Dionysios the Party God

#dionysios #mosaic

Our next sequence of secular mid week posts will feature the Party God the infamous son of Semele and Zeus and noted cross dresser when not half nude!

This is Dionysios riding a leopard 

No that is not a woman or a maenad

Dionysios is usually depicted as a man wearing the sort of festival robes only an aristocrat could afford or being half naked and while the earliest depictions show him with a beard he starts being depicted as beardless in Hellenistic Art. He is often shown riding a leopard or being pulled in a chariot drawn by tigers and leopards or dancing with his Maenads. I'll be showing you examples of all of these over the next couple of weeks

Ares god of War

This is the oldest vase painting image I could google showing Ares.
 Its Attic dating about 570 bc. Notice the eye depicted in Archaic Greek style.

Another detail of interest is the attempt to use slip to suggest a lighter hair color and that he seems to be carrying two spears not one.

A Brief History of Hermes in ART

How the Greeks and Romans depicted Hermes in ART.

The earliest images of Hermes show a mature adult with a beard.

but this changes about the beginning of the hellenistic era

Hermes loses his beard and appears younger

then we have the Roman version

finally here's a modern depiction ... ye sit is a page form a comic book EARTH2 but Nicola Scott does excellent art and I wanted to show you a modern use of a mythic image.