Showing great mastery of the Renaissance language brought by Italian and Flemish influences, this tapestry is one of the most significant examples from the MNAA collection, not only from the point of view of its compositional arrangement, but also from the point of view of the technique and iconography that it displays, having certainly belonged to a set of textiles all woven at the same workshop, with the same border and narrating different scenes from the same story.

Hercules, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, was perhaps the most popular hero in Classical Mythology, synthesising in his parentage the twin essence of the divine and the human. His labours and adventures, together with his human weaknesses, gave rise to countless narrative accounts, ranging from tragedy to comedy, which have formed the basis of an immense iconography.