Mars Resting

Velázquez painted Mars Resting around 1640, depicting the god of war in an extraordinary anti-heroic mode: Mars sits dejectedly on a rumpled bed, his armor piled around him, his expression vacant and somewhat forlorn, wearing only a military helmet and a comic mustache that belongs more to a Madridian barber than an Olympian deity. The painting was intended for the Buen Retiro's Tower of the Parada hunting lodge, a private royal space where Velázquez could take greater interpretive risks than in the public ceremonial portraits. His Mars belongs to a tradition of ironized mythology that questions the grandiose conventions of heroic painting, and the result is both comic and strangely melancholy — one of the most unexpectedly human classical subjects in the history of art.

The painting juxtaposes the idealized classical helmet and armor in the foreground with the very human, un-heroic body of the model, painted with Velázquez's mature technique of broken brushwork and subtle flesh tones.