ABSTRACT
There are conspicuously few representations of disability, and none of the severely disabled, in the entire repertoire of Roman art. Even the god Hephaestus/Vulcan, famously characterized in the literary tradition as lame (the earliest reference comes from the Iliad, where he is described as ‘crook-footed’, or with ‘feet turned backwards’: 18.371 and 1.607) is never portrayed as overtly disabled in the visual tradition; his lameness, when represented, is always discreet (e.g. a slight twist of the foot, see, for example, the Albani Puteal, c.2nd century ce, now in the Capitoline Museums, Rome) and his body is otherwise youthful and physically robust (on the iconography of Vulcan in Roman art, see the LIMC VIII (1997), 283-97; on the earlier iconographic tradition of Hephaestus in Greek art, see the LIMC IV (1988), 628-54; on lameness in Antiquity more generally, see Pestilli 2005). Vulcan’s representation underscores a tension in the (literary and) visual record and in our examination here of disability: if one of the most famous characters in Antiquity is rarely depicted as physically impaired, then perhaps we should wonder whether disability, as understood today, works at all as an ancient category of identification?
