Malevolent or Benevolent Brushstrokes?: Exploring the Depiction of Disability in Renaissance Paintings Using a Critical Disability Studies Lens

Abstract

It may be important to situate disability historically to move toward understanding the rise of contemporary and often dominant ableist approaches to thinking about and representing disability today. The arts serve as “living artifacts” which store historical ideas about disabled bodies. Using a critical disability studies (CDS) lens, we explored the historical depiction of disability through Renaissance paintings created between 1300 and 1700. Our formal and semiotic analysis suggests that disability was depicted in ways that reinforce a medicalized notion. Malevolent representations seem to focus on the notion that a disabled body exists in service to an able-bodied other, the healing of disability by a god, or disability as a source of entertainment. In contrast, disability and tenderness may be seen as a more benevolent portrayal but not without paternalism and infantilization. Although paintings of children were few, disabled children were depicted in a more compassionate and vulnerable light than disabled adults, perhaps highlighting differing degrees of acceptance on the basis of age. Our use CDS in this paper highlights the problematic persistence of biomedicalization and pathologizing in Renaissance art. We encourage further use of CDS perspectives in art history analysis in the future, given the potential to generate emancipatory artistic movements and new conversations about bodies in space and time.