This bronze statuette was created by Florentine sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1725) around the 1690s. It depicts a story from the Greek mythology, which is related, with variants, by several Classical and Renaissance authors. Hercules who had fallen in love with Iole, took her for concubine although he was already married with Dejanira. After tolerating this infidelity for some time, Dejanira soaked a cloak with centaur Nessus’ blood believing it would be a love charm and gave it to Hercules. It was however a poison and the cloak killed the hero. This unusual scene comes from poet Giovanni Boccaccio’s version of the story, where Hercules was so enamoured with Iole that he surrendered his club and his lion skin to her and willingly took her distaff.
Giovanni Battista Foggini, who was first identified as the author of this bronze in 1968 (Montagu 1968), was born in Florence but trained in Rome between 1673 and 1676 with sculptor Ercole Ferrata and painter Ciro Ferri. After his return from Rome, he soon became court sculptor to grand duke Cosimo III de’ Medici and then court architect and superintendent of the Medici workshop, for which he provided a number of designs and supervised the production of furniture and reliquaries.
For his composition, Foggini was inspired by a famous fresco of the same subject painted by Annibale Carracci on the ceiling of the Farnese Gallery in Rome, which the sculptor would have seen during his studies in Rome. He may also have been influenced by a painting representing Hercules and Omphale by Peter Paul Rubens now in the Louvre (INV 854) but formerly in the collection of the Queen of Sweden in Rome.
The bronze was probably commissioned shortly after 1691 by Cosimo III as a wedding present to his daughter Anna Maria Luisa and her German husband Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine. A bronze of Heracles of Iole by “Fugini” is indeed recorded in their palace in Düsseldorf in 1719 and then again 1743. The bronze only reappeared in the 20th century when it was purchased by the collector John A. Tulk, possibly in Germany when looking for Meissen porcelain. Tulk bequeathed the sculpture to the V&A and it arrived at this death in 1956.
Thanks to the indirect lost wax casting method, artists could make several copies of their works. Foggini, like other Florentine sculptors, often made new casts of his most successful compositions a few years apart. Two other casts of this group are known. The second cast was left by Giovanni Battista Foggini in his workshop after his death and was then exhibited by his sons at Santissima Annunziata in 1729. It was then acquired by Giuseppe Borri who extensively collected sculptures of his contemporaries. Borri also exhibited the bronze, paired with another similar group of Bacchus and Ariadne at Santissima Annunziata in 1767. The latter is now considered as a work by Giuseppe Piamontini (several version exist including on at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 83.SB.333). The pair reappeared in 1903 at the sale of the Lelong collection in Paris (11-16 May 1903, Paris, lot 790). The illustration in the sale catalogue allows to distinguish it from the V&A version, it has for instance a longer handle of the club and slightly different formation of the ground and can be identified with the bronze bought by the Queensland Gallery in Australia in 1980 (Acc. 1:1763).
Finally, the third version of Hercules and Iole was acquired by the Currier Museum of Art, New Hamphire, in 2010. The early provenance of that group is unknown but it reappeared in the 20th century a collector named Jaffé and was then sold in auction at Sotheby’s London on 18 May 1967, lot 48.
In addition, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery owns a terracotta (1967P53) of this composition which shows some differences with the bronzes. It is likely to be a preliminary model for the bronze.