Introduction: Homer’s Visual Legacy
“If one were to say that Homer was a teacher of painting as well, this would be no exaggeration.” So begins a remarkable passage from the ancient Life of Homer long attributed to Plutarch that frames the poet as a master of visual as well as verbal art. The unknown but insightful author elaborates on this claim with specific reference to the Shield of Achilles:
But Homer’s Hephaestus, making the shield of Achilles and sculpting in gold the earth, the heavens, the sea, even the mass of the sun and the beauty of the moon, the swarm of stars that crowns the universe, cities of various sorts and fortunes, and moving, speaking creatures — what practitioner of such techne does he not seem to excel? (Squire 2013, 164)
This ancient recognition of Homer’s ability to “sculpt in the medium of language” would echo through centuries of artistic response, as successive generations struggled with the challenge of representing the unrepresentable. The Shield of Achilles in the Iliad—an artifact containing the entire cosmos, multiple cities, and simultaneous temporalities—presents perhaps the most profound example of this challenge.
Yet the history of this artistic engagement reveals a striking paradox: what was once clearly recognized has sometimes become obscure to modern scholarship. Stephen K. Scher, examining Pisanello’s Renaissance medal for Don Iñigo d’Avalos, suggests that its cosmic imagery only tenuously relates to Homer’s Shield of Achilles, calling the medal’s meaning “something of a puzzle” (Scher 1994, 58).
Yet our earliest documented commentary on the medal—a short prose comparison of the Homeric, Hesiodic, and Virgilian shields, followed by a Latin poem, both by the Anconitan jurist Giuseppe Castiglione (d. 1616)—unequivocally celebrates it as an heir to Homer’s shield ekphrasis. Castiglione wrote when the medal was, by his own reckoning, “more than a hundred years” old, and his text was reprinted in Gaudentius Robertus’s Miscellanea Italica Erudita of 1690 together with an engraved plate of the medal (see figure 2), suggesting that the compiler, too, considered the object worthy of both poetic and visual commemoration (Castiglione in Robertus 1690, 81–83). That such a sophisticated and multi-modal interpretation appeared within a century and a half of the medal’s creation indicates a persistent understanding of its Homeric resonance among educated viewers. It is this striking contrast—between early recognition and later scholarly hesitation—that prompted the present inquiry into how artists across different cultures have confronted the challenge of rendering Homer’s impossible shield.
What emerged was not only evidence that Pisanello’s medal follows established traditions of representing the Shield of Achilles, but an unexpected discovery: a renowned Greek vase in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, interpreted since the early 20th century as depicting Achilles’ “First Arming,” should be viewed as representing the pivotal moment from Iliad Book 18 when Thetis presents her son with his divine armor. Both cases suggest that our modern scholarly uncertainties may have created confusion where none existed for the original audiences.
Through analysis of Greek vase painting, the miniature arts, numismatics, and Renaissance medals, this essay demonstrates how craftsmen and artists developed sophisticated strategies of reduction and allusion to engage with Homer’s shield. Their approaches reveal that what appears puzzling to modern eyes was likely clear to viewers familiar with Homeric tradition. The methodological framework combines formal art historical analysis with close reading of classical sources to examine how different cultures and periods approached this representational challenge. By examining surviving artifacts alongside contemporary textual evidence, we can reconstruct how artists developed increasingly sophisticated solutions to the challenge of translating Homer’s verbal artistry into visual form.
The reach of the shield’s opening image extends well beyond Homer. In an earlier essay, The Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a Recommended Translation, I noted that Ovid’s cosmogony (Metamorphoses 1.5-88) alludes to Homer’s Shield of Achilles through the tripartite division of earth, sky, and sea. Stephen M. Wheeler argues that this echo signals Ovid’s epic pretensions while establishing an ecphrastic structure: like Hephaestus crafting the Shield, the demiurge orders chaos as a divine artist creating a work of art, and both poets “depict an object as it is made” (Wheeler 1995, 97, 104–106, 114). The present essay takes up the other side of that relationship: not how later poets reworked the shield, but how visual artists did.
The original Greek of Homer’s description establishes this cosmic framework:
ἐν μὲν γαῖαν ἔτευξ᾽, ἐν δ᾽ οὐρανόν, ἐν δὲ θάλασσαν,
ἠέλιόν τ᾽ ἀκάμαντα σελήνην τε πλήθουσαν,
ἐν δὲ τὰ τείρεα πάντα, τά τ᾽ οὐρανὸς ἐστεφάνωταιThere he made the earth and there the sky and the sea,
and the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full
and there the constellations, all that crown the heavens(Iliad 18.483–485, trans. Fagles. Line references throughout follow the Greek text; Fagles’s English lineation runs higher, so that these lines fall at 18.565–567 in his translation.)
The Unrepresentable Shield: A Framework for Analysis
Homer’s Shield of Achilles presents a paradox that has challenged artists for centuries: it is at once a physical artifact and an infinite cosmos, containing multiple cities, seasons, and perspectives compressed within a single object. In the entirety of the description of the shield that Hephaestus forged at the behest of Thetis, mother of Achilles, Homer presents an impossible-to-illustrate vision of the cosmos and human experience. Beyond the earth, sky, and sea of the opening lines, the shield contains elaborate depictions of two noble cities: one at peace, filled with weddings where “marching through the streets while choir on choir the wedding song rose high and the young men came dancing, whirling round in rings and among them flutes and harps kept up their stirring call” while “women rushed to the doors and each stood moved with wonder”; the other at war, besieged by armies “armed for a raid, hoping to break the siege” and scenes where “both armies battled it out along the river banks” where “Strife and Havoc plunged in the fight …. So they clashed and fought like living, breathing men grappling each other’s corpses, dragging off the dead” (Iliad 18.490–540, trans. Fagles). Pastoral scenes add further complexity, where “harvesters labored, reaping the ripe grain, swinging their whetted scythes,” and a vineyard where “girls and boys, their hearts leaping in innocence” are found “bearing away the sweet ripe fruit in wicker baskets” (Iliad 18.541–572, trans. Fagles).
The shield’s fundamental unrepresentability manifests in three specific challenges, each of which every artist examined below had to confront:
- Temporal simultaneity. The same space must somehow contain both a peaceful city and a besieged one, together with seasonal activities—ploughing, harvest, vintage—that cannot occur at the same time of year. This simultaneity of incompatible elements creates what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “an encyclopedic vision of the Homeric world” that “overawes” those who behold it (Mitchell 1994, 176ff.).
- Spatial compression. The shield must hold both celestial and terrestrial viewpoints at once, ranging from the constellations that crown the heavens to intimate street scenes of weddings and dancing, all within the compass of a warrior’s shield.
- Narrative density. Individual scenes resist depiction on their own terms. The juridical scene (Iliad 18.497–508) is a telling example. As Gregory Nagy demonstrates, this single scene demands the simultaneous representation of multiple temporalities and perspectives: a gathering of people, two active litigants, seated elders rising in turns to speak, heralds maintaining order, and crowds reacting on both sides, all while keeping two symbolic talents of gold at the center. The scene must capture both ongoing physical actions (heralds restraining the crowd, elders taking turns to rise) and abstract concepts (the nature of the legal dispute, the quality of the judgment being rendered) (Nagy 2003, 73–83).
Beyond these representational challenges, Homer’s Shield of Achilles is more than an ekphrasis of an object; it is an act of creation in itself. As scholars have observed, Homer does not merely describe a finished shield—he performs its forging through words in real time, mirroring Hephaestus’ craftsmanship (Mitchell 1994, 178; Squire 2013, 157–158, 160). This meta-ekphrastic process—where poetry becomes a medium of artistic production—parallels ancient conceptions of the poet as a sculptor in language (Vit. Hom. 216; Squire 2013, 164–165). Thus, the shield exists most fully not as a physical object but within the verbal cosmos of the Iliad, where it is perpetually “made” before the audience’s mind’s eye. As Mitchell argues, ekphrasis lives between “hope and fear”—the hope that words can render visual reality, and the fear that no image can fully capture the verbal description (Mitchell 1994, 152). The very act of ekphrasis here suggests a challenge to the traditional hierarchy between verbal and visual representation, positing poetry as an art of the impossible, where what cannot be forged in metal may still be realized through verse, and making any visual rendering of the shield inherently partial.
This distinction provides an essential framework for evaluating how artists across different periods approached the shield. The absence of a fully realized shield in ancient art does not indicate a failure of execution but rather an acknowledgment of the limits of ekphrasis. As John Boardman has noted, the assumption that Greek art merely sought to “illustrate” epic texts fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between visual art and literary tradition: “Figurative Greek art was long viewed simply as illustration of texts, which is patently absurd” (Boardman 2001, 190). Instead, when Greek artists engaged with mythic tradition—their history, or what they believed to be their history, in many instances—they created works that relied on and activated the viewer’s prior knowledge. Recognition of narrative scenes depended foremost on “the expectation and experience of the viewer once the scheme and figures are identified by whatever means” (Boardman 2001, 199). This shared iconographic and mytho-historical vocabulary allowed artists to employ minimalist approaches while conveying complex meanings.
This creative tension—between the verbal and the visual—was central to ancient thinking about ekphrasis. Homer’s description became, in Becker’s phrase, “the touchstone for ekphrasis in ancient Greek and Latin literature” (Becker 1995, 3, cited in Squire 2013, 187 n. 55), the model against which every later verbal rendering of an artwork was measured, and, as Squire argues, the passage through which Graeco-Roman writers thought about whether words could rival images in representational power (Squire 2013, 158, 161). The challenge of Achilles’ shield was thus not merely a challenge for artists but also for poets, rhetoricians, and philosophers grappling with the limits of representation. The poetic rendering of the shield suggests that no physical artwork could ever fully capture the cosmic scale of Homer’s description, compelling later artists to engage in strategies of abstraction, allusion, and synoptic reduction. In this sense, attempts to depict the shield in visual form were not failures of execution but acknowledgments of the inherent impossibility of full representation.
