Sky-Father, from Diespiter to Jove

Jupiter's public rites preserved a strange trace of very old belief: Pliny the Elder records that on the day of his triumph, a victorious general had his face painted red with minium so that he resembled, for that one day, the red terracotta cult statue of Jupiter housed in the Capitoline temple, paraded through the city in a chariot as though he were briefly the god's own image come to life. The practice had faded into a merely decorative memory by the late Republic, but ancient writers still connected it back to this identification between triumphator and god.

Jupiter's astrological and calendrical legacy long outlasted his temples. Ancient astrology gave him rulership of the largest planet and made him the great benefic, a reading of expansion and good fortune that Western astrology still uses; dies Iovis, Jove's day, survives as jeudi in French and giovedi in Italian, while English Thursday continues the same weekday but through the Germanic identification of Jupiter with Thor rather than with Jove directly, an equivalence based on their shared command of thunder rather than any borrowed name. Renaissance and Baroque painters, Correggio and Rubens among them, returned repeatedly to Jupiter's mythic love affairs, keeping the god visually present in European art long after his cult had ended.