NEPTUNE
Brother of Jupiter and Pluto; sire of Theseus, of Polyphemus, and of the titanic lads who threatened to pile mountain on mountain in order to destroy the home of the deities; the god whose footsteps tremble the earth; who disputes with the sun; who uses floods and earthquakes for weapons; who owns vast palaces in the caverns of the deep; for whom the angry waves sink down beneath the shining sea, and ocean monsters play around his lightning track across the waters: this is the divinity whom the painter is accustomed to portray as a rough bearded man with dishevelled hair and rugged features, holding a three-pronged fork, and associating with dolphins, mermaids, and shells. But Neptune is not a popular god. He does not appeal to the mind as a good-natured god like Jupiter or Mercury, with many of the virtues and some of the failings of mankind. His acts are mostly violent; he punishes but does not reward; grows angry but is never kind. There is consequently no sympathetic attitude towards him on the part of the artist, who would sooner paint good than bad actions. Beyond his violent acts, the circumstances which make up the history of the god, provide subjects more suitable for the poet than the painter, who is practically confined to unimportant and casual incidents which, with changes of accessories, would answer a thousand scenes in mythological history. Neptune then may well disappear from the purview of the painter, with the tritons and the seaweed entourage.
MARS
From the point of view of the painter, there is little to say about the Grecian Ares. He has not a single good trait in legend or story, and we know nothing of his presumed personal form beyond the military externals. It is difficult to understand how such a god came to be included among the deities of a civilized race. Of what service could be prayer when it is addressed to a blatant, bloodstained, genius of the brutal side of war, without feeling or pity, and apparently so wanting in intelligence that he has to leave the direction of battles to a goddess? One would think that Homer intended him as the god of bullies, or he would not have made him roar like ten thousand men when struck with a stone, nor would he have allowed him to be imprisoned by two young demigods, and contemptuously wounded by a third. But who is responsible for the association of such a wretched example of divinity with the radiant Aphrodite, for surely it is only the cloak of Homer that covers the story! Was it a painter who had sought in vain from the poets a suggestion for a composition in which the god would at least appear normal, or a cynical critic who wished to incite ridicule as well as contempt for the divinity? In any case the painter must sigh in vain for an inspiriting design with Ares as the leading figure: he cannot harmonize love and terror.
The Roman Mars has a slight advantage over Ares, for the name of Silvia is sweetly-sounding, but she should be represented alone, as the star of the wild Campagna, while yet it was forest-clad: the gleaming light whose rays are to illumine the earth. Mars may disappear with the wolf, but who can hide the glory of Rome?
MERCURY
It is difficult to connect the Hermes of the poet with the tedious expressionless figure commonly seen in painting, whose only costume is a helmet, and whose invariable province is apparently to look on and do nothing. For the sculptor he is a god; for the painter a symbol of subordination. A Rubens may give him the pulse of life, but only the sculptor can suggest the divinity. With the painter the winged helmet is a bizarre ornament; the immortal sandals are shrunken to leather; the caduceus is a thing of inertia which is ever in the way. But with the sculptor all these things may be endowed with the quickening spirit of a soaring mind, for does not Giovanni di Bologna show the lithesome god speeding through space ahead of the wind, the feathery foot-wings humming with delirium, the trembling air dividing hastily before the wand? True, the painter may represent the divine herald on his way through space, as when he conducts Psyche to Olympus, or leads the shades of the suitors to Hades; but the accessories present must surround him with an earthy framework, unless the design be confined to a ceiling, and shut away from things mundane with architectural forms, as in the plan of Raphael at the Farnese Villa, or to a fresco executed in the manner of a Flaxman drawing. Beyond these artifices the artist cannot go with propriety.