All-Seeing Helios in the Adultery of Venus: the Image and Contex in Roman art and its Christian Afterlife

Abstract

This paper examines the role of Helios as an all-seeing deity in scenes of the adultery of Venus and Mars based on classical literary sources and mythological reliefs in Roman funerary art, and also elucidates its afterlife in Christianity. Few Roman examples survive that explicitly show this act of infidelity, therefore particular emphasis is placed on a relief from a mirror from Viminacium, the province of Upper Moesia, and the altar Ara Casali, now in the Vatican Museums. The paper traces the general development of the symbolic roles of Helios in different thematic representations and the context in which Helios as an all-seeing God is represented in Early Christian and Medieval art. The myth and the role of Helios in it could be understood in different contexts: as an inter alia neo-Pythagorean, celestial, and in moralizing. The role of Helios in the moralizing context is, however, indisputable. This aspect will be a key motivation in the transformation of the myth in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, not only in literary sources but in visual art as well.