Napoleon as a Hercules, painting by Jacques-Louis David. This is from a series of paintings commissioned by Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who was king of Spain. The Napoleonic Wars were beginning. Napoleon’s rise to power had been swift. Now he was about to invade Russia, an even riskier move.

Treating Napoleon with the respect due an emperor, David portrayed him as the demigod Hercules: he is striding across the Alps on his way to conquer Rome (or Russia). David was a court painter, and the message here was that Napoleon was acting on behalf of France as a whole and not just his own ego; he was carrying the French state on his back. This image followed an ancient tradition in which rulers were portrayed as gods and heroes. But something new is happening here: the artist has chosen to portray Napoleon as himself a god rather than as surrounded by gods.

This painting is one of several that David made for Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother and at this time king of Spain. It is not clear whether Joseph liked it or whether he used it for propaganda in Spain or whether the painted Hercules annoyed him because he thought it made his brother look too much like a god.

Rubens was not the first to paint Napoleon as a classical hero. First there was Jacques-Louis David, whose painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps has remained its most famous image. Then there was Antoine-Jean Gros, who made a famous sculpture of him wielding a club. And then there were a lot of other paintings.

The thing about these paintings is that they show Napoleon as a heroic version of himself. Not in a metaphorical way, but literally: he’s wearing Roman armor and carrying a Roman sword and so on. He is the Roman general Hannibal crossed with Alexander the Great. He is more than human, an idealized being in whom we can see traces of ourselves but magnified and perfected.*

Napoleon did this himself too: he had coins minted showing him as Apollo and Caesar, and he also liked to pose for artists as Apollo or Mars or Alexander. He liked to be depicted as Hercules too, which comes across in the painting by Antoine-François Callet that I’ve chosen here; it’s easy to see how Rubens took his inspiration from it. It’s one of two versions Callet made—the other one is at Versailles—and it shows Napoleon about to tear off his shirt before battle in

Napoleon was quite the fur fetishist. In 1805, he commissioned a painting of himself as Hercules, carrying the world on his shoulders while nude women gamboled at his feet. It was painted by Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835).

The painting is lost, but fortunately an engraving of it has been preserved. The engraving is from the book L’Aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle With Two Heads) by Alexandre Dumas père. According to some sources, this work was a novel about Napoleon; but it is more properly described as a biography in the form of a novel—that is, it’s mostly about Napoleon, but contains fictional elements.* In Chapter XXIX, we get a description of the painting:

“Cependant l’empereur Napoléon peignit volontiers son corps d’après nature et il fit venir chez lui un artiste nommé Gros pour le représenter sous les traits du dieu Hercule portant le monde sur son dos.”

The painting never actually depicted Napoleon with two heads. Instead, it showed him with two faces: one looking up to

Napoleon was a big guy. He was about 5’6″ tall, which was well above average in those days (the average Frenchman of his generation was about 5 feet tall). But he was quite wide, with broad shoulders and thick arms. The English called him “the Corsican Ogre.” He had a large head, with a prominent nose and full lips. His face as a young man is said to have been handsome, although when he got older it became rather fleshy and lost what little beauty it once had.

To top it all off, Napoleon was vain about his appearance. When he went into battle on horseback, he wore white silk breeches to emphasize his riding legs. (It’s hard to tell from the portraits how muscular he actually was; they make him look like a bodybuilder.)

What I’m trying to do is to imagine how this might have worked. First, let’s find out what the ancient Greeks thought about furries.

The first thing we need to know is that there were no such thing as cartoons in the modern sense. The Greeks had no way of making a visual image move, and they didn’t care much about drawing realistically. They drew idealized human figures, which they called kouroi, or statues of gods or heroes that they called korai or kouroi.

And then, on top of those idealized bodies, they put animal heads. So you get something like this:

They did this because Zeus was associated with eagles and Poseidon with horses and Athena with owls and so on. And humans are supposed to be special, so when you draw human figures you want them to be more than just people; you want them to be like gods. In particular you want them to be young and strong and handsome, like gods. But a statue can’t be all those things at once; it’s too big for one thing, and anyway how do you make stone look handsome? So instead the sculptor will put the head of an eagle on the body of a kouroi.

Artistic depictions of animals in the years leading up to the Victorian era were often fantastical and whimsical, with a focus on the “cute” aspects of animals. At this time, art depicting animals in a realistic manner was uncommon, and paintings depicting them as anything other than pleasant and decorative were even rarer. This state of affairs began to change in the mid-19th Century, when several artists started depicting animals more realistically and less comically.

However, these realistic portrayals were not done from an anthropomorphic perspective; that is, animals were depicted as if they were humans in animal form. A few realistic animal painters did exist at this time—although their work was considered to be somewhat radical—but they were not considered to be within the mainstream of artistic thought and were often shunned by their contemporaries. As such, it is unsurprising that the first truly anthropomorphic animal art would not appear until the early 20th Century.

The earliest examples of anthropomorphic animal art are attributed to William Nicholson, a British artist who is best-known for his illustrations of anthropomorphic foxes in children’s books. Nicholson created a series of etchings and paintings featuring anthropomorphized foxes which he called “Furries”, although he himself

Furry art is a genre of anthropomorphic art that has grown in popularity and diversity in recent years. The furry fandom is not merely an interest group, but rather a culture that encompasses a wide variety of artists, writers, gamers, and other individuals. The furry community has had a significant impact on the Internet, as well as on science fiction and fantasy fandom as a whole.

The furry fandom can be separated into two distinct groups: furs and plushies. Furs are fans of adult-oriented cartoons with an anthropomorphic animal theme (Example: Zootopia). Plushies tend to be younger fans who enjoy more cutesy (Example: “My Little Pony”) or childlike versions of such characters. Plushies do exist within the fandom’s adult subculture, however they are comparatively few in number.

“Fursonas” are created by fans to represent themselves as anthropomorphic animal characters in the fandom. These fursonas may be whimsical or serious; some furries have several different fursonas for different situations. A furry name is also sometimes chosen to reflect the character, such as “Spots”, “Bucky”, or “Fang”.

The term “furry” was coined by Mark Merlino in November