Thus, when we encounter depictions of Achilles and his shield, it is natural to wonder how Greek artists might have rendered the shield in light of Homer’s ekphrasis. Yet we should neither be surprised nor disappointed to find that, rather than attempting a literal translation of Homer’s description, Greek artists employed visual strategies that engaged with the viewer’s familiarity with the myth, ensuring recognition through symbolic allusion, synoptic representation, and visual economy.
This reliance on visual economy and allusion becomes particularly significant when considering representations of Achilles’ shield. Rather than attempting to replicate Hephaestus’ intricate designs—an impossible task—Greek artists employed what Boardman identified as “synoptic” composition,[1] in which multiple moments from a story are compressed into a single image. Through this technique, “By presenting figures ‘in character’ in a single scene it becomes possible to allude to past and future” (Boardman 2001, 200). Artists could thus suggest the shield’s cosmic significance while acknowledging the impossibility of literal representation.
These strategies manifested differently across media. While vase painters could draw on narrative scenes and detailed figural compositions, other media—gems and coins above all—demanded even greater compression of meaning into minimal visual elements. Three strategies of visual economy recur, and the sections that follow trace them across media and historical periods:
- Contextual identification. Greek vase painters and gem engravers placed a simplified shield within a recognizable narrative moment from the Iliad—Thetis crossing the sea, Hephaestus at the forge, the arming itself—so that the setting, not the shield’s surface, identified the object.
- Emblematic reduction. Vase painters, gem carvers, and coin engravers marked the shield with a single device—a Gorgoneion, a raptor, a monogram—that signified its divine or heroic character without any attempt at Homeric detail.
- Conceptual abstraction. A Renaissance medalist like Pisanello transformed the shield into a philosophical emblem of cosmic order, distilling Homer’s cosmos to its celestial and terrestrial frame.
By examining how these strategies evolved across media and time, we can better understand the creative dialogue between verbal and visual representation. Rather than seeing these works as incomplete attempts to illustrate Homer, we can appreciate them as sophisticated acknowledgments of the limits of ekphrasis and as demonstrations of how artists engaged their viewers’ mythological literacy through strategic visual shorthand. Artists from the Greek vase painters to Pisanello embraced symbolic reduction, choosing to encode the shield’s power through carefully chosen signifiers rather than exhaustive detail. This framework guides the analysis of specific artifacts that follows, from Greek vase painting to the Renaissance medal, and reveals how artists developed increasingly sophisticated “economies of recognition” to make the unrepresentable shield recognizable to their intended audiences.
Artistic Conventions Before the Renaissance
Having established the fundamental challenges of representing Homer’s Shield of Achilles, we now turn to the specific artistic conventions that governed pre-Renaissance approaches to this impossible object. Unlike Renaissance artists, who would later engage in theoretical debates about the translatability of Homeric ekphrasis into visual form, Greek and Etruscan artisans approached the shield through allusion and narrative placement rather than literal depiction—a strategy that reflects the broader conventions of ancient visual culture.
Narrative Placement and Visual Shorthand
Greek vase painters, gem engravers, and coin designers did not attempt to replicate the vast cosmological imagery described by Homer in Iliad 18. Instead, they relied on the broader mythological context of a scene to make the identity of the shield known to the viewer. The shield was recognizable not because it bore an elaborate depiction of the heavens, warring cities, and pastoral life, but because it was placed in a setting that made its significance unmistakable. Artists leveraged the viewer’s familiarity with the Homeric tradition, ensuring that the shield’s identity was established through narrative placement, iconographic shorthand, and selective symbolism rather than through exhaustive detail. This strategy extended beyond vase painting; as de Callataÿ observes, Greek coins are “small and round,” a twofold constraint under which “there is simply no place for elaborate images, and types have to embrace some general circularity,” so that engravers were driven toward schematism and emblematic imagery rather than detailed narrative scenes (de Callataÿ 2022, 248). Just as vase painters condensed mythic meaning into recognizable compositions, coin designers employed highly selective visual motifs to ensure immediate recognition, reinforcing the broader Greek artistic tendency toward abstraction rather than literal transcription.
Luca Giuliani’s distinction between two kinds of image refines our understanding of how Greek artists handled mythic time. Descriptive images depict habitual or universal actions, such as battle scenes or symposia—”what habitually happens in the world, what is easy to understand and constitutes no cognitive problem”; narrative images depict an exceptional event and rely on the audience’s prior familiarity with a specific mythic story, which the image itself cannot tell (Giuliani 2022, 71, 78–79). The forging, transport, and arming of Achilles all fall within the latter category: they are discrete, recognizable moments in a mythic sequence. By contrast, the shield’s ekphrastic description is not an event but a conceptual construct, and so is fundamentally resistant to direct depiction. The difficulty of translating this poetic cosmos into a single visual moment explains why Greek artists avoided literal representation of its details, signifying the shield’s power instead through its context and divine associations.
Emblematic Iconography
The visual shorthand used to indicate Achilles’ shield varied across different artistic media but followed consistent principles. On vases, shields were often decorated with motifs such as the Gorgoneion, an apotropaic symbol that reinforced the shield’s divine protection but had no direct connection to Homer’s description. On coins and jewelry, the shield sometimes bore animal emblems, such as raptors or serpents, which may have suggested divine favor or martial prowess but did not attempt to visualize the ekphrastic elements of Homer’s shield. As de Callataÿ (2022, 244–245) observes, coin types were a state-controlled production whose choice “had to be approved by local authorities,” meaning that shields depicted on coinage functioned less as mythological artifacts and more as politically charged symbols of power, legitimacy, and military prowess. Rather than attempting to narrate Homeric episodes, coin engravers followed an established iconographic tradition that prioritized recognition over literary fidelity.
Even when Achilles’ shield is shown in moments of narrative significance—such as Thetis delivering it to her son or Achilles arming for battle—there is no attempt to depict the intricate imagery described by Homer. Instead, artists trusted that viewers would recognize the shield by its dramatic placement within the larger mythological scene. This reliance on context rather than literalism is the synoptic approach described above: multiple narrative moments compressed into a single frame to enhance recognition and engagement. The shield’s presence in a scene was enough to invoke its Homeric significance without requiring a visual transcription of its ekphrasis.
Transitioning to the Renaissance Approach
This artistic convention persisted for centuries, demonstrating the enduring power of Homeric allusion in Greek, Etruscan, and later Roman visual culture. As de Callataÿ (2022, 245) notes, Greek coin iconography was designed primarily to generate trust rather than to tell complex stories—trust “functions as a pronounced inhibitor of visual creativity”—reinforcing a broader Greek artistic tendency toward allusion over exhaustive depiction. Artists across multiple media, from vase painters to coin and gem engravers, did not attempt a literal representation of Achilles’ shield but relied on established symbolic motifs that could be immediately recognized by viewers. With the Renaissance revival of classical texts, however, a shift occurred. Unlike Greek artists who worked within a shared mythological literacy, Renaissance scholars and artists engaged with Homer through the lens of textual exegesis and humanist inquiry. This led to an entirely new question: if the Shield of Achilles is fundamentally unrepresentable, how might one capture its essence rather than simply acknowledging its presence?
Pisanello’s Renaissance medal for Don Iñigo d’Avalos marks a turning point in this regard. While it still does not attempt to depict Homer’s ekphrastic shield in literal detail, it engages with its meaning in a more philosophical manner—transforming the shield from a narrative signifier into a conceptual meditation on cosmic order and heroic inheritance. By positioning the shield as an emblem of martial and intellectual excellence rather than merely a functional object, Pisanello’s work represents a critical departure from earlier artistic traditions while maintaining a profound continuity with the problem posed by Homer’s description.
With this framework established, the following sections will explore how specific artifacts—vases, jewelry, numismatic representations—demonstrate the pre-Renaissance strategy of contextual allusion, leading up to the Renaissance engagement with the shield as a theoretical and artistic problem.
Early Visual Solutions: The Greek Vase Painting Tradition
Having established that pre-Renaissance artists approached the Shield of Achilles through contextual allusion rather than literal illustration, we can now examine how this principle manifested specifically in Greek vase painting. Before analyzing individual examples, it is crucial to understand the nature and context of ancient ceramic production. As Boardman emphasizes, these vessels were primarily commercial craft items produced for the market, not elite artworks commissioned for wealthy patrons. Pottery workshops operated as small businesses, producing vessels for everyday use, religious dedication, and funerary purposes. The craftsmen and painters who created these works had varying levels of literacy and familiarity with epic traditions – some may have known Homer’s texts only through oral performance, while others might have had more direct textual knowledge. This context helps explain both the simplification strategies we observe and the sometimes idiosyncratic interpretations of epic scenes. Moreover, our understanding of these works is shaped by their survival patterns: most surviving figured vases come from funerary and temple deposits, particularly from Etruscan tombs, rather than from domestic contexts. This archaeological bias means we are seeing only a portion of what was likely a much broader tradition of depicting Homeric scenes on ceramics.
These vessels served multiple social functions beyond their commercial nature. In domestic settings, they were used in symposia, where their mythological imagery sparked intellectual discourse among elite gatherings. In religious contexts, they served as votive offerings, while in funerary settings they marked the status and cultural sophistication of the deceased. The survival patterns of these vases—primarily from Etruscan tombs and temple deposits—shapes our understanding of their social significance.
The Camtar Painter’s Innovation
The Boston MFA amphora (MFA 21.21), attributed to the Camtar Painter and dated to 560–550 BC, presents a striking black-figure depiction of Thetis presenting Achilles with his shield (Figure 3). The scene is accompanied by inscriptions naming the figures: Achilles, Thetis, and the Nereids Kumatothea, Neoptoleme, and Panope, while a male figure behind Achilles has traditionally been identified as Peleus, his father. The inscriptions serve an important function, reinforcing the vase’s role within a broader culture of literary and visual literacy, where audiences were expected to recognize and interpret epic traditions through a combination of word and image.
