Heracles the Archer

When he created these classicizing figures, Émile Antoine Bourdelle uncompromisingly liberated his theme from literary stories but applied the necessity of the sculpture’s order. In the figure of a Greek hero he experimented with different postures to harmoniously balance the archer’s dynamic position. He combined two traditions - the head references archaic Greek sculpture while the distinctly modelled body invokes Hellenistic sculpture. The work’s theme is based on Greek mythology. It embodies one of the twelve labours Heracles was to perform for the Mycenaean King Eurystheus - to remove the human-eating birds living in the Stymphalian swamps from Earth.