The artist who cast this seventeenth-century tour de force of bronze sculpture has not been identified. It bears no signature, and no other known work is similar enough to support an attribution. This dynamic scene of combat is made of at least fourteen different pieces, each cast separately. The subject is the second of Hercules’s Twelve Labors, in which he slew the seven-headed Hydra with his club. The fantastic monster is composed with imaginative variety. Moving around it, one discovers that each writhing head displays a distinct venomous personality; at the front, biting Hercules’s foot, is a birdlike head with horns and fanged beak, and just above it, a doglike head with shaggy ears rears back to strike the hero.

Some have associated this sculpture with the French king Henry IV, one of several French sovereigns who aligned themselves with the figure of Hercules, symbol of heroic virtue. Henry, who reigned from 1589 to 1610, was once bestowed with the title “Gallic Hercules” and was portrayed in painted portraits in the guise of Hercules vanquishing the Hydra.