This vase has long been classified as depicting Achilles’ First Arming—the moment before his departure for Troy—following the argument put forward by Knud Friis Johansen (1934, 1967). Friis Johansen asserted that Thetis and the Nereids must be delivering Achilles’ initial set of armor, rather than the divine panoply forged by Hephaestus in the Iliad. His interpretation was pronounced “convincing” by J. D. Beazley in his review of the book (1934, 84–85) and augmented by Dietrich von Bothmer (1949, 84–90), who added the Louvre companion piece with its Patroklos figure as corroboration rather than challenging Friis Johansen’s premises. This scholarly consensus rested largely on circular reasoning—the assumption that the presence of Peleus, coupled with a military preparation scene, must indicate Phthia rather than Troy.
However, this interpretation is fundamentally flawed. I argue instead that the Boston MFA amphora exclusively depicts the Iliadic arming of Achilles in Book 18, when Thetis delivers the divine armor crafted by Hephaestus after the death of Patroclus. This reading is more consistent with both literary and iconographic evidence and has been convincingly supported by Steven Lowenstam’s seminal critique of the First Arming hypothesis (1993, 201–207).
First, the notion of Thetis arming Achilles outside of the Iliadic tradition is unattested in ancient literature and tradition. Nowhere in early Greek epic or tragedy is there any reference to a pre-Trojan arming by Thetis. The Iliad (18.368–616) explicitly describes the only episode in which Thetis plays this role, delivering armor forged by Hephaestus to Achilles before his reentry into battle. This singularity is critical—there is no independent tradition in which Thetis provides armor before Achilles departs for Troy, nor is there a mythic precedent for such a moment. Lowenstam’s examination of the passages Friis Johansen adduced from Euripides shows that they cannot bear the weight placed on them; the First Arming hypothesis relies on an invented narrative rather than one attested in ancient sources (Lowenstam 1993, 207–210).
Second, Lowenstam (1993) systematically dismantles the core arguments for the First Arming thesis. He demonstrates that:
- Key iconographic elements once used to support the First Arming—such as wreaths, aryballoi (oil jars), and soft garments—are not exclusive to domestic departure scenes but also appear in numerous depictions of warriors arming for battle (Lowenstam 1993, 200–202).
- The presence of an unlabeled old man behind Achilles does not establish Peleus, and therefore Phthia: of five arming vases with such a figure, one labels him Peleus, another Phoinix, and three leave him unnamed (Lowenstam 1993, 202–205).
- The thesis was “immediately accepted by Beazley, subsequently augmented by von Bothmer, and endorsed by the great majority of critics,” so that it “held sway for over fifty years” without systematic re-examination (Lowenstam 1993, 199, 205).
Third—and this is an argument of my own rather than Lowenstam’s—the shield iconography is consistent with an Iliadic identification. The Myrmidons’ shields on the amphora feature standard martial motifs—a bird of prey, an animal protome, a rosette, and concentric circles—designs commonly associated with Greek warriors in battle scenes (Hoffmann, Bothmer, and Truitt 1973, 13) (figure 4). In contrast, Achilles’ shield bears a Gorgoneion, a powerful apotropaic emblem of divine protection,[2] visually setting it apart as a supernatural artifact rather than conventional military equipment. Lowenstam himself is cautious here: he notes that the arming vases show no shield devices “specifically recalling any poetic description,” and that it is “difficult to imagine a vase painter trying to represent the Homeric description of the shield” (Lowenstam 1993, 211 n. 61)—an observation that, as the present essay argues, is true of every pre-Renaissance depiction and is precisely the point. Yet the device need not transcribe Homer to allude to him. Bothmer, discussing the Amasis Painter’s late-sixth-century second-arming amphora, read its lion-and-stag device as “reminiscent perhaps of the two lions that fell a bull in the Homeric description of the second shield of Achilles” (Bothmer 1949, 89). If a shield device could evoke the Iliadic shield for Bothmer, the Camtar Painter’s Gorgoneion, which marks the shield as divine while leaving the Myrmidons’ blazons mundane, may do the same.
As we have established, Greek artists did not attempt to illustrate Homer’s complex ekphrasis literally. In keeping with the conventional approach of contextual identification rather than direct illustration, the Camtar Painter represented the shield’s supernatural qualities through the apotropaic Gorgoneion. This choice exemplifies the strategy of selective reduction we have identified—distilling the shield’s cosmic significance into a recognizable emblem of divine power. The Gorgoneion serves as visual shorthand that marks this as the divine shield rather than ordinary armor, reinforcing the scene’s identification as the Iliadic arming.
The misclassification of this vase as a First Arming is a testament to the entrenched authority of early scholarly assumptions, which persisted despite a lack of textual or visual evidence. Lowenstam’s methodological correction forces a necessary reevaluation of the vase’s imagery, demonstrating that the Boston MFA amphora does not depict a pre-Trojan event but rather the climactic moment of Achilles’ rearmament in Iliad 18.
The Boston MFA amphora thus provides an excellent example of how Greek artists used narrative context and selective symbolism to identify the Shield of Achilles without attempting to reproduce its elaborate Homeric description. The emphasis on the shield itself, rather than the full panoply of armor, further aligns with the artistic tradition of highlighting this singular, defining object in Achilles’ mythos. The persistence of the First Arming misinterpretation reflects scholarly inertia rather than evidence, and Lowenstam’s critique compels a necessary revision of how we understand this and similar depictions.
Beyond Simple Representation: The Hydria’s Narrative
While the Camtar Painter’s amphora focuses on the pivotal moment of Thetis presenting Achilles with his shield, another vase offers a strikingly different strategy for engaging with Homeric tradition. Rather than depicting the arming scene, this Attic black-figure hydria (c. 520–510 BC) shifts attention to one of the most emotionally charged moments of the Iliad: Achilles’ defilement of Hector’s corpse (figure 5). This narrative choice—moving from armament to aftermath, from divine craftsmanship to brutal retribution—illustrates the range of interpretative possibilities available to Greek vase painters when responding to Homeric epic.
Additionally, Achilles’ shield in this representation bears a triskelion, or triskelês (a neologism from the Greek τρισκελής, meaning “three-legged”), an ancient symbol featuring three interlocked spirals or bent human legs radiating from a central point. The symbolic meaning of the triskelês for the Archaic and Classical Greeks is unknown. An early study suggested that it was associated with Hecate, a goddess with domains in sky, earth, and sea (Luynes 1835, 83ff) while a more recent study suggested a possible association with Apollo and, by extension, the sun (Grainger 2009, 115). This emblem exemplifies how Greek artists balanced mythological reference with contemporary martial iconography. Rather than attempting to depict the elaborate cosmic imagery described by Homer, the artist chose a recognizable heraldic symbol that would resonate with contemporary viewers while still marking the shield as extraordinary. Achilles’ shield thus serves a dual function: maintaining his epic distinction while simultaneously aligning with Greek hoplite warfare traditions.
The overall composition of the hydria demonstrates the sophisticated technique of narrative compression that characterized Greek vase painting. The artist merges multiple events from the Iliad‘s final books into a single visual moment.[3] Achilles is depicted mounting his chariot, dragging Hector’s lifeless body behind him, while Priam and Hecuba lament from within the walls of Troy. The eidolon (shade) of Patroklos, shown as a fully armed figure, hovers above, reinforcing the connection between Achilles’ vengeful act and the unresolved tension of Patroklos’ funeral rites.
Through this visual economy, the vase painter crafts a cohesive, immediate, and emotionally charged representation of Achilles’ fury. Rather than trying to illustrate multiple scenes from the epic sequentially, the artist creates a synoptic image that evokes the emotional core of the narrative. This approach to Homeric material—compressing narrative time while using recognizable visual shorthand—made epic poetry accessible to the vase’s contemporary audience, transforming literary complexity into immediate visual impact.
The hydria thus offers a complementary example to the Camtar Painter’s work, showing how the Shield of Achilles could be incorporated into different narrative moments from the Iliad while consistently avoiding any attempt to literally reproduce Homer’s elaborate ekphrasis. In both cases, the shield is represented through emblematic symbols rather than detailed illustration, relying on the viewer’s familiarity with the epic tradition to complete its significance.
Evolution of Technique: The Dutuit Painter
The Attic red-figure amphora (c. 470 BC), attributed to the Dutuit Painter, exemplifies how artistic approaches to depicting the Shield continued to evolve, maintaining the essential strategy of symbolic reference while embracing the greater anatomical precision and expressive clarity of red-figure technique. This vase depicts Hephaestus polishing the Shield of Achilles, while Thetis stands nearby, prepared to receive the divine armor crafted for her son (Figure 6). The inclusion of suspended greaves, a helmet, a hammer, and a saw reinforces the completeness of the scene of Hephaestus’ labor towards Achilles’ divine rearmament.[4]
The shield itself is depicted as a simple circular form, surrounded by rivets around its circumference. Like earlier artists, the Dutuit Painter avoids any attempt to represent Homer’s complex ekphrastic description (Iliad 18.478–608), instead conveying the shield’s significance through compositional emphasis and narrative context. The shield bears a Gorgoneion, but unlike the elaborate renditions seen on earlier shields, this version is starkly minimalist—almost schematic. This simplification is striking, suggesting that by the mid-fifth century, the iconic function of the Gorgoneion had become so conventionalized that intricate detail was no longer necessary. The date is telling: the decades around 480–450 BC are precisely where scholars from Furtwängler onward have located the transition of the gorgoneion from the monstrous Archaic type toward a more human, and eventually beautiful, face, with the detached head lagging a generation or two behind the full-bodied Medusa in that evolution (Lazarou and Liritzis 2022, 53–54). Over time, the Gorgoneion lost much of its original potency and became a commonplace motif in Greek art.
The Dutuit Painter was not alone in this. A near-contemporary Attic red-figure cup by the Foundry Painter (Berlin, Antikensammlung F 2294, c. 490–480 BC) shows the same subject—Thetis in Hephaestus’ workshop with the finished shield—and marks the shield not with a Gorgoneion but with an eagle and snake, a device with no warrant in Iliad 18. Squire’s reading of that cup could serve as a summary of the argument advanced here. The shield, he observes, is rendered “with its simplified emblematic devices,” and the painter, “while in one sense renouncing the challenge of materialising the Homeric description through pictures (for how could a human artist ever hope to rival a divine one?),” nonetheless “exploits the shield as an iconic emblem for iconicity itself.” His conclusion is that “already by the beginning of the fifth century BC, we therefore find artists interested both in the visual appearance of Achilles’s shield and in its make-believe status” (Squire 2013, 169). The emblematic shield, in other words, is not a confession of failure but a knowing acknowledgment that Homer’s object belongs to a different order of representation—and that acknowledgment is itself part of what the image communicates.
