The historic pigments in the Forbes Collection include the esoteric, the expensive, and the toxic. This high-speed rail project is a warning for the US.
The challenge is for us to try and understand the ancient Greeks and Romansnot to tell them they got it wrong., Lately, this obscure academic debate about ancient sculpture has taken on an unexpected moral and political urgency. Bond told me that shed been moved to write her essays when a racist group, Identity Evropa, started putting up posters on college campuses, including Iowas, that presented classical white marble statues as emblems of white nationalism. A mysterious creature works hard to make new friends and get a decent forest selfie in Sara Litzenbergers lively animation. Because its not Western, its perfectly O.K. Abbe and Van Voorhis will have to engage in some speculation, particularly when it comes to hair color and skin tone. The result of this effort was a touring exhibition called Gods in Color. Versions of the show, which was launched in 2003, have been seen by three million museumgoers in twenty-eight cities, including Istanbul and Athens. Californias "train to nowhere" shows the challenges ahead. To revisit this article, select My Account, thenView saved stories, To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. A Trojan archer, from approximately 500 B.C., wears tight pants with a harlequin pattern that is as boldly colored as Missoni leggings. In August, 2014, two thousand years after Augustuss death, color was projected onto a set of friezes at the Ara Pacis museum, in Rome. I try to convince everyone that they need to buy these for when they go to museums, he said. It turns out that vision is heavily subjective, he told me.
Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. These near-life-size portraits, which were painted on funerary objects, present their subjects with an array of skin tones, from olive green to deep brown, testifying to a complex intermingling of Greek, Roman, and local Egyptian populations. For classical scholars, it is a given that the Roman Empirewhich, at its height, stretched from North Africa to Scotlandwas ethnically diverse. Mahogany-colored paint is still visible on the boys face. In the nineteenth century, a series of major excavations should have toppled the monochrome myth. Treat it like triage.
A color reconstruction of the Phrasikleia Kore, completed in 2010. One day in July, Gina Borromeo, the curator of ancient art at the risd Museum, walked me through the Greek and Roman galleries, and pointed out a label that shed written in 2009: The surviving traces of reddish pigment, still visible in the hair of this figure, reflect the fact that most ancient statues were originally quite vividly painted. But Borromeo believes that nothing can match the power of displaying a polychrome work that has retained its original hues. For many people, the colors are jarring because their tones seem too gaudy or opaque. Take the thing, wrap it up in something like neutral cotton gauze, and put it on a shelf in a stable place. Christina Alderman, who runs the program, told me, The moment they found out that the statues were originally painted, I just lost them to that idea. He would use an array of fantastical tools, including an eye surgeons scalpel, a tungsten needle with a tip six microns wide, and a brush with a single bristle, made from the hair of a deer. 
When Abbe arrived there, several decades later, he started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. Ancient buildings and sculptures were actually really colorful. Will they help you get a better nights sleep? The first thing you want to do is make it legible. This impulse, he said, must be checked: You should treat a discovery like a medical situation. When the Eskenazi Museum reopens, in a year or two, it will host a special exhibition featuring the busts of Severus and Julia. Abbe told me, From basically 1960 to 2000, people were just, like, Yeah, the colors there, but you cant do anything with ittheres not enough there, its too fragmentary. But in recent years its become easier to detect many colors, using noninvasive technologies such as X-ray fluorescence analysis (which can identify the elements in pigments). The visual appearance of these things was just totally different from what Id seen in the standard textbookswhich had only black-and-white plates, in any case. For Abbe, who is now a professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, the idea that the ancients disdained bright color is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art. It is, he said, a lie we all hold dear., In the early nineteen-eighties, Vinzenz Brinkmann had a similar epiphany while pursuing a masters degree in classics and archeology from Ludwig Maximilian University, in Munich. Vinzenz Brinkmann, who now heads the antiquities department of the Liebieghaus sculpture collection, in Frankfurt, told me that viewing classical sculptures in color does far more than expand your notion of what such objects originally looked like; it helps you understand that everything that seems to be so clearly and firmly set is not always so clearly and firmly set. In other words, he said, seeing these colors affects peoples understanding of themselves. Julia came from a priestly family in Emesa, Syria. Abbe noted that a set of Roman historical friezes recently found in Nicomedia, Turkey, are awash in purple.. In Germany, Goethe declared that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors. He also noted that people of refinement avoid vivid colors in their dress and the objects that are about them.. So, you know, youve had a little bit to drink, and youre negotiating this, Van Voorhis joined in the reverie: Youre calling over your slave boy, but it happens to be a statue. As part of an effort to determine what kinds of tool marks could be found on Greek marble sculpture, he devised a special lamp that shines obliquely on an object, highlighting its surface relief. Armed with these technologies, curators and conservators are starting to rexcavate in our own museums, as one scholar put it to metaking objects that were presumed to be colorless and looking at them anew. Delivered Fridays. A color reconstruction of a marble statue, based on surviving traces of pigment. You need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful imprinta tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish.
