Hercules and Lichas

This painting by Christoph Unterberger (1732–1798) on a ceiling of the Villa Borghese in Rome depicts the murder of the servant Lichas by Hercules. The hero is tormented by the pain of the deadly blood-soaked garment, inadvertently sent by his wife Deianeira and handed to him by Lichas. Grabbing hold of the servant, he whirls him in the air and hurls him into the sea. Such fits of uncontrolled passion prompting excessive violence and leading to murder belong to the downsides of the deeds for which Hercules is known and are much rarer in the visual iconography of the hero than those of the fighting Hercules.

Hercules and Lichas, ceiling painting, 1785–1786, artist: Christoph Unterberger, photographer: Fabrizio Garrisi; source: Borghese Gallery, Sala di Ercole, Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:54-_Christoph_Unterberger,_La_punizione_di_Lica,_1784-86_-FG54.jpg,  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.