The overall composition of the vase is masterfully balanced. The shield serves as the central visual anchor, flanked by the bent figure of Hephaestus, who leans over his divine creation, and the poised figure of Thetis, awaiting its delivery. Above them, suspended tools of craftsmanship—the hammer and saw—frame the action, emphasizing the physical labor involved in divine artistry.[5]
This shift from black-figure to red-figure technique not only reflects evolving artistic capabilities but also marks a transformation in the conceptual approach to Homeric representation. While the Camtar Painter relied on stark silhouettes and inscriptions to identify key figures, the Dutuit Painter takes advantage of the expressive potential of red-figure painting, using gesture, drapery, and spatial arrangement to articulate the narrative. Yet, despite these technical advances, the fundamental strategy of contextual identification rather than literal illustration remains consistent.
The Dutuit Painter’s work demonstrates how, even as artistic techniques evolved, Greek artists maintained their approach to the Shield of Achilles as a symbolic rather than literal object. By placing the shield at the center of a scene of divine craftsmanship, the artist emphasizes its supernatural origin and significance while avoiding the impossible task of depicting its elaborate Homeric imagery. This consistency across changing artistic styles and techniques suggests a deeply ingrained understanding that Homer’s shield existed most completely in the realm of poetry rather than visual art.
This tradition of ekphrastic engagement with the Shield continued beyond the visual arts. As Squire notes, Philostratus the Younger’s Imagines provides an example of recursive ekphrasis, where a later author crafts a new verbal depiction of an imagined painting of Homer’s shield: if Homer “never forgets that he is representing representation itself,” Philostratus “reperforms the conceit at second remove” (Squire 2013, 165–166; for a full treatment, Squire 2018). Such literary responses reinforced the shield’s status as a conceptual rather than literal object, one that invited creative reinterpretation rather than definitive visualization.
As we turn next to examine even more constrained artistic media—jewelry and gems—we will see how craftsmen working at miniature scale developed even more economical solutions to the challenge of representing this impossible artifact.
Miniature Interpretations: Jewelry and Gems
While vase painters had the luxury of relatively expansive surfaces for their interpretations, craftsmen working in miniature faced far more stringent constraints. Yet these very limitations often produced some of the most innovative solutions to representing the Shield of Achilles, as demonstrated by two remarkable pieces: a Greek bronze ring and an Etruscan scarab.
Jewelry bearing mythological scenes operated in a complex social network of personal display, gift exchange, and authority marking. Unlike vases, which could serve both public and private functions, rings and gems were intimately connected to individual identity and status. Their small size made them portable repositories of cultural memory, while their use as seals linked them to both personal and official authority.
The Greek Bronze Ring: Thetis in Transit
This late 5th-century BC Greek bronze ring, said to come from Asia Minor, presents an evocative depiction of Thetis, mother of Achilles, transporting his newly forged shield while riding a hippocamp (figure 7; Spier 1992, no. 73). The motif was not rare—Spier notes that Thetis carrying the arms of Achilles “is popular on rings” and cites fine examples in gold and silver, among them a later fourth-century gold ring from a tomb at Homolion in Thessaly, Achilles’ own country—but that popularity is itself evidence for the argument advanced here: the scene was instantly legible to its owners without any Homeric detail on the shield at all. The ring visually encapsulates a narrative moment following Hephaestus’ forging of the divine armor in Iliad 18—specifically, Thetis’s journey to deliver the shield to her son. Unlike vase paintings that frequently depict Thetis presenting the shield directly to Achilles, this composition highlights an earlier, transitional moment—her passage through the sea with the divine gift.
Rendered in relief on the bezel of the ring, Thetis is seated on a hippocamp—a mythological sea-horse hybrid—her form slightly hunched as she cradles the shield. The ridged outline of her headgear suggests a close-fitting cap or veil, an iconographic feature often associated with goddesses and noble women in Greek art. Her raised arm, with fingers extended, may suggest an offering gesture or divine invocation, reinforcing her role as a liminal figure between the gods and mortals. The hippocamp, with its fluid, curving form, conveys movement, emphasizing the urgency and divine nature of her mission.
The shield itself is reduced to its most essential form—a simple rounded contour at Thetis’s side. This extreme simplification exemplifies how miniature craftsmen addressed the constraints of their medium while maintaining mythological clarity. The artist makes no attempt to suggest the shield’s elaborate Homeric imagery; instead, the shield’s identity is established entirely through narrative context—its association with Thetis and her iconic sea journey. This approach represents perhaps the most radical application of the principle of contextual identification we’ve been tracing.
The motif of Thetis riding a hippocamp while carrying the shield reinforces a broader thematic contrast between the mortal world and the divine. Thetis, a sea-deity bound by fate to the world of men through her son, serves as a crucial mediator between the gods and the battlefield. Her aquatic journey on this ring symbolizes not only the delivery of Achilles’ armor but also the inexorable movement toward his destiny. The shield itself, a divine object crafted to protect him, paradoxically foreshadows his ultimate demise—an irony that permeates the Iliad.
Additionally, the choice of this scene for a ring bezel suggests an elite owner with an appreciation for Homeric themes, possibly even someone who identified with Achilles’ heroic ethos. Given the ring’s small size and worn surface, it was likely a personal object, meant to be both an ornament and a signifier of cultural literacy.
The Etruscan Scarab: A Moment of Arming
While the bronze ring captures Thetis’s journey with the shield, another miniature masterpiece approaches the narrative from a different moment entirely. The Scarab with Achilles Arming (figure 8), attributed to the Master of the Boston Dionysos, offers a striking visualization of the presentation of Achilles’ divine armor. This cornelian gem, mounted on a gold swivel ring, exemplifies the transmission of Greek mythological themes into Etruscan visual culture while reflecting the exceptional skill of early Etruscan gem carvers. The engraver of this piece, active in the late 6th and early 5th centuries B.C., was known for his mastery of form and narrative clarity, and this scene is no exception.
The composition presents Achilles in a dynamic pose, stooping to fasten a greave over his shin in preparation for battle. His Corinthian helmet, sharply crested, and his well-defined corselet emphasize his readiness as a warrior. The central figure, Hephaestus, identifiable by his backward-angled feet—a sign of his lameness—offers Achilles his weapons while holding a pair of spears. To the right, Thetis gestures with a raised hand, a common motif for divine mediation, reinforcing her role as the intermediary between the mortal and divine. The entire composition is framed within a line-and-dot border, set upon a cross-hatched exergue that grounds the figures.
The impression of the scarab (figure 9) reveals one of the composition’s most crucial elements—the shield. Like other artists we’ve examined, the gem carver makes no attempt to reproduce Homer’s elaborate cosmic imagery. Instead, the shield bears a stylized raptor, possibly an eagle or falcon, with its wings extended. This emblematic choice is significant both within Greek and Etruscan artistic traditions. In Greek mythology, the eagle was associated with Zeus, serving as a divine symbol of power and fate. Within Etruscan culture, birds played a crucial role in augury, serving as omens for future events. The choice of a bird emblem for Achilles’ shield thus functions as potent visual shorthand for his destiny—soaring in glory yet bound to a tragic fall.
The shield itself is rendered in high relief, with careful attention to curvature and placement, ensuring it remains visually prominent despite the constraints of the gem’s small scale. Its forward-facing angle draws attention to its importance as the defining symbol of Achilles’ martial prowess. The artist has expertly balanced the need for recognition with the limitations of the medium, creating a symbol that reads clearly at a glance while carrying complex mythological associations.
The clarity of the impression also enhances the understanding of the figures’ movement and interaction. Achilles’ bent posture and poised stance emphasize a moment of transition, reinforcing his imminent entry into battle. Hephaestus’ slightly turned position, marked by his differently aligned feet, creates an asymmetry that adds to the composition’s dynamism. Thetis’ raised hand, in conjunction with her supportive stance, further conveys the urgency of the moment.
The mounting of the cornelian gem in a gold swivel ring marks it as a luxury item, while its function as a seal connected it to both personal identity and official authority. Such pieces served multiple social purposes: as markers of elite status, as functional tools for marking documents and property, and as demonstrations of cultural sophistication through their engagement with Greek mythological themes.
Comparative Analysis: Greek and Etruscan Approaches to the Shield
The Etruscan scarab and the Greek bronze ring offer complementary examples of how different artistic traditions approached the challenge of representing the Shield of Achilles within the constraints of miniature art. These pieces reflect not just technical differences but distinct cultural approaches to heroic narrative.
The Greek approach to representing the shield, as exemplified by the bronze ring with Thetis on a hippocamp, relied on contextual identification—the shield is recognizable through its association with Thetis and its placement within a known mythological moment. This strategy depended on viewers’ intimate familiarity with epic tradition, allowing artists to employ minimalist approaches while conveying complex meanings. The shield itself requires no distinctive markings; its presence with Thetis during her sea journey is sufficient for identification.
By contrast, the Etruscan scarab employs what we might call an “emblematic” approach. Rather than depending solely on narrative context, the Etruscan artist marks the shield with a distinctive symbol—the raptor—that carries significance in both Greek and Etruscan visual vocabularies. This approach creates a more self-contained symbolic system that could function independently while still maintaining connection to Greek source material. As Nancy Thomson de Grummond has demonstrated in “Etruscan Myth, Sacred History, and Legend” (2006), Etruscan adaptation of Greek mythological themes involved complex processes of cultural translation, transforming external cultural material for elite Etruscan patrons.
These different strategies reflect distinct social and religious contexts. Greek artistic representation of divine artifacts like the Shield of Achilles operated within a complex network of ritual and mythological meaning that viewers were expected to recognize. Etruscan artists, working with adopted Greek themes, integrated these motifs into their own sophisticated system of religious symbolism, particularly concerning augury and divine signs. The raptor on Achilles’ shield functions simultaneously within both Greek heroic tradition and Etruscan systems of divination.
