Mars

The god of war sits slumped and brooding, naked but for a great plumed helmet, his armor cast aside on the floor, his body soft and his mustache drooping - a Mars utterly deflated, more weary old soldier than triumphant deity. Velazquez paints him with sly, melancholy wit, perhaps gently mocking martial glory itself. Now in the Prado, the picture is a study in anticlimax: the warrior at rest, stripped of his menace, caught in a moment of glum, all-too-human fatigue. Few painters dared make a Roman god look quite so ordinary.