Hercules ready to fight with a bat wearing a lion's hat

Heracles ready to strike is the action-pose of the great Lysippan tradition. In the fourth century BCE, the sculptor Lysippus of Sicyon revolutionised the depiction of the hero with works such as the Hercules Epitrapezios — small bronze figures in which the demigod is caught at the height of effort, body braced, club raised. From those originals the type travelled to Rome, where Glykon's Farnese Hercules turned the same readiness into one of the most monumental nude sculptures of antiquity.