The technical approaches also differ significantly. Mario Torelli’s “The Etruscans” (2000) demonstrates how Etruscan glyptic art developed what he calls “concentrated narrative,” where single images carry multiple layers of cultural and religious significance. The extreme miniaturization required by gem carving led Etruscan artists to develop particularly economical visual language, in which each element carries maximum symbolic weight.
Rather than seeing these differences as competing approaches, we can understand them as complementary strategies for addressing the fundamental challenge we have identified: how to represent an artifact that Homer describes as containing the entire cosmos. Both Greek and Etruscan artists recognized the impossibility of literal representation, but they developed distinct solutions based on their cultural contexts, technical traditions, and audience expectations.
As we turn next to numismatic representations, we’ll see how these strategies for handling Homeric imagery influenced attempts to compress the shield’s cosmic significance into the even more confined space of coinage, where political and civic identity added new layers of meaning to this legendary artifact.
The Final Compression: Numismatic Representations
Coinage represented a unique intersection of economic function, political messaging, and cultural memory. Unlike vases or jewelry, coins were state-sponsored productions that circulated widely across social classes. Their imagery needed to be both immediately recognizable to facilitate commerce and sophisticated enough to convey complex political messages about civic identity and state authority. Within these constraints, numismatic artists developed perhaps the most economical representations of the Shield of Achilles—ones that transformed it from a cosmic artifact into a political symbol of hereditary power and martial prowess.
The Larissa Kremaste Trichalkon: Civic Identity through Myth
One of the earliest numismatic representations of Thetis and the Shield of Achilles appears on a 4th-century BC trichalkon from Larissa Kremaste in Thessaly (figure 10). The obverse features a bare-headed portrait of Achilles, while the reverse presents Thetis seated upon a hippocamp, holding Achilles’ shield marked with an AX monogram, a personal emblem that unequivocally ties the artifact to its legendary owner.
This representation exemplifies the strategy of emblematic identification we have traced throughout earlier media, but with an important civic dimension. The AX monogram functions similarly to the Gorgoneion on vase paintings or the raptor on the Etruscan gem—it identifies the shield not through elaborate Homeric imagery but through a simple marker that viewers would immediately recognize. The use of the hippocamp as Thetis’s mount maintains continuity with earlier artistic conventions while reinforcing her divine maritime nature.
What distinguishes this numismatic representation is its civic function. By placing these images on its coinage, Larissa Kremaste asserts its connection to Achilles, aligning itself with his mythic homeland Phthia and claiming a share in his heroic legacy. The shield thus becomes not merely an object from epic poetry but a symbol of local identity and prestige.
The Epirote Didrachm: Pyrrhos’ Claim to Heroic Heritage
A more explicitly political engagement with Achilles’ shield appears in the silver didrachm of Pyrrhos of Epeiros (297-272 BC), struck at Lokris Epizephyrioi (figure 11). The obverse depicts a helmeted Achilles, adorned with a griffin crest, an allusion to divine protection and military cunning, aligning Achilles with Apollo and strategic warfare.
On the reverse, Thetis once again holds Achilles’ shield, but now in the explicit service of Pyrrhos’ dynastic propaganda. The legend “ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΠΥΡΡΟΥ” (King Pyrrhos) leaves no doubt that the imagery functions not merely as a mythic evocation but as a direct assertion of Pyrrhos’ heroic ancestry. As a ruler of Epeiros who claimed descent from Achilles through the Molossian royal line, [6] Pyrrhos used numismatic imagery to position himself as a new Achilles, inheritor of both military valor and divine favor.
Pyrrhos certainly wished to be the embodiment of Achilles reborn, especially martially (figure 12). Jeff Champion relates the following story from the conflict between the Macedonian forces under Pantauchus and the opposing forces under Pyrrhus in 289 BC: “The fighting was heavy, and during the battle the two commanders sought out each other. Pantauchus challenged Pyrrhus to individual combat. Pyrrhus, supposedly wishing to emulate his ancestor Achilles in glory, accepted. After hurling spears at one another the two came to sword blows. Pyrrhus was wounded but in return twice wounded his opponent, in the thigh and neck. Pantauchus’ bodyguards carried him away. The Epirots, exalted by the exploits of their king and inspired by his valour, overran and cut to pieces the phalanx of the Macedonians. They killed many in the pursuit, and took 5,000 prisoners. The anecdote of the individual challenge is a set piece that would not have been out of place in the pages of Homer, two heroes throwing spears at each other and coming to close-quarter blows. Although there is no good reason to doubt that the incident happened, given that such encounters were common enough in the battles of the Successors, the details should be treated with some scepticism. After learning the result of the battle Demetrius ended his pillaging of Epirus and withdrew back into Macedonia. This was Pyrrhus’ first victory in battle and won for him great admiration, both for his generalship and for his courage. The Epirots, flushed with victory, bestowed the surname of ‘Eagle’ upon him. This nickname would remain with him for the rest of his life. Pyrrhus’ victory had saved both his kingdom and his allies’ lands. His defeat of a Macedonian army, and his demonstrated courage in battle, had given him the most important asset for a Hellenistic king, a reputation as a brave and successful general.” (Champion 2009, 33).
Through everyday economic transactions, citizens encountered these images repeatedly, reinforcing both Pyrrhos’ connection to heroic tradition and his current political authority. The presence of Thetis as an intermediary figure, presenting Achilles’ shield, reinforces the theme of legitimate transmission. The coin thus compresses an entire genealogical and political narrative into a single visual statement: Achilles, the greatest warrior, lives on through his shield, wielded in spirit by Pyrrhos.
Numismatic Legacy: From Divine Shield to Political Symbol
These numismatic representations complete the evolution we’ve traced in pre-Renaissance approaches to the Shield of Achilles. Beginning with the strategic simplification of vase painting, continuing through the emblematic compression of jewelry and gems, and culminating in the political appropriation of coinage, we see a consistent pattern: artists acknowledged the impossibility of literal representation and instead focused on making the shield recognizable through context, selective emblems, and narrative placement.
What distinguishes coins from earlier media is their explicit political function. The shield is no longer merely a narrative element from epic poetry but a symbol of civic or dynastic identity. Its cosmic significance in Homer becomes subordinated to its value as a marker of heroic inheritance and martial excellence. The shield becomes less a depiction of Homer’s ekphrasis and more an artifact of mythic legitimacy, standing in for Achilles himself.
This transformation set the stage for the Renaissance reinterpretation of the shield. While Greek, Etruscan, and Hellenistic artists adapted the shield pragmatically for narrative or political purposes, Renaissance humanists would approach it through a new lens of philosophical and allegorical interpretation. As we turn to Pisanello’s medal for Don Iñigo d’Avalos, we will see how this new humanist engagement with classical tradition transformed the shield once again, from a symbol of heroic inheritance to an emblem of cosmic and intellectual order.
Renaissance Reinterpretation: Theory and Practice
The transition from ancient to Renaissance interpretations marks not merely a change in artistic style, but a fundamental shift in how artists approached the challenge of the unrepresentable. While earlier artists worked within traditions that allowed for symbolic shorthand and contextual identification, Renaissance theorists confronted Homer’s text through a new lens of humanist scholarship. The Renaissance reception of Homer was shaped by a textual and intellectual culture, where classical texts were studied, analyzed, and reimagined within a scholarly framework. This shift not only altered the medium through which artists engaged with Homer but also introduced new theoretical concerns, such as Leon Battista Alberti’s concept of historia, which emphasized the narrative and moral function of art. As we move from the Greek and Etruscan strategies of allusion to the Renaissance medal, we observe a transformation in how artists conceived of Achilles’ shield—not merely as an object to be identified through context, but as a philosophical emblem of cosmic and historical order.
Renaissance artists and theorists grappled explicitly with the challenge of translating literary works into visual form. Leon Battista Alberti (figure 13), in his treatise De Pictura (1435), argued that the great work of the painter is the narrative (Amplissimum pictoris opus historia). Alberti’s concept of historia was central to Renaissance artistic theory, defining the highest form of painting as one that conveys a compelling narrative scene rather than simply depicting isolated figures or ornamental designs. Unlike earlier approaches that relied on symbolic reduction, Renaissance artists sought to create compositions that reflected a coherent, structured narrative, often infused with humanist ideals. For Alberti, an effective historia did not simply depict an event; it had to evoke emotion and provoke thought, inviting the viewer to infer both past causes and future consequences. This theoretical shift influenced how Renaissance artists approached Homeric themes, favoring conceptual distillation over emblematic illustration. Alberti himself insists that a historia should be rich in variety yet governed by restraint: the painter who crowds his picture with everything he can think of produces confusion rather than a narrative, and must instead select what serves the subject (De Pictura 2.40). As Westfall shows, Alberti drew the governing idea from rhetoric, where praise derives not from the composition alone but from the inventio—the selection and development of the subject (Westfall 1969, 490–491). This theoretical framework would prove crucial for Renaissance artists like Pisanello as they confronted the challenge of Homer’s Shield of Achilles, offering a path between complete representation and complete abstraction.
The Shield of Achilles presented an even more profound problem: it was not merely a literary object, but a dynamic event within the Iliad. As Squire argues, following Lessing, Homer’s ekphrasis of the shield is not a static description but a verbal performance of its forging—Homer “does not paint the shield as finished and complete, but as a shield that is being made”—drawing the listener into the act of creation itself (Squire 2013, 157–158, 160). This suggests that any visual rendering of the shield, no matter how intricate, would always be incomplete, as it could never capture the unfolding process that Homer’s poetry enacts. Pisanello’s Renaissance medal, with its cosmic sphere and celestial symbols, acknowledges this challenge, offering not a literalization of Homer’s description but an interpretation of its cosmic and temporal dimensions. Just as Philostratus and later poets transformed the shield through new ekphrases, Renaissance artists reimagined it in ways that reflected their own philosophical and artistic priorities.
