Disability and Art History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

Ann Millett-Gallant, Elizabeth Howie, Ann Millett-Gallant, Elizabeth Howie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000417517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume analyzes representations of disability in art from antiquity to the twenty-first century, incorporating disability studies scholarship and art historical research and methodology.

This book brings these two strands together to provide a comprehensive overview of the intersections between these two disciplines. Divided into four parts:

• Ancient History through the 17th Century: Gods, Dwarfs, and Warriors
• 17th-Century Spain to the American Civil War: Misfits, Wounded Bodies, and Medical Specimens
• Modernism, Metaphor and Corporeality
• Contemporary Art: Crips, Care, and Portraiture

and comprised of 16 chapters focusing on Greek sculpture, ancient Chinese art, Early Italian Renaissance art, the Spanish Golden Age, nineteenth century art in France (Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec) and the US, and contemporary works, it contextualizes understandings of disability historically, as well as in terms of medicine, literature, and visual culture.

This book is required reading for scholars and students of disability studies, art history, sociology, medical humanities and media arts.

Part 1 Ancient history through the seventeenth centuryGods, dwarfs, and warriors

1Hephaestus representedA mêtis-based inquiry

Sara Newman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003048602-3

Introduction

In contemporary discussions, Hephaestus was the unattractive, disabled god, “the lame one.”¹ Because of his perceived disability, this thinking goes, he was necessarily less significant than the other, able gods. This was precisely my position, if implicitly, when I began this project. Yet, as I learned, the ancient Greeks had a wiser perspective. Understood in that context, Hephaestus is one of the twelve, great, originating Olympians, the skilled and clever god of blacksmiths, fire, and sculpture. Within this important, powerful group, Hephaestus also possesses unprecedented traits. He is the one and only Olympian god with bodily difference. He is also the only god to return to Mount Olympus after exile and the one god with the capacity to incapacitate other gods, the latter with the support of his mêtic, or cunning intelligence. In addition to these unprecedented traits, his myth contains various apparent discrepancies. Among them, although Homer names Zeus and Hera as Hephaestus’s parents,² Hesiod reports that his birth was the unnatural accomplishment of Hera alone. Finally, Hephaestus is represented with unusual frequency in everyday Athenian ceramics in the sixth century BCE. Thus, as represented in the words and images of his day, Hephaestus’s story is rife with antithetical, oppositional, and contradictory elements. These circumstances involving Hephaestus’s myth raise several significant questions about his presence and role in Greek myths. How can a god be disabled and to what purposes? The answer, as the pottery’s imagery shows, involves what Hephaestus embodies and actualizes through his mêtic movement and thinking in resolving oppositional situations.

Despite the centrality of his physique in his myth and the many images of him, the standard, classical scholarship on Hephaestus neglects or underplays the significance of those corporeal representations. Instead, and given its disciplinary goals, this scholarship focuses on literary, philological, and archaeological concerns.³ Accordingly, these investigations discuss Hephaestus’s displeasing physique, his twisted leg especially, in association with his mêtis. This mêtis, traditional classical scholars suggest, is evident in Hephaestus’s penchant for working with others, not only to aid but to thwart them, and often involving elements and agents of deception and chaos.⁴ Thus, Hephaestus’s purported physical defect is matched by his mêtis, a form of intelligence considered lesser than conventional intellect or physical strength. Thereby, Hephaestus is physically and morally compromised and, paradoxically, the lesser god among the gods.⁵

Although this standard scholarship is essential grounding for any inquiry into Hephaestus, it mischaracterizes the god as disabled in simplistic, dismissive ways which mirror Western misconceptions of disability and impose them on ancient Greek literature and art. These misconceptions are grounded in what this conventional scholarship lacks. With one exception, none of this work adopts a disability studies perspective.⁶ Because this scholarship examines Hephaestus in terms of what he lacks, without considering his representations in any depth, it cannot fully and properly appreciate this unprecedented god’s significance in Greek antiquity from any inclusive perspective, let alone a disability studies one.

My study extends essential classical scholarship into the realm of disability studies by considering how sixth-century BCE Athenians visualized Hephaestus and how these visualizations shaped/were shaped by cultural values. Accordingly, my reading focuses on iconography, rather than style, and applies a methodology which integrates disability studies approaches involving art and symbolism with oral classical/archeological studies. In contrast to contemporary scholarship, I situate pottery representations of Hephaestus in their cultural context, one grounded in oral literacy and its own conceptions of disability and art.

