Some thirty years ago the present writer attributed the V&A’s Salting Hercules Pomarius (Hercules with the apples of the Hesperides) to the youthful Michelangelo. The discovery, in a private collection, of a contemporary rough cast from the same model prompted a return to the subject. Following a survey of the attributional history of the Hercules, and an examination of responses to it by sixteenth-century sculptors, it is argued that Michelangelo’s model although it was immediately cast as one, was not created for that purpose, but in preparation for a marble statue to be carved from a pre-existing block which, judging from the Hercules’ lack of depth, was to be shallow. This block was no doubt that used later by Michelangelo for the David, whose similarity of pose to the Hercules has always been recognised. Michelangelo told Vasari that he had planned to work on that block many years earlier and it is suggested that the project of carving from it a Hercules was conceived by Lorenzo the Magnificent for his villa-farm at Poggio a Caiano, the ideal location for a Hercules Pomarius. But the scheme would have lapsed either at Lorenzo’s death in 1492 or at the expulsion of his son Piero from Florence in 1494.

The block was no longer available when the Medici returned to power in 1512, but the family’s interest in Hesperidean imagery continued. The subject was included by Michelangelo in an unused design of 1520 for the New Sacristy’s Magnifici Tomb; and it is probable that at the same time a Hercules in the Garden of the Hesperides was projected for Poggio’s salone facing Pontormo’s Vertumnus and Pomona, although it was painted only fifty years later by Alessandro Allori. Michelangelo likely made drawings for this fresco too, of which a magnificent vision of the dragon Ladon survives at Oxford.