Pisanello and the Renaissance Medal
The challenge of representing the Shield of Achilles evolved significantly from its earliest Greek depictions through its Renaissance reinterpretation. While Greek artists developed strategies of meaningful reduction, and rulers like Pyrrhos of Epeiros transformed the shield into a symbol of hereditary power and prowess, the Renaissance medal presented a unique opportunity to reimagine this tradition through the lens of humanist scholarship. Unlike coins, which circulated widely as economic instruments, Renaissance medals functioned primarily as commemorative objects exchanged among humanist scholars and courtly elites. Their limited production and sophisticated imagery marked them as objects of intellectual prestige rather than economic exchange.
Among Renaissance artists who tackled this challenge, Pisanello (Antonio di Cuccio Pisano, c. 1395–1455) (figure 14) stands out for his sophisticated synthesis of classical inspiration and contemporary theory. Trained in North Italian painting traditions and later exposed to humanist ideas in the courts where he worked, Pisanello had already distinguished himself as a pictor egregius by 1424.[7] His pivotal experience came in Ferrara in 1438, where he witnessed the arrival of the Byzantine emperor John VIII Paleologus and created what is generally considered the first true Renaissance portrait medal—the first, that is, of the large cast type he made his own; struck portrait medals of the Carrara lords of Padua (c. 1390) and of the Sesto family of Venetian mint-engravers precede it by decades (Hill 1930, nos. 1–4; Stahl and Waldman 1993–94).[8] This innovation established a new artistic format that perfectly suited humanist engagement with classical tradition—intimate in scale yet monumental in conception.
The D’Avalos Medal: Physical Form and Symbolic Content
Scholars believe that Pisanello crafted the bronze medal honoring Don Iñigo d’Avalos, Grand Chamberlain of Naples from 1442, at Naples circa 1448/1449 (Hill and Pollard 1967, no. 22). At just 7.81 cm in diameter, this intimate object demonstrates the Renaissance mastery of working in small scale while conveying monumental ideas. The obverse presents d’Avalos in profile, wearing a broad-brimmed hat that demonstrates Pisanello’s virtuosity in rendering different textures in bronze—a portrait Hill and Pollard call “perhaps the most delicate and beautifully designed of all that he executed.” An inscription around the portrait reads DON INIGO DE DAVALOS, while the reverse bears the inscription PER VVI SE FA (“For you it is made”) and OPVS PISANI PICTORIS (“The Work of Pisano the Painter”).
The reverse depicts a sphere representing the earth, sea, and sky with the d’Avalos shield above. Two citadels rise from a coastal landscape beneath a star-filled heaven—a design that functions simultaneously as “both a document on time present and an image of the entire created world” (Waddington in Scher 2000, 32). (figure 15) This composition engages the Homeric Shield of Achilles in a manner that is both ambitious and consciously self-limiting. Rather than attempting to replicate the shield’s comprehensive depiction of human life, Pisanello creates a composition that aligns with Alberti’s theory of historia—selecting the most significant elements to enhance representation.
Contemporary Recognition and Modern Uncertainty
The significance of Pisanello’s achievement was recognized relatively early by Giuseppe Castiglione, whose Latin poem celebrating the medal explicitly situates it within the classical tradition of shield ekphrasis:
“Homer, in the description of the Shield of Achilles, portrays the world crafted by Vulcan in many verses… Closer, however, to Homer’s commentary is a magnificent medal in bronze, or, as we say in the common Italian tongue, Il Medaglione.”[9] (Castiglione 1690)
The poem praises Pisanello’s selective approach to representing the cosmic imagery:
Namque hic aetherium prudens effinxit Olympum,
Addidit Arcturumque, Hydasque, et Orionis ensem.
In medio Terram posuit, saltusque ferasque,
Oppidaque, et summis geminas in montibus arces.
[…] Mulciber Aetnaeis clypeum fornacibus acer
Formasse ingenti talem narratur AchilliFor he wisely fashioned the ethereal heavens here,
Adding Arcturus, the Hyades, and Orion’s sword.
In the center, he placed the Earth, with forests and beasts,
Towns, and twin citadels atop high mountains.
[…] Just as mighty Mulciber is said to have forged
such a shield for great Achilles in the furnaces of Etna
Despite this early recognition, modern scholars like Stephen K. Scher have questioned the connection, arguing that “The precise meaning of the reverse is something of a puzzle” and that any link to the Shield of Achilles is “tenuous” (Scher 1994, 58). This uncertainty contrasts sharply with Raymond B. Waddington’s assessment: “I see no reason to doubt the tradition that the reverse represents the Shield of Achilles” (Waddington in Scher 2000, 30). It contrasts, too, with the standard catalogues. Hill’s Corpus (1930, no. 44) and the Kress catalogue of the very specimen illustrated here state without qualification that “the reverse is inspired by the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles” (Hill and Pollard 1967, no. 22).
Pisanello’s Homeric Knowledge and Humanist Context
This disconnect between historical recognition and modern uncertainty raises questions about Pisanello’s access to Homeric material. At the time he composed the medal (∼1448–1449), neither the full Greek text of Homer’s Iliad nor a complete Latin translation was widely available in Italy. However, Pisanello’s exposure to Homeric tradition was likely multi-layered, drawing on both direct textual sources and broader humanist engagement with classical learning.
The chronology of Latin Homer is instructive. Leontius Pilatus had completed a Latin translation of the Iliad and Odyssey around 1362, encouraged by Petrarch and Boccaccio, but its literal nature and limited circulation likely precluded its influence on Pisanello (Pfeiffer 1976, 14). More importantly, as Rudolf Pfeiffer has noted, only in 1428/29 did Lorenzo Valla begin translating four books of the Iliad into clear Latin prose for Alfonso of Aragon, managing to Latinize two-thirds of the Homeric poem between 1442 and 1444; the work was only completed posthumously in 1457 by his pupil Francesco Aretino (Pfeiffer 1976, 38). Similarly, Angelo Ambrogini, called Poliziano (1454–1494), translated Books II–V of the Iliad into magnificent Latin hexameters at the age of eighteen, but again, well after the medal was executed (Pfeiffer 1976, 43).
Given this chronology, the most accessible and widespread source which would have been available to Pisanello would have been the Ilias Latina, a first-century AD Latin summary of the Iliad that was widely read throughout the medieval and early Renaissance periods . Significantly, its description of the Shield of Achilles (lines 663-668) emphasizes the cosmic elements while omitting the intricate human narratives found in Homer’s original:
Scuta deum clypeumque dehinc et saepta rotarum
Artifici doctus fabrili pollice Mulciber aegre
Explicat: insano celerant incendia flatu
Atque ignis rigidum pulsat fornacibus aurum.
Oceani gyro terras, solemque rubentem
Lunamque et rutilas certo sub limite flammas
Addit et innumeros stellarum pingit honores.Then the skilled artisan Mulciber [Hephaestus], with expert hand, Crafts shields for the gods, and then, with difficulty, the shield of Achilles, Unfolding it with his forge’s cunning. The raging fires hasten / And the flame hammers the rigid gold in the furnace. He adds the lands encircled by Ocean, the glowing sun, The moon, and the brilliant flames fixed in their course, And paints the countless glories of the stars.
This description focuses precisely on the elements Pisanello included in his medal design: the lands encircled by Ocean, the sun, moon, and stars in their celestial order. This striking parallel suggests that the Ilias Latina provided the primary conceptual framework for the medal’s reverse.
However, Pisanello’s Homeric knowledge was likely enriched beyond this text through his immersion in humanist circles. His presence in Ferrara during the Council of Florence in 1438 exposed him to the unprecedented intellectual exchange between Greek and Western scholars. The impact of this cultural encounter was evident in his first Renaissance medal commemorating the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Paleologus, which featured predominantly Greek inscriptions—a testament to his engagement with Hellenic culture.
Pisanello’s connections to humanist scholars extended beyond this pivotal event. His work for the papal court of Eugenius IV in 1431 at St. John Lateran overlapped with Lorenzo Valla’s time in papal service, creating a plausible scenario for direct contact between the artist and the scholar. When Valla later undertook his translation of the Iliad at the behest of Alfonso of Aragon in the early 1440s, Pisanello could have gained insights into ongoing scholarly discussions about Homer’s text, since this was the same period in which Alfonso commissioned medals from him. Though Valla’s translation remained incomplete and unpublished during Pisanello’s lifetime, the intellectual climate it reflected—a growing interest in recovering Homer in fuller form—undoubtedly influenced educated circles. Indeed, Don Iñigo d’Avalos himself, as a central figure in Alfonso’s circle, would have been familiar with contemporary Homeric scholarship and may have specifically requested a medal that demonstrated his connection to classical learning.
The medal’s design ultimately suggests that Pisanello drew primarily from the cosmic imagery emphasized in the Ilias Latina while being informed by the broader humanist climate of Homeric rediscovery. This approach allowed him to create a sophisticated visual parallel to Achilles’ Iliadic shield that resonated with contemporary understanding of Homer while acknowledging the impossibility of representing the shield’s full complexity.
Theoretical Significance: Reimagining the Shield
The Renaissance engagement with Homer’s Shield of Achilles reflects a fundamental shift in how artists and humanists understood ekphrasis. Unlike Greek vase painters, who relied on a shared mythological literacy and visual conventions, Renaissance artists approached ekphrasis through the lens of textual scholarship and Alberti’s theory of historia, which emphasized the narrative and moral function of art.
Pisanello’s medal does not attempt to depict Homer’s shield directly but rather reinterprets it conceptually. The celestial and terrestrial symbols on the reverse do not merely reference the shield—they perform what James Heffernan describes as the act of creative ekphrasis, a narrative process that reshapes its subject (Heffernan 1993, 7). Just as Virgil’s Aeneid reimagined Achilles’ shield through Aeneas, Pisanello transformed the Homeric ekphrasis into a humanist emblem of cosmic and historical order.
The medal’s engagement with heroic inheritance also follows a tradition established over a millennium earlier by Pyrrhos of Epeiros, who used numismatic depictions of Achilles’ shield to assert his own claim to heroic ancestry. However, where Pyrrhos emphasized direct genealogical descent from Achilles, Pisanello and his humanist contemporaries reimagined this inheritance in intellectual and spiritual terms. The medal suggests that d’Avalos, through his mastery of both arms and letters, embodied the Renaissance ideal of heroic virtue—an inheritance of excellence rather than blood.
