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According to Vasari, Guglielmo moved to Rome in 1537. However, his name does not feature on any documents there until 1546. The Farnese family commissioned him to restore antique sculptures, including the Farnese Hercules, which he restored in 1547 after its discovery by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in 1540.
The Farnese Hercules is a massive marble statue, following a lost original cast in bronze through a method called lost wax casting. It is probably an enlarged copy made in the early third century AD and signed by Glykon, who is otherwise unknown. It is a copy or version of a much older Greek original that was well known, in this case a bronze by Lysippos that would have been made in the fourth century BC. The enlarged copy was made for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome (dedicated in 216 AD), where the statue was recovered in 1546, and is now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.
The statue depicts a muscular, yet weary, Hercules leaning on his club, which has the skin of the Nemean lion draped over it. In myths about Hercules, killing the lion was his first task. He has just performed one of the last of The Twelve Labours, which is suggested by the apples of the Hesperides he holds behind his back.
The sculpture has been reassembled and restored by degrees. According to a letter of Guglielmo della Porta, the head had been recovered separately, from a well in Trastevere, and was bought for Farnese through the agency of della Porta, whose legs made to complete the figure were so well-regarded that when the original legs were recovered from ongoing excavations in the Baths of Caracalla, della Porta's were retained, on Michelangelo's advice, in part to demonstrate that modern sculptors could bear direct comparison with the ancients. The original legs, from the Borghese collection, were not reunited with the sculpture until 1787.
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