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capri0mniSo, I'm starting to work on my piece for Blogging Against Disablism Day:
And (Spoiler alert!) it's going to be about Hephaestus (pictured), and -- modern -- people seem to assume that when the Greeks said "lame," they simply meant "walking with a bit of a limp. Not really crippled, like we think of it today."
Well, years ago -- More than 5, less then 15 -- I remember there was a documentary series of hour-long (maybe 2-hour) programs on PBS tracing the history of art from cave paintings to television advertisements, talking about how art is used in a culture, etc.
Anyway, in the episode on Ancient Greek statues, there was an interview with a conservator dude who noted that the bottom of the statues' feet were compressed, as if actually weight-bearing. And this was a clue to him that the statues were made from plaster life-casts of actual people, because if you're molding the sculpture from clay, you wouldn't need to put accurate details on the bottoms of the feet, because those were going to be stuck to the pedestal, anyway.
What this means, of course, is that the only people available to be models for statues had to be able-bodied enough to stand for long periods of time without tiring.... So you never actually had any crippled people to model for the crippled god. Now, one thing you could do, if you were building a bronze statue of Hephaestus, and you wanted to show him as deformed, you could turn the foot molds around backwards before you attatched them. And that's how Hephaestus is shown to be crippled in some statues, and vase paintings (inspired by statues -?-).
I so want to cite this in my BADD piece. Because it's the fact that all the statues of Hephaestus look so able-bodied that people today don't believe the Ancient Greeks knew what they were talking about. But I've trolled the PBS archives for a transcript. ...And it's nowhere to be found! It's like it never existed. Argh. And I don't want to use this tidbit without being able to point people back to the original source.
Okay, I'll take a deep breath. Go eat something with protein. Maybe start up a pot of rice, for this week's meals, and try again.
Still...
[ETA: it may have been longer than 5 years ago, now that I think about it -- Maybe it was right around the time of the first![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
naarmamo?]
And (Spoiler alert!) it's going to be about Hephaestus (pictured), and -- modern -- people seem to assume that when the Greeks said "lame," they simply meant "walking with a bit of a limp. Not really crippled, like we think of it today."
Well, years ago -- More than 5, less then 15 -- I remember there was a documentary series of hour-long (maybe 2-hour) programs on PBS tracing the history of art from cave paintings to television advertisements, talking about how art is used in a culture, etc.
Anyway, in the episode on Ancient Greek statues, there was an interview with a conservator dude who noted that the bottom of the statues' feet were compressed, as if actually weight-bearing. And this was a clue to him that the statues were made from plaster life-casts of actual people, because if you're molding the sculpture from clay, you wouldn't need to put accurate details on the bottoms of the feet, because those were going to be stuck to the pedestal, anyway.
What this means, of course, is that the only people available to be models for statues had to be able-bodied enough to stand for long periods of time without tiring.... So you never actually had any crippled people to model for the crippled god. Now, one thing you could do, if you were building a bronze statue of Hephaestus, and you wanted to show him as deformed, you could turn the foot molds around backwards before you attatched them. And that's how Hephaestus is shown to be crippled in some statues, and vase paintings (inspired by statues -?-).
I so want to cite this in my BADD piece. Because it's the fact that all the statues of Hephaestus look so able-bodied that people today don't believe the Ancient Greeks knew what they were talking about. But I've trolled the PBS archives for a transcript. ...And it's nowhere to be found! It's like it never existed. Argh. And I don't want to use this tidbit without being able to point people back to the original source.
Okay, I'll take a deep breath. Go eat something with protein. Maybe start up a pot of rice, for this week's meals, and try again.
Still...
[ETA: it may have been longer than 5 years ago, now that I think about it -- Maybe it was right around the time of the first
naarmamo?]