500 B.C. In the eighteen-eighties, Russell Sturgis, an American art critic, visited the Acropolis, in Athens, and described what happened after objects were unearthed: The color of all these soon began to fall and vanish. You go to a dinner party in Pompeii, and there are statues of nude homoerotic youths, in the old, noble Greek tradition.
Traces of blue and purple pigment can be seen on the wings. They can be revised as new information becomes available, and they can also show multiple possibilities of how an object might have looked. In the eighteenth century, Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar who is often called the father of art history, contended that the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is, and that color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. When the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were first excavated, in the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann saw some of their artifacts in Naples, and noticed color on them. (He advises people who actually do wear the device in galleries to put their hands behind their backs while peering closely at objects, so that guards dont freak out.). By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The easiest, and cheapest, way for museums to address the fact of polychromy is to say more about it in their labelling. Verri, like Abbe and others in the field, believes that digital reproductionscomputer animations and the likecan offer advantages that physical ones do not. He said, It started as an obsession for me that has never ended.. Verri performed what he called a digital face transplant. He identified pigments that had originally covered the sculpture: Egyptian blue mixed into pinkish skin tones and the whites of the eyes; yellow and red ochre in the hair; rose-colored madder lake for the lips. Abbe said, We have this wonderful anecdote from Praxiteles, the Greek sculptor from the fourth century B.C. In 2007, Giovanni Verri, who now teaches conservation at the Courtauld Institute, in London, figured out how to confirm the presence of an ancient pigment known as Egyptian blue. Its spectacularly successful as a means of communication., But Abbe, like many scholars I talked to, wasnt crazy about the reconstructions in Gods in Color. He found the hues too flat and opaque, and noted that plaster, which most of the replicas are made from, absorbs paint in a way that marble does not. In a 1920 essay titled Purism, the architect Le Corbusier wrote, Let us leave to the clothes-dyers the sensory jubilation of the paint tube. In Italy and Germany, Fascist artists created white marble statuary of idealized bodies. 2022 Cond Nast. And if youre interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.
Later, in another e-mail, Abbe pointed out that much of the Roman lite came from diverse-looking stockBerber, Arab, Transylvanian, Danubian, Spanish, etc. He also noted that sculptures of African people from the ancient world were sometimes carved from black stones, such as basalt, and then painted with reddish-brown pigments to create a lifelike effect.
When you think of the ancient world, you probably picture towering buildings of white marble adorned with statues, also made of white marble. Oh, my God! Its true that Homer describes the hair of Achilles as xanthos, a word often used to characterize objects that we would call yellow, but Achilles is fictional, so imaginative license in casting seems perfectly acceptable. Its partly an honest mistake. They were, like, Wait, are you serious? The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Abbe wrote to me, in an e-mail.
Will you support Voxs explanatory journalism? We have experienced two thousand years of history, and art history, that would be extremely difficult to forget.. Remember how they would hose statues down in the courtyard? Van Voorhis asked Abbe, recalling an excavation in Turkey that theyd both worked on.
(A set of friezes at the Ara Pacis museum, in Rome, have been presented this way, to pleasing effect.)
In the North, you have plenty of thick blood. And then theyre washing that over with a paint pigment that seems to have a number of elementsit seems to have Egyptian blue in it, and it seems to have a mercury-rich red pigment, probably cinnabar.
