1495
ink
paper
From the collection of National Gallery of Art
Hercules and Antaeus is a 1495 ink by Andrea Mantegna, a Renaissance work, held at National Gallery of Art.
This sketch shows a muscular man lifting another man off the ground. The guy on the ground is tangled in vines, struggling to free himself. The background is rough lines, like scratched stone, with a few plants in the corner. The artist used lots of tiny parallel lines to build up dark areas—this is called cross-hatching. It makes the figures look solid and the shadows deep. Try looking up cross-hatching to see how it works in other art.
Andrea Mantegna (UK: , US: ; Italian: ; c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was an Italian Renaissance painter, a student of Roman archaeology, and the son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna…
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