Hercules Dressed as a Woman

This watercolor is based on a famous etching after a lost mural in the Palace of Fontainebleau made by sixteenth-century Italian painter Francesco Primaticcio. Mannerist painters of Primaticcio’s circle played to an elite audience of courtiers who embraced homosexuality and the queering of hypermasculine figures like Hercules. The subject appealed to Day, whose lifetime spanned the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay liberation.

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