Prado Museum renames ‘dwarf ’ paintings
SPAIN’S most famous museum is expunging terms such as dwarf, dwarfism, deformed and deviant from its vast art collection, saying the words are no longer acceptable.
The Prado Museum in Madrid has a large number of artworks that feature dwarfs, many of them painted by the celebrated artist Diego Velazquez.
They were celebrated members of royal households, known as hombres de
placer or men of pleasure, and fulfilling the role of court jesters, mocked for their stature and appearance.
On its website, the Prado explains: “The custom of placing the principal figure in a portrait alongside another being that was physically or socially inferior was common practice among artists who portrayed figures from the Spanish court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
“With their witty sallies, bizarre behaviour and physical and psychological peculiarities, they offered a permanent image of a carnivalesque world: that of the other.”
But the Prado has now resolved to remove terms such as “dwarf ” and “disabled” from the titles of such artworks as well as their online descriptions.
The historic museum has combed through nearly 30,000 descriptions of artworks in its online catalogue and inscriptions that accompany almost 2,000 paintings that are on display.
A museum official told The Times: “We have a duty to be exemplary as a key institution. We have decided to revisit, with a sharper criterion, signs that we did not see anything odd about when they were written, but that now we find are out of step with the times”.
For one Velazquez painting, which was painted sometime around 1638, the word “dwarfism” has now been changed to “achondroplasia”, the scientific term for the most common form of dwarfism or disproportionate short stature. In another painting, the word “dwarf ” in the title has been replaced with “buffoon”.
Dwarfs were viewed with morbid fascination in Spain at the time. One academic paper concluded: “The mentally disabled were taken from asylums to entertain the king and dwarfs were considered curiosities of God’s creation.”