The Greeks and Romans painted their statues to resemble real bodies, and often gilded them so they shone like gods. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public. One false notion, she said, had reinforced the other. stergaard and Brinkmann believe that Winckelmanns thinking was evolving, and that he might eventually have embraced polychromy, had he not died in 1768, at the age of fifty, after being stabbed by a fellow-traveller at an inn in Trieste. How to Buy a New Mattress Without a Ph.D. in Chemistry. Ad Choices. The Augustus of Prima Porta and the Alexander Sarcophagus retained bold hues when they were discovered, as contemporaneous paintings of them confirm. And Im not saying theres no truth to the idea that something singular happened in Greece and Rome, but we can do better and see the ancient past on a broader cultural horizon.. Modernism lauded the abstraction of white forms and derided earthy verisimilitude in sculpture. He had examined their surfaces with a powerful microscope and with infrared and UV light, and had discovered rich purples, blues, and pinks.
By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. The casting decision elicited a backlash in right-wing publications. Significant Greek and Roman finds are still being made. She had horizontal creases encircling her neckVenus rings, I learned they were calledand a delightful unibrow, both of which connoted desirability.
But he found a way around that discomfiting observation, claiming that a statue of Artemis with red hair, red sandals, and a red quiver strap must have been not Greek but Etruscanthe product of an earlier civilization that was considered less sophisticated. But a man with pale skin was considered unmasculine: bronzed skin was associated with the heroes who fought on battlefields and competed as athletes, naked, in amphitheatres. Julie Van Voorhis, an art-history professor at Indiana who is researching the busts, had joined Abbe and me, along with Juliet Graver Istrabadi, the ancient-art curator from the Eskenazi Museum.
In 2016, she successfully lobbied to acquire an Etruscan urn that still has much of its original color. Youre not alone most people picture the same thing. We can still look at these things and admire them as monochromatic, neoclassical works. Nevertheless, as much as I thought that it was important to acknowledge polychromy, I still sometimes preferred the ghostly elegance of white marble. But, as stergaard put it to me, nobody has a problem hailing Nefertiti as a spectacular piece of world art, and nobody says that its unfortunate that its painted. The reality-television, big-reveal style of the Gods in Color exhibition is certainly effective at upending our preconceptions. Like youd hose down your wheelbarrow, Abbe said.
Classic neoclassical assumption!. In the eighteen-fifties, when the British artist John Gibson, a proponent of polychromy, showed his delicate Tinted Venusthe goddesss body is mostly white, but she has muted golden hair and cornflower-blue eyesa titillated reviewer described the figure as a naked, impudent Englishwoman., As the artist and critic David Batchelor writes in his 2000 book, Chromophobia, at a certain point ignorance becomes willful deniala kind of negative hallucination in which we refuse to see what is before our eyes.
The sculptures, made from a creamy white marble, appeared to have negligible speckles and stains. Then call us, and we will come and do the micro-excavation of the surface. This process needs to happen relatively quickly, because, after extraction, the soil clinging to an object dries, and the paint layers literally delaminate with it, leaving a denuded object and a painting in reverse adhering to scattered flakes of soil. And then there are actual slave boys that look just like those well-tanned bronzes, and at first theyre standing still. Online commenters insisted that the real Achilles was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and that someone with skin as dark as the actors surely would have been a slave. Buried objects retained more color, but often pigments were hidden beneath accretions of dirt and calcite, and were brushed away in cleanings. But white marble couldnt have become the norm without some willful ignorance. Some white supremacists have been drawn to classical studies out of a desire to affirm what they imagine to be an unblemished lineage of white Western culture extending back to ancient Greece. Photograph by Alberto Pizzoli/ AFP/ Getty Images.
When hes asked which of his sculptures he liked the best, he names those that the premier painter of the day, Nicias, applied his hand to. He noted that, in the ancient Roman Empire, statues would not have been sequestered in art galleriesthey would have been on the streets and in peoples homes.
When he began scrutinizing sculptures with the lamp, he told me, he quite immediately understood that, while there was little sign of tool marks on the statues, there was significant evidence of polychromyall-over color. As a result, the artists unearthing, studying, and copying ancient art didnt realize how colorful it was supposed to be. But lets not have it in our part of the world, because were different, arent we?. Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker. Thats a good example of how theyre layering..