Through this sophisticated engagement with classical tradition, Pisanello’s medal exemplifies the Renaissance understanding that Homer’s ekphrastic shield is an impossible totality—one that can only be engaged with through interpretation rather than direct reproduction. His approach represents not a failure to depict the shield but a profound recognition of its conceptual nature, reflecting a humanist understanding of how art engages with literary tradition.
Conclusion: The Unrepresentable Shield and the Enduring Power of Visual Recognition
The enduring power of Homer’s Shield of Achilles lies paradoxically in its very resistance to complete visual representation. Through centuries of artistic response, from the elegant restraint of Greek vase painters to the sophisticated symbolism of a Renaissance medalist, we find that the most successful interpretations are those that acknowledge and embrace this impossibility. Their strategic choices—whether through the Camtar Painter’s minimalism or Pisanello’s sophisticated symbolism—demonstrate that artistic greatness often lies not in attempting the impossible, but in finding creative ways to suggest it.
The transformation of the Boston MFA amphora from a misidentified First Arming scene to its proper recognition as the pivotal Iliadic moment when Thetis delivers divine armor reveals more than an isolated scholarly correction. It exposes how modern interpretive frameworks have sometimes obscured the sophisticated visual strategies employed by ancient artists. Where earlier scholars expected literal illustration of Homeric narrative, the Camtar Painter employed contextual placement and strategic symbolism—marking Achilles’ shield with a distinctive Gorgoneion—to trigger recognition in viewers familiar with epic tradition.
Similarly, Pisanello’s medal for Don Iñigo d’Avalos demonstrates how this approach to representation evolved across centuries. His cosmic sphere with celestial references does not attempt to reproduce Homer’s elaborate shield but instead distills its essential significance as a meeting point between human achievement and cosmic order. That this interpretation was recognized by Castiglione in his contemporary Latin poem suggests that Renaissance viewers understood Pisanello’s visual strategy perfectly well, even as modern scholars like Scher have questioned the “tenuous” connection to Homer’s shield.
These cases reveal a fundamental pattern in how artistic traditions engage with complex literary sources. Rather than attempting exhaustive illustration, successful artists across time have developed what might be called “economies of recognition”—strategic choices that activate viewers’ prior knowledge through minimal but precisely chosen visual cues. This pattern matters for several reasons:
First, it challenges the modern assumption that visual art related to literature should be evaluated primarily by its fidelity to textual description. Both the Greek vase painter and the Renaissance medalist understood that their task was not to reproduce Homer’s words but to create visual experiences that resonated with those words while respecting the distinct possibilities of their medium.
Second, it reveals how sophisticated visual literacy functioned in different cultural contexts. Viewers of the Boston amphora and Pisanello’s medal alike were expected to recognize allusive references through contextual placement and symbolic elements rather than through comprehensive illustration.
Third, these cases demonstrate that artistic representation often operates through patterns of recognition that transcend specific cultural moments. The strategies employed by the Camtar Painter and Pisanello, though separated by nearly two millennia, share a fundamental understanding that representation of complex narrative requires not exhaustive detail but meaningful selection and contextual placement.
The common adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” fundamentally underestimates both the boundless capacity of human imagination and art’s ability to transcend its material limitations. Each representation, whether verbal or visual, serves not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for the viewer’s own imaginative engagement. The evolving artistic responses to the Shield reflect a broader pattern in classical reception: not simply the passive inheritance of an ancient motif but its active reinterpretation through shifting cultural frameworks. The Renaissance, in particular, recast the Shield as an emblem of cosmic order, resonant with Neoplatonic and historia traditions, rather than attempting literal visualization of Homeric ekphrasis.
In this light, Homer’s “impossible” shield becomes inevitable: it exists perfectly in the boundless gallery of human imagination, where each viewer or reader completes the artwork anew. The Shield of Achilles remains an enduring enigma, not because artists failed to capture its grandeur, but because it resists visual containment altogether. As Squire reminds us, ancient writers and artists alike “recognised the visual–verbal games of the Homeric paradigm, and indeed developed them in a series of sophisticated, self-referential and creative ways”: every attempt to depict the shield engages in a tradition of ekphrastic reimagining rather than replication (Squire 2013, 179). The impossibility of fully realizing it in visual form is precisely what has made it such an enduring inspiration for artists and poets across centuries.
As we attempt to recover the original reception contexts for works like the Boston amphora or Pisanello’s medal, we may find that what appears puzzling to modern eyes was likely clear to viewers familiar with these enduring patterns of artistic engagement. By recognizing these patterns, we not only correct specific misidentifications but also recover a more sophisticated understanding of how visual traditions engage with literary sources—an understanding that may help us better appreciate similar dynamics in contemporary artistic practice.
[1] The term “synoptic”, derived from the Greek “συνοπτικός” (synoptikos), meaning “seeing the whole together”, has been used in classical art scholarship to describe a narrative technique where multiple moments from a myth are merged into a single composition. The term was most systematically applied by Kurt Weitzmann in his 1947 work Illustrations in Roll and Codex: A Study of the Origin and Method of Text Illustration, where he categorized it under what he called the “simultaneous method” (Weitzmann 1971, 13-14). This interpretive flexibility was a key feature of Greek art, where figures were often rendered not in a frozen moment but in a way that encapsulated an entire mythic arc. A depiction of Thetis presenting Achilles with his shield, for example, does not merely show an isolated event from Iliad 18—it foreshadows the shield’s ultimate role in Achilles’ final battles and his impending fate. As a result, Greek vase painters were not failing in their depiction of the shield but engaging in a sophisticated form of visual storytelling that relied on recognition rather than exhaustive detail.
[2] The Gorgoneion, the image of the Gorgon’s head, was a familiar apotropaic device in Greek religious and military practice. On Archaic temple antefixes and pediments, its fearsome countenance could serve as a guardian of sacred space. On shields and armor, it could turn the same forbidding gaze toward an enemy (Snodgrass 1967, 52; Lazarou and Liritzis 2022, 51, 55). It was a fitting device for Achilles, whose divine parentage and terrible wrath set him apart even among the heroes of the Iliad.
Homer gives the Gorgon a place on both divine and mortal arms. As Athena prepares to enter battle, she casts about her shoulders the aegis, ringed by Fear and bearing the Gorgon’s head (Iliad 5.738–742):
ἐν δέ τε Γοργείη κεφαλὴ δεινοῖο πελώρου
δεινή τε σμερδνή τε, Διὸς τέρας αἰγιόχοιο.and right in their midst the Gorgon’s monstrous head,
that rippling dragon horror, sign of storming Zeus.(Iliad 5.741–742, trans. Fagles)
On Agamemnon’s shield, the fierce-eyed Gorgon appears between Terror and Rout (Iliad 11.36–37). This is the closest Homeric parallel to the device the Camtar and Dutuit Painters give Achilles. The shield forged for Achilles in Book 18 has a different design, but the painters’ choice belongs to a tradition already attested in Homeric epic.
Euripides’ Ion gives a further sense of how a creature so closely associated with terror could also be a source of protection. Creusa recounts that Athena slew the Gorgon and wore her hide upon her breast as the aegis (Ion 989–997). She then tells how Athena gave the newborn Erichthonius “two drops of blood from the Gorgon” (δισσοὺς σταλαγμοὺς αἵματος Γοργοῦς ἄπο), one deadly and the other a cure for disease (Ion 1001–1005; cf. 1011–1015). The two drops give particularly clear expression to the Gorgon’s capacity to preserve life as well as to destroy it.
The Gorgon also figures in the Hesiodic Shield of Heracles, which Castiglione sets beside Homer and Virgil in the prose comparison that precedes his poem (see note 9). Here the Gorgons are shown pursuing Perseus across the shield’s surface. As their feet strike the adamant, “the shield rang sharp and clear with a loud clanging” (Aspis 231–233). The poem gives movement and sound to the terror that the solitary Gorgon’s face concentrates in its gaze. In painted and other representations of shields, that face became a familiar device in its own right (Wilk, as discussed in Lazarou and Liritzis 2022, 56).
From the early Classical period, artists increasingly rendered the Gorgon with less grotesque features (Lazarou and Liritzis 2022, 53–54). The change in appearance could soften the immediate shock of the image while leaving its older associations available to the viewer. On the shield of Achilles as depicted by the Camtar and Dutuit Painters, the Gorgoneion could still be read in both senses. It faces outward as a threat to those who confront him and serves as a protective emblem for the warrior who bears it.
[3] The text succinctly summarizes what another writer more fully expounded upon: “A few Attic black-figure vase painters of the sixth century preferred to depict Achilles dragging or preparing to drag the body of Hektor. An Attic black-figure hydria … is notable in this regard as the artist skillfully managed to condense, in his crowded yet clearly articulated work of art, many moments that spread across several books of the Iliad. Achilles is about to leap into his chariot in which the charioteer already stands and to which the body of Hektor has been attached. As he looks back he confronts Priam and Hekuba who stands beneath a Doric entablature, watching this gruesome spectacle. Although Hektor’s parents witness the mutilation of their son’s body (Iliad 22. 396-415) it is the artist who brings them to such terrifying closeness to the act. As the horses of Achilles disappear from the scene in the top right-hand corner, the soul of Patroklos flies away from his omphalos-shaped tomb, indicating that the body is dragged around the tomb of Patroklos (Iliad 24. 14-17). The woman in the centre gesturing to stop could be identified as Iris, who in the Homeric version, was sent to Thetis by Zeus asking her to persuade Achilles to stop the gruesome act. Then Zeus sends Iris again to Priam to encourage him to ransom the body of Hektor from Achilles (Iliad 24. l 04-187). The attempt of the painter here could be to combine both episodes in one scene by employing Iris to convey both messages by convening all characters necessary to understand the episode. Thus, the gesture of Iris signals to Achilles that he must end the dragging while signaling to Priam that he must visit Achilles. Thus, the painter has compressed both time and space to show his story through his artistic ingenuity” (Wickramasinghe 2014, 62).
