Artifice
By Daniel Browning
The production of myth is a balm that soothes us. It fills a void in our consciousness. In the political exercise of nation-building and history-making, it can lead to mass delusion. In a sedative haze, the stories we tell ourselves can suppress the truth and bury the past by rhetorically making heroes of villains. As artefacts, myths are inherently reductive and unilateral. Unlike the Belvedere of our imagination where there are multiple aspects from which to observe these objects, there can not be another theory or subjective text to challenge the hegemony and subvert the paradigm. There is no room for ambiguity or dissidence - only thinly-painted characters locked in binary opposition, their behaviour regulated by either good or evil for eternity. Heracles is a case in point. There are multiple aspects of this divine hero in classical sculpture, from the snake-killing infant in the Capitoline to the enormous and much-copied Farnese Hercules, acquired by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in 1546. Momentarily at rest from his labours, the exhausted hero leans on his upturned club like a crutch. In the inappropriately-named Lansdowne Heracles in the collection of the Getty Museum, the youthful hero has only just slain the Nemean lion - the first of his twelve labours. Like the Farnese, the Lansdowne has undergone major reconstruction since it was unearthed, devoid of colour and lacking some of its extremities, in the late eighteenth century. From Disney to Lil Nas X, there is no rest for the divine hero in popular culture. Both Jeff Koons’ Gazing Ball (2013) and Matthew Darbyshire’s Hercules (2014) recast the Farnese marble, albeit in plaster and polystyrene. But as the classicist Aimee Hinds has noted, the re-presentation of once wildly polychromic artefacts such as these as blindingly white perpetuates an artificial whiteness, which is inherently exclusionary. This artificial whiteness is predicated on
“...false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that codes all idealised bodies as white, young and hetero-normative”.
Not only has the iconography of the divine hero been whitewashed, latterly his myth has been cleansed of its more transgressive and genderqueer aspects. These include his enslavement at the court of Omphale, the regnant queen of Lydia (in what is now Turkey). His submission included voluntarily cross-dressing in Omphale’s robes - a part of the story immortalised in a marble held in the same collection as the Farnese. Naturally, the hypersexual Heracles had a catalogue of male lovers. In the Amatorius, Plutarch wrote that
It would be a task too great to enumerate the amours of Hercules...