Mars Resting — Diego Velázquez
One of history’s great painters portrays the god of war in Classical Antiquity.
A man with a mustache attached, almost naked; he has his armor and weapons at his feet, as he looks at whoever is portraying him with a mixture of curiosity and aplomb. He is wearing his helmet. He has not wanted to take it off, perhaps to make it clear that he is a warrior.
We are in front of the god Mars, conceived by Diego Velázquez in one of his most famous works. And we will focus on his Greek personification.
As was customary at the time, mythological paintings were titled and represented by the Roman equivalents of the Greek deities -although they were not always literal copies- and such was the case of this work, in which we observe Mars, the Roman god, who in turn is an assimilation of the figure of the Greek god Ares.
Son of Zeus and Hera, he was the god of war. As a war representative, his character had a violent and temperamental tendency, with high doses of brutality and exacerbated virility.
Ares was also the god of that very masculine concept -of virility-which resulted in an infinity of female lovers, who procured him an endless offspring and whose majority would also end up taking their place in the great tapestry of Greek mythology.