[4] The greaves (κνημῖδες) are explicitly mentioned in the Iliad as part of Achilles’ divine rearmament:
κνημῖδας μὲν πρῶτα περὶ κνήμῃσιν ἔθηκε
καλάς, ἀργυρέοισιν ἐπισφυρίοις ἀραρυίας·First he wrapped his legs with well-made greaves,
fastened behind his heels with silver ankle-clasps,(Iliad 19.369–370, trans. Fagles)
Similarly, Achilles’ helmet is described as a radiant masterpiece of divine craftsmanship, crowned with a crest that blazes like a star:
περὶ δὲ τρυφάλειαν ἀείρας
κρατὶ θέτο βριαρήν· ἡ δ’ ἀστὴρ ὣς ἀπέλαμπεν
ἵππουρις τρυφάλεια, περισσείοντο δ’ ἔθειραι
χρύσεαι, ἃς Ἥφαιστος ἵει λόφον ἀμφὶ θαμειάς.Then lifting his rugged helmet
he set it down on his brows, and the horsehair crest
shone like a star and the waving golden plumes shook
that Hephaestus drove in bristling thick along its ridge.(Iliad 19.380–383, trans. Fagles)
While the Iliad does not explicitly mention a hammer or saw, their inclusion as tools of Hephaestus’ divine metallurgy is a logical extension of his role as a craftsman. The forging of Achilles’ arms is vividly depicted through fire and metalwork, reinforcing the association with the tools of craftsmanship (Iliad 18.468–477). Their depiction on the vase visually underscores the divine labor required to construct the hero’s exceptional armor, reminding the viewer of the supernatural effort behind Achilles’ rearmament.
[5] On the reverse of the vase, a winged female figure, possibly Nike, holds an oinochoe and a phiale, reinforcing the heroic and ritualistic significance of Achilles’ new armor. The oinochoe (οἰνοχόη), a small, single-handled pitcher, was commonly used for pouring wine or libations, while the phiale (φιάλη), a shallow offering bowl, often appeared in scenes of sacrifice or ritual pouring. Their presence on the vase suggests a connection between Achilles’ divine rearmament and sacrificial or funerary rites, possibly alluding to the libations for Patroklos (Iliad 23.218–221) or the broader theme of divine favor in Achilles’ fate.
[6] “The history of Epirus down to the fourth century is mostly obscured by myth. The most common tradition is that the kingship of the Molossians was founded by Neoptolemus, who was called Pyrrhus in his youth, and was the only son of Achilles, the great hero of the Trojan War. Neoptolemus was brought to Troy following the prophecy of the captured Trojan seer, Helenus. He gained a reputation as the most savage of the Greek heroes, murdering the Trojan King Priam, his daughter, Polyxena, and Hector’s son, Astyanax. After the sack of Troy he took Hector’s widow, Andromache, as his concubine. As the result of another oracle of Helenus, he did not return to his homeland of Thessaly but sailed instead to Epirus, accompanied by both Andromache and Helenus. He had no legitimate children by his wife Hermione, but Andromache bore him three sons, named Molossus, Pielus and Pergamus. Neoptolemus’ violent past eventually caught up with him and he was murdered at Delphi, reputedly by Hermione’s previous husband Orestes. Helenus then married Andromache, assumed the throne and became guardian of Neoptolemus’ sons. On his death Molossus became king. It was, however, from his brother Pielus that the later kings traced their ancestry.” (Champion 2009, 3)
[7] Stephen K. Scher, in his biographical sketch of Antonio di Cuccio Pisano, called Pisanello, states that Pisanello was “trained within the North Italian schools of painting, blending Tuscan elements with local variations of the International Gothic style” while “also exposed to the newer art and ideas eagerly nurtured within the courts where he worked.” Scher also suggests the possibility that Pisanello was given a “humanist education.” In support of such a supposition, he notes that a “young Pisanello carried from Padua to Venice a manuscript belonging to the great humanist Guarino da Verona” around 1416. By 1424, Pisanello was already known as a pictor egregius (distinguished painter), which no doubt led to his employment by Lodovico Gonzaga in 1425-1426, and Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, by the latter part of that decade. Though Scher reports that Pisanello’s path is difficult to follow in the 1430s, we know that in 1431 Pope Eugenius IV commissioned Pisanello to work on a project in St. John Lateran but that he divided most of his time between the courts of the Gonzaga in Mantua and the Este in Ferrara. The latter court was quite significant in Pisanello’s life and development for numerous reasons. First, he developed a close relationship with Leonello d’Este as well as the “brilliant group of humanists gathered at his court.” He was in Ferrara in 1438 and “witnessed the arrival of the Byzantine emperor John VIII Paleologus and his large retinue. Fascinated by the costumes and accoutrements of the visitors, he made several sketches. From these, and for reasons that can only be conjectured, the artist then created a circular, cast commemorative relief with a portrait of the emperor on one side and a narrative scene on the reverse. Thus was born the first true Renaissance portrait medal.” Scher reports that during the 1440s Pisanello continued to work in Ferrara and Mantua. During this period, he produced additional medals for others due to the success of his first portrait medal. Around 1448, Alfonso of Aragon, the king of Naples, sought out Pisanello. Scher states that “[n]othing remains of Pisanello’s activities during this period except for three medals of Alfonso, one of them dated 1449, and the incomparable medal of Alfonso’s grand chamberlain, Don Iñigo d’Avalos.” He goes on to say that there is no further documentary evidence of Pisanello after 1450 and that the record suggests that Pisanello died, probably in Rome, between July 14 and October 31, 1455. (Scher 1994, 43-44)
[8] The delegation of Emperor John VIII Paleologus which arrived in Ferrara at the invitation of Pope Eugenius IV numbered over 700. Among the delegation with the Emperor were scholars and men of letters “delighted to find themselves in an environment conducive to new ideas and reverent of the ancient past. The Greeks were welcomed enthusiastically and encouraged to stay, thus accelerating the revival of Greek studies in Renaissance Europe.” (Scher 1994, 46) The Council of Florence was translated to Ferrara in early 1438 by Pope Eugenius IV; it was transferred to Florence in 1439, due to the threat of plague. However, its significance on the blossoming of humanist ideals and, more importantly, transmission of classical works (hyperbolically described as akin to a book fair) and ideas from the Greek east cannot be overstated. See “Cultural Exchanges and the Diffusion of Humanism” in The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium (2017, 567-569). Regarding Pisanello’s inspiration for the first Renaissance portrait medal, scholars have suggested that it was at Ferrara in 1438 that Leon Battista Alberti may have produced his uniface relief self-portrait, thereby offering inspiration to Pisanello for the medal of John VIII Paleologus. (Bliss in Scher 1994, 41)
[9] The preface to the poem stated the following:
HOMERI. HESIODI H ET. VERGILI LOCVS COLLATVS. Numifma INICI. DAVALI
Omerus in Achilis clypeo Mundum a Vulcano effic tum multis verfibus, quorum vnum appofuimus, Ili ados & profecutus eſt: -Εν μεν γαϊαν ἔτευξ᾽ ἐν δὲ ἐρανὸν ἐν δε θάλασαν quem verfum fic Latine reddidimus: Inclypeo terram, caelumq. effinxit, & aequor. Eiufdem Argumenti eſt Hefiodi Aris või multa de Herculis clypeo narrantur. Vergilius verò vtrumq.imitatus in Aeneae clypeo Aeneae progeniem, & Romanorum res geftas, Auguſtiq. naualem ad Actium victoriam, & triumphum expretium fuiffe libro octauo extremoteſtatus eſt. Ad Homeri autem Commen. tum propius accedit ampliffimum ex aere Numifma, fiue, vt in Italia vulgariſermonetoquimur, Il Medaglione, quo proximo fuperiore anno ALOYSIVS ORICELLARIVS HORATII Clariffimi viri, Filius, nobis dono dedit. qu in Numifmate exaltera quidem parte INICI. DAVAL effigiem, & nomen, ex altera vero Mundum, Terramſcıl cet, Caelum, ac Mare Piſanus Pictor cum fuo nomine, fententiola vulgaribus verbis concepta, PER VVI SE FA ideſt Tibi fit, centum, & co amplius ab hinc annis excude rat. NOS THOMAE. DAVALO. INICI ABNEPO TI, Illuftrisfimo Principi, qui ad maiorum fuorum glorian fingulari virtute aſpirat, gentis fuæ in Italia auctoris monu mentum, noftris autum verfibus, dedimus.
Homer, Hesiod, and Virgil Compared: The Medal of Inico d’Avalos
Homer, in the description of the Shield of Achilles, portrays the world crafted by Vulcan in many verses, one of which we have included here from the Iliad: Εν μεν γαϊαν ἔτευξ᾽ ἐν δὲ ἐρανὸν ἐν δε θάλασαν [“He made on it the earth, and the heavens, and the sea”] (Iliad 18.483). We have rendered this verse in Latin as follows: Inclypeo terram, caelumq. effinxit, & aequor. “On the shield, he fashioned the earth, the heavens, and the sea.” Of the same theme, Hesiod, in his Shield of Heracles, recounts many details about the shield of Hercules. As for Virgil, he imitated both Homer and Hesiod in his description of Aeneas’s shield in The Aeneid. On it, he depicted the lineage of Aeneas, the deeds of the Romans, the naval victory of Augustus at Actium, and his triumph, as stated in the closing of the eighth book.
Closer, however, to Homer’s commentary is a magnificent medal in bronze, or, as we say in the common Italian tongue, Il Medaglione. This medal was gifted to us last year by Aloysius Oricellarius, son of the illustrious Horatius Oricellarius. On one side of the medal is the effigy and name of Inico d’Avalos, while on the other side, the world is depicted—namely the earth, the heavens, and the sea. This design, created more than a hundred years ago by the Pisan painter, bears his name along with a brief inscription in the vernacular: PER VVI SE FA (glossed Tibi fit, “For you it is made”). To Thomas d’Avalos, descendant of Inico and most illustrious prince, who aspires to the glory of his ancestors with singular virtue, we dedicate this monument of his family’s founder in Italy, now celebrated in our verses.
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