van Ostade, Adriaen Brouwer, or David Teniers the younger, all of whom he considered vulgar.” Lairesse would restrict the painter only to “historical, mythological or allegorical subjects, genres that could educate the mind and move the heart” (Roy, Grove, 19:653). As early as 1668 Lairesse was creating in Amsterdam the kind of classicism that Bosse, Poussin, and Le Brun had brought to the Court of Louis XIV in France—in the form of a virtuously voluptuous Venus Presenting Arms to Aeneas (fig. 2; see Snoep, pp. 237-44).   

Until being “suddenly struck by blindness” in 1690, Lairesse had a “brilliant and fruitful” career as both an engraver and a painter. As an engraver, he achieved great renown with “several large plates” that “celebrated the military victories of William III” in 1674. He later received major commissions from William III to decorate his castles at Soestdijk. During the 1680s Lairesse was painting exactly the kind of classical, historical, and mythological subjects he was to elevate in his 1707 treatise: Achilles with the Daughters of Lycomedes, the Death of Germanicus, and Hercules between Virtue and Vice. At this point in his career his paintings were becoming “even more classical in character, with monumental figures evocative of ancient statues and an increasingly refined sense of composition” (Roy, Grove, 651-53).  These qualities are ably reflected in the painting of Hercule entre le Vice et la Vertu (c. 1685) that Melville acquired in the engraving by Pietro Fontana that is the subject of this entry. The original painting (fig. 3) was among the “heaps of treasures of art of all sorts” at the Louvre when young Melville visited in 1849 (NN J 31).   

Lairesse has brought the ancient Hercules up close and personal, his smooth massive chest more sensually rendered than the female allurements of Virtue or Vice on either side. The French text that accompanied Fontana’s engraving in Le Musée royal in 1818 contrasted the restraint with which Lairesse had rendered Vice against the more sensuous treatment of Annibale Carracci, who had taken much more literally her “transparent vestments” in Xenophon’s account of Prodicus’ fable (“Hercule entre le vice et la virtu,” n. p.). In the sculpting of its up-close bodies, as well as in its frieze-like spatial disposition, Fontana’s engraving after Lairesse’s Hercule resembles Melville’s copy of Staccoli’s Achille in Sciro in Mochetti’s 1785 engraving after an ancient Roman frieze (fig 4 below, our CAT 15).  

The above subject was itself a favorite of Lairesse, who painted at least three versions of Achilles Discovered among the Daughters of Lycomedes in the 1680s. Before Lairesse, treatment of this subject was “rare in seventeenth-century Northern Netherlandish art,” but in Flanders “the theme became very popular after Rubens’ version appeared in 1617/18,” one subsequent treatment having been the painting by Van Dyck in the collection of William III (Lammertse, nos. 66, 67, pp. 330-34).   

The story of Hercules’ choice between vice and virtue had been popularized in Greek and Roman culture by Xenophon and Cicero, respectively. Melville had access to the writings of each in his thirty-seven-volume edition of The Classical Library (Sealts no. 147). The subject was more conveniently available, however, in the commentary that accompanied the engraving of Lairesse’s Hercules between Virtue and Vice in Melville’s copy of The Works of Eminent Masters (fig. 5).  

The above wood-block engraving in Works is a crude effort compared to elegant etching by Fontana that Melville owned. The accompanying text, however, provides an extended English translation of the verbal dueling between Virtue and Vice, tracing the ancient fable back through Xenophon and Cicero to “Prodicus, a disciple of Protagoras and a native of Ceos, who lived about 400 B.C.” One of the two “majestic” women who appear before young Hercules offers him “a gentle and easy road. You shall want no pleasures and know no pain.” The other offers the “the labour, industry, and self-denial that make life happy and bright.” Hercules “listened attentively” as each spoke “and his decision was then made. He rejected Pleasure, and followed the track of Virtue” (2: 87). 

Jonathan Cook points to Melville’s copy of the Fontana engraving in arguing that the character Bulkington in Moby-Dick represents a Herculean example of self-denial. Cook notes that Melville had seen the celebrated Farnese sculpture of Hercules in Naples and he suggests that Melville himself, not only Bulkington, represents, in his life as a writer, the kind of self-denial that Emerson, in his essay “Intellect,” had attributed to the man of thought: “aloof from all moorings and afloat” (16-19, 25-26). In contrast to the self-denial of Melville’s choice to write poetry that few people read, and to collect prints that few people saw, during the 1870s and 1880s, however, we can also imagine the intense pleasure that the acquisition of his prints gave him—not only in heroic classical vein of Lairesse but in the Dutch realist mode from Rembrandt, Teniers, van Tilborch, and van Ostade on through to van Mieris, Metsu, and Netscher.   

In the heroic vein, when Melville encountered the Farnese sculpture of Hercules in Naples in 1857, he noted in his journal its “colossal, gravely benevolent face” (NN J 103). When writing Billy Budd in his home on East 26th Street three decades later, he endowed his young, handsome sailor with “that human look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules” (NN BBO 51). The Hercules after Lairesse that Melville owned certainly tends toward the “human” rather than the “colossal” side of the young strong man’s “look of reposeful good nature.” Lairesse had been considered “a painter of the highest rank by his contemporaries” in Amsterdam and the Hague. His work had been highly regarded throughout the eighteenth century, but he had fallen “into scornful disfavor” in the 19th century, when those who revived Realism and initiated impressionism “were violently opposed to academic art” (Roy, Grove, 653). 

Pierre Fontana (1762-1837) was an Italian engraver who studiesd with both Johannes Volpato (who engraved Melville’s copy of Raphael’s Loggia at the Vatican, CAT 108) and Rafaelle Morghen (who engraved his copes of Ariosto and Tasso, CAT 104 & 105). Fontana’s collaborator in engraving Lairesse’s Hercules was Felice Gianni (1758-1823), an Italian painter and draughtsman who had decorated many palaces in Rome with classical subjects from the literature and history of Greece and Rome. After 1798, Gianni was very much involved in the artistic rapprochement between Italy and France that in Melville’s print collection is most strikingly represented by Longhi’s 1806 engraving of Napoleon as Emperor of France and King of Italy (CAT 117). One decade later, Gianni and Fontana collaborated in the engraving of Lairesse’s Hercule entre le Vice et la Virtu for Le Musée royal, a continuation of the Le Musée français of 1803-11.