The title of Velázquez’s Marte (c. 1640–42, Fig. 11.1) invites certain preconceptions: first, that the subject of the work will be Mars, the Roman god of war; second, that the image will be of a splendid armed figure personifying the essence of military power; and third, that the portrait will possess a clear function.Velázquez’s depiction of Mars, however, brutally undermines such expectations. In place of the traditional embodiment of war, a dishevelled and apparently bemused individual gazes blankly into the extra-pictorial space. Instead of assuming a posture of divine authority on a chariot or a campaign couch, Mars adopts a more introspective pose as he perches on the edge of a rumpled bed. It becomes immediately apparent that a new lexicon is required to describe the god of war. The conventional Renaissance epithets used of Mars in the poetry of Garcilaso or Luis de León, such as airado or cauto y fiero, are no longer fitting. The gap that exists between viewer expectation, governed by an appreciation of iconographical tradition, and the physical and mental reality of Velázquez’s incongruous figure establishes a sense of profound ambiguity. Are we to see Mars in isolation from the world of mythological narrative, divorced from Venus and alienated from his traditional role as the dios guerrero? If so, how might one read this mythological figure? And what might one infer about Velázquez’s intentions in depicting Mars thus?

To date, critics of Velázquez, who have preferred to analyse his Sevillian bodegones, the influence of his contact with Italy, his work as royal portraitist, or his large-scale artistic achievements of the 1650s, have dedicated little time to an exploration of Marte and have responded to the work’s apparent surfacesimplicity with attempts at definitive interpretation. The first half of this chapter will analyse four such readings: as a moral and ethical justification of pagan mythology; as mythological burlesque; as socio-allegorical satire; and as an image of repose within the context of the Torre de la Parada. I will then explore the implications of Jonathan Brown’s mythological narrative reading of the work as a representation of the dénouement of the Homeric and Ovidian myth of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan, before proceeding to develop this identification along the parallel lines of the two readings that I now propose: the psychological reading and the aesthetic reading.