By Mario Martinez
The Classical body’s grasp on art history has never faded, from antiquity, through the renaissance, to modernity. Excluding the avant-garde movements during the first decade of the twentieth century, a general trend in modern art has been to refashion the Classical body as the modern body. The latter bloomed in post-World War I European visual culture as artists yearned to ameliorate artistic traditions, as witnessed by the recurring citation of Classical forms and motifs, primarily the Venus de Milo. Disabled women artists, working in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, have participated in this trend by representing their bodies in the guise of Graeco-Roman goddesses. By doing so, disabled women artists have reclaimed and recontextualized the fragmented Classical body on their own terms. The many re-iterations of the Venus de Milo, including those by Mary Duffy and Alison Lapper, will be analyzed using a feminist disability studies methodology. A discussion about disabled women’s lived experiences will contextualize the artworks examined and affirm the value of the disabled experience in art historical discourse
