Hephaestus make love to Athena: at the moment of climax she pushes him aside, and his semen falls to the earth where it impregnates Gaia." Hephaestus was associated by Greek colonists in southern Italy with the volcano gods Adranus (of Mount Etna) and Vulcanus of the Lipari islands. The first-century sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have observed, "there are many other mountains all over the earth that are on fire, and yet we should never be done with it if we assigned to them giants and gods like Hephaestus". In the Trojan war, Hephaestus sided with the Greeks, but
The Artist as Hephaestus 1987: an high bronze figure entitled "Selfportrait with a Strange Machine" (bought by the National Portrait Gallery in 1987, with a second version on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art from 1989 to 2010), and a bronze figure entitled "Portrait of the Artist as Vulcan" (sold at Christie's in London in 2006). Paolozzi donated a full-sized plaster and polystyrene version of "The Artist as Hephaestus" to the National Portrait Gallery in 1990. The Artist as Hephaestus The Artist as Hephaestus is a bronze statue by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, created in 1987. It depicts a standing human figure,