Pathetic Pygmies. Images of Africans between Fact and Fiction (original) (raw)

In the visual arts of ancient Greece and Rome, we are confronted with a great variety of contexts in which (elements of) African physiognomies can occur. In some cases, ethnic markers can serve as direct reference to a figure’s descent (e.g. the Egyptian king Busiris or the companions of Ethiopian king Memnon in Athenian vase-painting). More often, however, ‘ethnical markers’ are not primarily intended to indicate a figure’s origin but are used for status distinction (e.g. domestic slaves displaying African physiognomies) or as a comic element (e.g. parodies or grotesques). In these instances, ethnical features are often combined with other ‘deviant’ markers (e.g. short stature or old age) and thus have to be interpreted as a strategy to denote the figure as ‘the Other’ rather than ‘the African’. The mythical tribe of the pygmies is a special case insofar as it is, at least to some accounts, located in Africa but at the same time represents a somewhat idiosyncratic topos that exceeds ethnical attributions: Whether as dwarf-like creatures fighting against the cranes on Athenian pottery or as uncontrolled midgets satisfying their sexual needs on the walls of Pompeian houses, they clearly belong to the realm of parody rather than ‘objective ethnology’. The paper presents a short survey on the physiognomic features associated with African descent and their dominant contexts in Graeco-Roman art. The second part takes a closer look at the iconography of pygmies and tries to identify the particular functions and meanings of their physiognomic as well as habitual markers. The closing remarks are dedicated to the question if and how these images might have shaped the perception of Africa and its inhabitants in the Graeco-Roman world.