The Temple of Hercules

Antonio di Donnino di Domenico del Mazziere was a minor Florentine painter of the early sixteenth century working in the shadow of the dominant High Renaissance figures. His Temple of Hercules is an unusual secular mythological subject for a Florentine painter of his generation — possibly connected to a specific humanist commission or a decorative programme for a private interior. The Temple of Hercules as a subject connects to the widespread Renaissance interest in reconstructing ancient monuments from textual descriptions, a scholarly enterprise that gave painters and architects a legitimate basis for depicting invented classical architecture.

The composition places the architectural monument — a circular or columned temple — within a landscape setting. Antonio's technique follows the Florentine tradition of the period: careful linear construction of the architecture, atmospheric landscape recession in the Leonardesque manner of the generation after. Figure staffage, if present, is subordinate to the architectural subject.