Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Nereus.
The gallery
Heracles and Nereus (black-figure lekythos)
Istanbul Painter, c. 590–580 BC
On the shoulder of this Boeotian black-figure lekythos, attributed to the Istanbul Painter and now in the Louvre (CA 823), the hero Heracles grapples with the Old Man of the Sea to wrest from him the way to the Hesperides. Nereus, true and shape-shifting, was renowned for changing into many forms to slip a captor's grasp; here the Archaic painter fixes the moment of the seizing hold, a favorite subject of sixth-century Attic and Boeotian pottery in which the bearded sea-god, sometimes given a coiling fish-tail, is pinned by the inescapable arms of Heracles.
Nereus battling the giants, Gigantomachy frieze of the Pergamon Altar
Unknown (Hellenistic sculptors of Pergamon), c. 2nd century BC
In the great marble Gigantomachy frieze of the Pergamon Altar, now reconstructed in Berlin, the sea-god Nereus appears among the marine deities who join the Olympian gods in the war against the Giants. Carved in the dramatic high relief of the Hellenistic Pergamene school, with its deep undercutting, straining muscles and swirling drapery, the Old Man of the Sea is shown amid the writhing tangle of bodies that wraps the altar's monumental base — a rare large-scale ancient depiction of a figure who otherwise survives mainly on vase-painting.
The sea-god Nereus seated on a shell with his daughters
Philips Galle, 1586
This engraving by the Haarlem printmaker Philips Galle, the third plate in his numbered series of river- and sea-gods, shows Nereus enthroned upon a great shell with his many daughters, the Nereids, gathered behind him. The Renaissance image gives visual form to Hesiod's catalogue of the fifty sea-nymphs born to Nereus and the Oceanid Doris, presenting the benevolent Old Man of the Sea as a patriarch of the waters surrounded by his marine progeny, complete with the antiquarian attributes — shell, beard and watery setting — that humanist artists drew from ancient sources.
Nereus (from the series of Sea and River Gods)
Philips Galle, 1586
A second plate from Philips Galle's 1586 series of marine and river deities, held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, isolates Nereus as a single standing figure. The bearded sea-god is rendered in the precise burin-work of late sixteenth-century Netherlandish engraving, identified by inscription and the conventional attributes of an aquatic divinity. Such printed pantheons of classical sea-gods circulated widely as iconographic reference for painters and decorators, keeping the figure of the truthful, shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea current in the visual vocabulary of the European Renaissance.