Are there any Midas portraits from the ancient era?

Question

This is not strictly a history question, but I hope you can help me: I'm looking for original ancient art depicting king Midas (Ideally a mosaic, but anything will work, as long as it is from the "ancient era"). Searching online with the most popular search engines has been an absolute waste of time, and I find it hard to believe that there is not a single "original" art piece depicting Midas (I thought he was one of the popular ones, even back in the day?). Ideally, the image should be large, in high resolution and royalty/copyright/whatever free, as I plan to use it as cover art in my doctoral thesis (I am on a completely unrelated field, but Midas' myths provide a perfect metaphor for my research, and I'm really into Greek mythology, so...). Links, actual names of the pieces (maybe the search engines will be less useless if I tell them exactly which piece I am looking for?), links, downloads, anything at all will be helpful. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out!!

Answer 1

The problem you are running into here is that there are several ancient kings in several ancient places associated with the King Midas myths. Most of these kings and stories substantially predate even the Trojan War, and finding any portraiture from that period depicting specific people rather than idealized forms, let alone ones we can positively identify, is pretty rare. If you're really set on having a picture of a possible King Midas from that period, Dr. Lynn E. Roller is the expert on Phrygian imagery and you can look up her articles for inspiration and open source images, but it's likely that you'll find pictures of a generic guy in a Phrygian cap, which is more strongly associated with other meanings besides the Midas myths. I recommend you pick the most striking royalty-free image you like rather than going for accuracy for your cover photo.