Solar Crowns

Last week and the week before  I showed you a variety of headgear worn by monarchs on coins and other art and showed you how UNLIKE modern crowns they were.

So why did later European monarchs start wearing spiked crowns rather than jewelled headbands?

One reason might have been the radiate solar crown used by some Hellenistic monarchs and LATE Empire Caesars.

The god Helios was traditionally shown wearing a crown of rays.

Hellenistic and Roman SYNCRETISM lead to people identifying Apollo or Helios with various Near Eastern and Egyptian Solar Deities. 

I suspect an attempt to identify with Horus lead to the Ptolemies using a radiate crown.

The First Caesars however did not wear crowns but the revival and spread of various Solar deities from Syria and Persia, the cults of Sol Invictus, Mithras, and Shams, and others lead to a brief revival of the radiate crown started by Aurelianus who had coins issued showing Helios on one side and his image with a radiate crown on the other.

I'm thinking also that perhaps some later jewellers were given Roman coins to melt down and remove the "pagan" imagery and were asked to recycle the coins into crowns but seing the coins and perhaps survivng mosaics or statutes of Helios got ideas.

I have more Helios art I'll share soon.

Garish Colors - Cinnabar Red

GARISH COLOURS - CINNABAR RED

#classicalart #ancientgreekpainting #romanpainting #pigments # cinnabar

Probably the Brightest Strongest Mineral Pigment available to the Greeks and Romans was #Cinnabar #MercurySulphide

If you think painted statues or wall paintings were a riot of bright reds greens yellows and blues ... er no ... the Greeks and Romans had a more limited range of pigments available than we do.
But yes some of those all now seemingly serene marble sculptures may have had red clothing and cinnabar mixed with other pigments for skin tones.

This is what cinnabar looks like.

Please bear in mind that cinnabar can be toxic and especially in its powdered form should be handled with gloves and a mask and washing of any exposed skin and probably clothes too.

The raw mineral ore form

Powder and wet pigment


Its a gorgeous warm color stronger than Realgar or any of the Iron Oxide reds from clays.

Cadmium Red wasn't discovered until the 19th century.

Cinnabar red is also known as Vermilion or sometimes as Minium.

If you're planning to try to duplicate the reds seen on Roman frescoes I suggest you use modern paints to avoid the toxicity problem and bear in mind another problem with sulphides is that they do NOT BLEND WELL with pigments from copper ore.

I did consult Wikipedia and other sources but that was to check if what I remembered from art school decades ago was still valid and up to date.

Apollo and Mithras

Apollo and Mithras
A strange relationship

A couple of weeks back some one described my Judeo-Christian deity  as being just another near eastern solar god. I politely pointed that that was incorrect for several reasons. anyway I started thinking about the rayed halo iconography and its origins and did some googling to find the latest views on that.

A lot of people believe the rayed halo was borrowed from either the Mithras cult or or some other sun god like Apollo.

Now the odd thing is that Apollo with a rayed halo or any halo is only depicted with one from the late Hellenistic era onwards.

Some scholars used to believe the Kouros images of archaic Greek art were Apollo like this one.

Greek Classical art depicted Apollo like this :

Either dressed as a musician or shown as an archer or nude always with long hair and young. Frequently you can see where a hand holding a bow was broken off.

Now these Hellenistic Imperial era images.

First sign of the rayed halo motif!

Though this may be Helios driving the sun chariot!

The later Greeks seem to have confused the two in popular art.

Images of Mithras a maybe Persian god. 

Maybe a persian god? The first shows Mithras with a Hellenistic Greek King Antiochus and the second is Persian. 

Now the Mithras cult is odd. Said to have come from Persia there are very few artifacts within the Persian and Parthian cultural sphere showing Mithras. 

Given the Mithras cult peaks during the Roman era is it possible there was a separate Anatolian Mithras cult incorporating solar imagery from both Greek and Near Eastern art . Mithras changed from a minor deity to a separate syncretistic cult.

A lot of Roman art copies and adapts earlier Greek art.

Here's a mosaic from Roman Africa.

Who used the rayed halo first? Apollo or Mithras. Given Hellenistic cultural contact with the Parthians its not impossible the rayed halo idea moved from west to east? 

By the way that sun god thing in relation to images of Christ? The earliest images of Christ tend to to stress the Good Shepherd image without HALOS.

But thats a topic for a separate post.

Apollo and Mithras. What was the ultimate source for the rayed halo?

I've given you images to think about. Enjoy.

Amphitrite in Art One

Amphitrite Goddess of the Sea

There are very few surviving stories featuring her as much more than a name  but her appearances in art suggest there may be missing stories that have not survived.

She is mentioned by Hesiod, Apollodoros, and Ovid and some other writers.

She was an Oceanid a daughter of  the Titans Oceanus and Tethys who married Poseidon and together they ruled the seas. Take a look at these images.

The striking thing about them is that although Poseidon ? Neptune got all the temples in popular art used in homes, mosaics, frescos, and lastly this vase painting, Poseidon and Amphitrite seem to be shown as co-equal consorts?
You rarely seen images of other gods together as married couples.

The other striking feature is how often Amphitrite is semi naked and always from the waist down. This is perhaps not so odd givne other deities being depicted this way but when she is shown as semi naked its always from the waist down.

But there is another way of depicting Amphitrite. There are vase painting images that refer to a story of her meeting her husbands son Theseus.

That's the topic for my next post!