Classical statues were not painted horribly
worksinprogress.co631 points by bensouthwood 4 months ago
631 points by bensouthwood 4 months ago
I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer stuck to the statues, and the rest was washed away.
This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.
Painters layer paint, starting with a saturated base color. These archaeologists are simply looking at the paint that was left in the crevices.
Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to the public
Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed.
The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle.
I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.
Yes, the suggestion that they're trolling goes too far.
However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...
But they still don't add anything without direct evidence - where there's evidence in later statues for more subtle colouring, they include that.
I’m reminded of a Reddit thread long ago about a reconstruction of Roman garum by some American scientists. In their paper they conclusively declared that it tasted foul and a Filipino Redditor replied saying “This actually sounds a lot like the fish sauce we use in SE Asia. I wonder if people from a different culinary tradition would find it less off putting or even tasty?” Cue a bunch of Redditors downvoting the poor sap to hell for daring to disagree with the scientists’ assessment of the flavor.
There might even be a directish connection, one way or the other, between garum and SE Asian fish sauce, since Roman coins have been found in Vietnam.
Can't find the better source on that specifically now but this is a nice article about the Roman trade with India and mentions the coins found in Vietnam and even Korea about half way down
https://www.thecollector.com/why-was-the-roman-indian-ocean-...
On the other hand, it's not implausible that maritime societies come up with their own fish sauce independently
I read that what's now 'soy sauce' also started off as a kind of fish sauce originally.
Worcestershire sauce is also considered a descendent of the fish sauces from ancient Rome.
That's funny, I thought Worcestershire sauce was based on some Asian fish sauce because it has the colonial ingredients like tamarind etc. I had a look on wiki and seems it's not known where the recipe comes from but it dates from the 19th century
It is possible for Brinkmann to be guilty of showboating, while other researchers are simply being fastidiously proper in what they communicate.
The problem is that there is no "missing data" color, so that discipline would default to marble white, which is just as made up as the rest.
I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.
If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.
>The problem is that there is no "missing data" color
they should use "green screen green" and give you viewing glasses that fill in the colors to your own historical preference (e.g. rose colored? blood-soaked?). then if you point a finger with your "anhistorical" complaints, there will be 3 fingers pointing back at you!
Architectural restoration often solves this by using an inoffense, but still visibly detectable, "new material color". Some British castles have been rebuilt this way.
They're making it up no matter what they do, since we don't know how these things were originally painted and have no way of knowing. They should just present the reconstructions as interpretations and actually try to do a good job painting them. I agree with the article that what they're doing now is harmful to the public understanding.
I mean, we kind of do though? We could assume that the surviving images of statues showing how they were painted are accurate. If you know the colour of the underlayer, this actually lets you determine exactly what the colouration of the paint on top of that is despite it not being present whatsoever
This gives you a general trend of how brightly underlayed statues tended to be painted afterwards to finish them, and lets you infer how other statues without surviving coloured pictures of them would have appeared based on the likely prevailing style at the time
That is how scholarship works. It’s like a math proof: they’re interested in proving the base case. If someone else wants to do more speculative work to theorize what a well-painted version would look like, that would be super cool, but it wouldn’t be scholarship.
And that's a fine standard to maintain when you're writing an academic paper.
When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression.
It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.
Imagine if we refused to publish any material or exhibit recreations of dinosaurs because the only evidence we have are fossilized skeletons and a few skin texture impressions.
You've highlighted a very cogent comparison!
Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex.
We might be at that point with repainted statues. Museum visitors are now starting to expect the ugly garish colours.
I've not seen the latest Jurassic Park movie, but I've seen a clip with velociraptor's with feathers, and maybe quetzlcoatalus too? Along with colourful skin on eg compsagnathus.
They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
This guy had feathers and they made him the right size https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Oviraptor