Hammers, and their close relatives mallets, are among the oldest and most basic of tools, with a key role in the fabrication of most other tools. Although seldom the focus of much attention, hammers, mallets and their kin are often significant features in visual art. In this article I concentrate on their role in mythological and religious narratives, and the next shows their depiction in various kinds of work.
Some of the earliest painted images of hammers are those found in Etruscan tombs, showing their deities, including the god Charun.
Charun and Vanth have been identified as the Etruscan deities associated with death. They’re often seen as a couple accompanying those who have just died, or are about to die. They certainly had their work cut out as Achilles carved his way through the necks of these Trojan captives, pictured on the wall of the François Tomb from about 340 BCE.
This version of Charun seems fairly typical, but not stereotypical, in that he doesn’t have snakes with him. His distinctive hammer or mallet is used to open the bolts on doors, particularly that to the underworld.
This painted krater was also found in the François Tomb, and shows Charun alone, without his partner Vanth.
The Farewell of Admetus and Alcestis (c 325 BCE) is an Etruscan vase painting of the Greek myth of Admetos, the King of Pherae, and his wife Alcestis, described in several sources including Euripides’ play Alcestis. When Admetos’ fated day of death came, Apollo intervened to help him, according to Aeschylus by making the Fates drunk, so they agreed to reprieve him from death if he could find a substitute. His wife Alcestis substituted for him. In this painting, she is shown making her farewells to her husband, as two versions of Charun await their victim. That on the left wields his trademark hammer, while that on the right holds his characteristic snakes, and seems to have borrowed Vanth’s wings.
In classical Greek mythology, it’s the god Hephaistos who wields the hammer in his role as blacksmith and artificer of the gods, translated by the Romans to Vulcan.
Homer’s story of the adulterous affair of the wife of Hephaistos, Aphrodite (Venus), with Ares (Mars) is retold by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the likely source for Diego Velázquez’s The Forge of Vulcan from 1630. This shows Apollo, at the left, visiting Hephaistos (to the right of Apollo) in his forge, to tell him about this infidelity.
A mallet became a murder weapon in this gruesome story from the Old Testament.
At about the same time that she was painting her second version of Judith Slaying Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi painted this chilling Jael and Sisera (c 1620), based on the account in chapters 4 and 5 of the Book of Judges. In that, Jael, an Israelite woman, wields a mallet to drive a tent peg through the temples of Sisera, the general of the army of Jabin and the enemy of the Israelites.
Hammers also have a grim role in Christian narratives, notably that of the Crucifixion.
Following his earlier paintings of the Deposition (or Descent from the Cross), Lovis Corinth came even closer to harsh reality in The Great Martyrdom (1907). Here taking the example of an ordinary man being crucified, he secularised the image and placed it in a vivid historical context. This makes clear the vicious inhumanity of crucifixion, as a nail is hammered through a foot.
The painting that marked a turning point in Jacopo Tintoretto’s career is his Miracle of the Slave from 1548. Based on the notoriously unreliable Golden Legend, a slave is about to be martyred by torture in having his limbs and body broken, for the offence of venerating the relics of a Christian saint. The naked slave lies on the ground, surrounded by the shattered fragments of an axe, other tools, and lengths of rope that were being used to kill him slowly. One of his torturers, wearing a distinctive turban, is caught just to the right of centre, in the midst of hammering something to inflict more pain and suffering (detail below).
A large hammer is the attribute of the Norse god Thor.
Mårten Eskil Winge’s painting of Thor’s Fight with the Giants (1872) shows the god engaged in battle, wielding his hammer.
Finally, hammers feature in William Blake’s personal mythology.
This is the final plate of Blake’s last completed illuminated book, Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion (1804-20), in its sole fully-painted form. The figure in the centre, holding his blacksmith’s hammer and tongs, is that of Los, who has paused from his labour of building Jerusalem. Behind him is the Druidic form of a temple (reminiscent of Stonehenge) representing the rise of false religion, already starting to snake out over the country.
On the left, the sun is carried around not by Urizen in his chariot, but by a youth, perhaps the Spectre of Urthona. On the right, Enitharmon is in the shadows of the night and surrounded by stars, as she winds the thread of life from a distaff. Those threads fall past the crescent moon onto the earth. This shows that the task of building Jerusalem is never complete, and takes the book’s conclusion onward to the eternal continuation of Blake’s mythological processes.