EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Baccio Bandinelli admired and competed with the older Michelangelo all his life but never escaped the great man's shadow. When the Republican government of Florence decided to order Hercules and Cacus as a companion piece for David at the entrance to the Palazzo della Signoria, they originally gave the commission to Michelangelo. A decade later, after a change of government, the marble ended up in Bandinelli's hands. This, then, is the story of what he sculpted. 

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Himself. As always, each figure is an alter ego of the artist. Although Bandinelli's Hercules (top) long pre-dates his Self-portrait (bottom), their bearded faces are similar, a "look" Bandinelli used in many figures. This means, as I have suggested of Leonardo and Michelangelo, that the young Bandinelli developed a facial type of what he might look like when old.¹ He either was accurate in his prediction or made his later self-portraits conform to that type. His probable purpose, like Leonardo's and Michelangelo's, was to convey his access to wisdom, a concept long symbolized by old age.

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Even Hercules' victim, the kneeling Cacus (bottom), shares Hercules' distinctive hairstyle, the curl to his lower lip and the creases on an artist's forehead. The frown, a very common feature of artists' self-portraits, symbolizes deep thought.² Even Cacus' beard, with far less growth, is at least curly like Hercules'. Only Cacus' nose is really different and its prominence intentionally persuades the casual viewer to see two different people.

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Hercules also resembles his mate, David. Their right arms hang down, both heads turned over the left shoulder, alert and frowning. Their straight, right legs are tensed with toes near the edge of rocky ground with a short, dead tree trunk.³

They stand like sculptors, their heads theoretically looking in the mirror as if making a self-portrait.⁴ Both right hands (one holds a club) seem ready to strike marble.⁵ Hercules "sculpts" Cacus while David, one hand turned inwards, "sculpts" himself both as a young hero and giant.⁶ That may be why Cacus' curly facial hair is only half-alike; it is in the process of being "sculpted" like Hercules'. Cacus is Hercules' "self-portrait" or an alter ego struggling creatively.

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The Herculean "sculptor" with Bandinelli's features is depicting himself as his own victim because, in beauty and wisdom (the two are one and the same), all opposites are united. That's why, as EPPH proposes, art has long had one unchanging theme: the creative moment which, understood properly, leads to "heaven" (i.e., spiritual happiness) in this life not the next. 

Bandinelli's art is not as awe-inspiring as Michelangelo's but, like many artists and poets, he could see the thematic unity in art unseen by the crowd. And so should we. If not, in the absence of some other method of transcendence, we will forever be hammered by reality.