In the third century BCE, Ptolemy II, together with the architect Timochares, imagined a new kind of representation to commemorate his deceased sister and wife, Arsinoe II. The Elder Pliny explains how Timochares put his special knowledge of materials to work: he planned to construct the vaulting of Arsinoe’s Alexandrian temple out of lodestone – a dark mineral with magnetic properties – to suspend her partially iron portrait statue above the heads of viewers, achieving the effect of a levitating deity. Had the plans come to fruition, the visual experience would have, perhaps, filled the king’s subjects with terror and wonder.