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Florence

The Greco-Roman mother of the gods, known as Cybele from about the fifth century B.C. onward, welcomed and cured Dionysus of madness. Here, she's shown in a figurine at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The legend of Dionysus turning Tyrrhenian pirates into dolphins is depicted on a kylix, a shallow drinking cup, from 530 B.C., now in the State Collection of Antiquities in Munich.

The graphic death of the mythical King Pentheus of Thebes is depicted in this fresco from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. In The Bacchae, Euripides recounts how Pentheus was dismembered by a group of maenads—including his own mother, Agave—while the women were in the throes of an ecstatic Dionysian frenzy.

Pregnant with Dionysus, Semele perishes after demanding to see Zeus in all his glory in this 17th-century oil painting by Luca Ferrari.

In this oil painting from 1595, Caravaggio depicted Bacchus (the Roman name for Dionysus) as a callow adolescent, his head crowned with grape leaves and a glass of wine in hand.

This gold falcon, which was discovered at the Tomb of Hetepheres, is now at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Van Dyck's sketchbook shows an account of his 1624 visit with Sofonisba.

A gold ring, from circa 1353-1336 B.C., features likenesses of both Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

Meticulously crafted, a statue from the Amarna period depicts a woman wearing a close-fitting, pleated linen dress. It is believed to represent Nefertiti or perhaps one of her daughters.

Akhenaten's face stares out from a plaster bust found in Amarna, dated circa 1353-1336 B.C.