Considering these ancient representations individually, in their aggregate, and from a context-based, disability studies perspective allows me to reconstruct the milieu in which the Greek polis received and constructed myths about Hephaestus. Hephaestus provided a necessary kind of ability, one embodied and actualized in the antithetical combination of his cunning mind and twisted body. Thereby, he played an essential role in Greek mythology which reflects on Athenian culture of the sixth century BCE. Hephaestus emerges not as a lesser god, a sum of his limitations. Instead, Hephaestus’s visual representations speak to what he has the potential to accomplish. Among the gods, Hephaestus exemplifies how to resolve contradictory situations with unprecedented antithetical, artistic abilities.

First, I offer background on sixth-century BCE Athens and Hephaestus’s association with mêtis. After identifying my corpus, I discuss disability in ancient Greek thinking and the concepts of technai/art and oral communication which also shaped the ceramic images of Hephaestus. Then, I consider how images of Hephaestus in “The Return to Olympus” and in unusual births demonstrate his ability to resolve contradictory situations effectively.

Historical and scholarly background

Sixth-century BCE Athens: context and corpus

In the sixth century BCE, Athens was often engaged in conflicts within and across its civic boundaries that almost invariably involved shifting power relationships. After mass immigration in Greece and Asia Minor in the two previous centuries, many cities, Athens and Sparta, for instance, had gained status as independent cities. Such city-states had relatively defined borders and were ruled by civic leaders, rather than existing as less territorially defined communities that were ruled kinship groups. Throughout the sixth century BCE, these cities fought to protect and increase their power and territory. In addition to external power conflicts, Athens experienced internal strife. These confrontations, again, involved power clashes and, often enough, reversals. Notable among these shifts, in the second half of that century, Peisistratos took hold of the city and established an Athenian dictatorship that lasted through the reigns of his sons, Hippias and Hipparchos. In 510 BCE, however, the dictatorship was overturned.⁷

Figure 1.1 Return of Hephaestus attributed to Kelophrases; Kalyx Crater, Red-Figure, ca. 500 BCE, Late Archaic. Harvard Museum of Art, Cambridge, MA, Accession no. 1960.236.

As this sketch indicates, sixth-century BCE Athens was marked by opposition between and overturning of power structures. The pervasive presence of such conflicts shaped cultural values. The values were then captured by artists and shared with the citizenry in performances, pottery, architecture, and so forth.⁸ Among these objects, ceramics have been particularly helpful in identifying and tracing ancient Athens’s cultural values. Their usefulness lies in large part in their plentitude. In addition to their sheer numbers, ceramics were used across a variety of everyday purposes (domestic, healing, and ritual) and, thereby, provide insight across a range of civic experiences.

My search uncovered 100 vessels with identifiable representations of Hephaestus; though not comprehensive, they represent the range of images found across various mediums (ceramics, painting, sculpture), are available online for viewing, and span the years 575–425 BCE. The vessels are decorated with red (Figures 1.1 and 1.3), black, and white figures, and figures of all three colors (Figure 1.2); the ceramics embrace a tremendous range of forms. To individuate the pieces, I categorized them on a spreadsheet in terms of subject, date, cultural provenance, shape, location, and artist. In this chapter, I encapsulate these data in three tables. Table 1.1 lists the representations by scene, beginning with the one most frequently pictured and ending with the image which appears the least. Table 1.2 follows the chronology of Hephaestus’s story. Table 1.3 provides information about the images I discuss. Those tables guide my telling of his story.

Table 1.1 Numbers of Representations

The Return: 38

Birth of Athena: 5

Birth of Erichthonius: 4

Birth of Pandora: 4

Composites of Thetis: 8

Forges: 4

Gigantomachy: 1

Table 1.2 Chronology

The Return

Birth of Athena

Birth of Erichthonius

Creation of Pandora

Thetis

Table 1.3 Image List

Image Number	Location	Subject Artist	Shape Coloring Date
Image 1	Harvard Museum of Art, Cambridge, MA 1960.236	Return of Hephaestus Attributed to Kelophrases	Kalyx Crater Red-Figure ca. 500 BCE Late Archaic
Image 2	British Museum	Birth of Athena	Black-Figure Amphora B 575–525 BCE
Image 3	Ashmolean Museum, Oxford	Creation of Pandora	Red-Figure ca. fifth century BCE

Literary/visual accounts of Hephaestus

Existing ancient accounts of Hephaestus associate him with mêtis. Mêtis was a greatly admired form of intelligence in Athenian Greek culture, one characterized by cunning thought, practical effectiveness, shapeshifting, kairos, or appropriate rather than chronological timing and future foresight. Consequently, mêtic intelligence is a kind of power whose role and operation are, depending on the situation, complemented by and/or contrasted with the power of corporeal strength.⁹

The goddess Mêtis, daughter of Titans Oceanus and Thetys, was the namesake of this cunning intelligence and its ultimate practitioner. In fifth-century BCE Athens, Mêtis was associated with wisdom and good counsel as well as with magic. She embodied these capabilities and her mêtis in her ability to shapeshift into the ...