5

This is not strictly a history question, but I hope you can help me: I'm looking for original ancient art depicting king Midas (Ideally a mosaic, but anything will work, as long as it is from the "ancient era"). Searching online with the most popular search engines has been an absolute waste of time, and I find it hard to believe that there is not a single "original" art piece depicting Midas (I thought he was one of the popular ones, even back in the day?).

Ideally, the image should be large, in high resolution and royalty/copyright/whatever free, as I plan to use it as cover art in my doctoral thesis (I am on a completely unrelated field, but Midas' myths provide a perfect metaphor for my research, and I'm really into Greek mythology, so...).

Links, actual names of the pieces (maybe the search engines will be less useless if I tell them exactly which piece I am looking for?), links, downloads, anything at all will be helpful. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out!!

2 Answers 2

10

His tomb was found in 1957; a detailed report,

Reconstructing King Midas: A First Report, by A. J. N. W. Prag, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 39 (1989), pp. 159-165 (9 pages) Published by: British Institute at Ankara

details a reconstruction of his face from the body found in the tomb; see p. 9 of the article, available on JSTOR:

enter image description here

2
  • I asked for an "original" portrait, and I got the most accurate portrait there is: the reconstruction of the guy's face. This is great, thanks! Not the most photogenic alternative for cover art, but it is cool to see either way (Seeing the ear picture, you sort of start getting where the "donkey ears" myth started out...)
    – user753441
    Commented Jan 23, 2019 at 14:33
  • @user753441: You can tell if it is Midas on a vase by the ears! And sometimes the artist has supplied a tail as well. Commented Jan 23, 2019 at 15:04
3

I don't know about portraits, but there are coins depicting him.

3
  • 2
    There are vases too google.com/… feel free to use to expand your answer.
    – AllInOne
    Commented Jan 22, 2019 at 20:57
  • I do like the coin idea, a "Midas gold coin" is very symbolic of the whole thing, thanks for the suggestion!, Also, adding "vase" to the keywords does help, I did saw a couple of potential images that will work for what I want. I'll look into both, this definitely gets me closer to what I imagine, thanks!
    – user753441
    Commented Jan 23, 2019 at 14:36
  • 3
    Policy is that you should copy the information into the answer rather than just supplying a link.
    – user32121
    Commented Jan 24, 2019 at 17:00

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.