Wearing Hercules: Hendrick Goltzius’s Odd Bodies and Johan Colterman’s Identity

In the early seventeenth century, when artists studied antique statues and sought to perfect man’s proportions, Hendrick Goltzius painted imperfect human bodies. Although the renowned draughtsman could imitate any style, when he traded his burins for brushes around 1600, Goltzius filled his canvases with oddly naturalistic bodies. In 1613, Johan Colterman, a multi-term burgomaster of Haarlem, commissioned the artist to paint a seven-foot-tall portrait historié for the center panel of a mythological triptych. Hercules and Cacus features a stout, well-fed nude with an undaunted gaze, confident stance, and Johan Colterman’s face. By “wearing” Hercules the patron assumes the strongman’s virtues, celebrates his civic pride, and appropriates heroic iconography from aristocratic tyrants. Beyond the lion-skin pelt and club that identify Hercules, an unusual body remains. It is unlikely that Goltzius studied Colterman’s body for this portrait; instead, the burger is “dressed” in another man’s body—and it is not a muscle-bound figure from Antiquity. Seventeenth-century male audiences, who were accustomed to viewing idealized physiques, might find this barrel-chested, beer-bellied body more representative of their own bodies and notions of masculinity. In this paper I argue that Goltzius, whose hand had been disfigured since childhood, explored the fraught connection between appearance and (masculine) identity. According to Karel van Mander, when Goltzius traveled to Italy, he disguised himself as a peasant and fooled people into believing that Jan Mathijssen, his physically impressive companion, was the famed printmaker. In art and in life, Goltzius complicated the idea that clothes—or bodies—make the man.