The cult of unpainted sculpture continued to permeate Europe, buttressing the equation of whiteness with beauty. Smith, who arrived at the storage facility later that afternoon, told me that he had skipped coffee that dayhe needed to have the steadiest of hands. After the publication of her essays, she received a stream of hate messages online. Abbe and Van Voorhis lamented that, even now, such objects are sometimes mercilessly cleaned.
The busts belong to Indiana Universitys Eskenazi Museum, which is closed for renovation, and Abbe was examining them in a storage facility. Mark Abbe, who has become the leading American scholar of ancient Greek and Roman polychromy, believes that, when such a delusion persists, you have to ask yourself, Cui bono?Who benefits? He told me, If we werent benefitting, we wouldnt be so invested in it. When you went into a place, the divide between what was sculpture and what was actual life was fluid, and highly theatrical.
Cecilie Brns, who currently heads a project at the Glyptotek called Tracking Colour, which is investigating all the museums ancient pieces for traces of color, admires the Brinkmanns reconstructions but said she worries that museumgoers accept them too literally.
In a catalogue essay for an 1892 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the classical scholar Alfred Emerson said of polychromy that literary testimony and the evidence of archeology are too strong and uniform to admit of quibble or doubt. Nevertheless, Emerson continued, so strong was the deference for the Antique, learned from the Italian masters of the Renaissance, that the accidental destruction of the ancient coloring had been exalted into a special merit, and ridiculously associated with the ideal qualities of the highest artfrom lofty serenity to unsullied purity., This ardor for whiteness was so intense that the evidence didnt stand a chance.
Ive played video games set in ancient times, and all I see are white sculptures. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today. So how should we represent the colors of the classical world in museums? As I walked around the busts, he told me, You can get much closer.
The first time I saw a statue that had been painted to approximate ancient polychromy, I was in Nashville, of all places. He was also bothered by the fact that the statues all look fundamentally the same, whereas styles would have differed enormously., The Brinkmanns have made several replicas in synthetic and real marblean expensive undertakingand these do reflect light somewhat better than the plaster models. This made it clear that she was wearing the wig for fashion, not to cover up baldness. Theres a real aesthetic, especially in the Roman period, for the visual trick, he said. And the people they called Ethiopians were thought of as very smart but cowardly. In an essay for the online magazine Aeon, Tim Whitmarsh, a professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge, writes that the Greeks would have been staggered by the suggestion that they were white. Not only do our modern notions of race clash with the thinking of the ancient past; so do our terms for colors, as is clear to anyone who has tried to conceive what a wine-dark sea actually looked like. You look at it up close, and you realize the whole thing is covered in bits of gold leaf. In the Odyssey, Whitmarsh points out, the goddess Athena is said to have restored Odysseus to godlike good looks in this way: He became black-skinned again and the hairs became blue around his chin. On the Web site Pharos, which was founded, last year, in part to counter white-supremacist interpretations of the ancient world, a recent essay notes, Although there is a persistent, racist preference for lighter skin over darker skin in the contemporary world, the ancient Greeks considered darker skin for men to be more beautiful and a sign of physical and moral superiority., Last year, high-school students participating in a summer program at the risd Museum, in Providence, were so fascinated to learn about polychromy in classical statuary that they made a coloring book allowing gallery visitors to create brightly hued versions of the objects on display. By the time the Renaissance began in the 1300s, their paint had faded away. The replicas often deliver a shock. Abbe, who is forty-five, tall, and slim, was wearing a dapper dark suit and a narrow floral tie. Some of the painted replicas that I saw subsequently seemed more subtle and persuasive.
Throughout the exhibition, the colored replicas are juxtaposed with white plaster casts of marble piecesfakes that look like what we think of as the real thing. They owned slaves, but this population was drawn from a wide range of conquered peoples, including Gauls and Germans. I wondered if Abbe ever regretted having to see such sculptures, in his minds eye, saturated in the bright colors that many people find kitschy. And the white part seems to be painted with lead white, one of the most opaque whites. Skeptics of polychromy question why Greek and Roman artists would have sculpted with such beautiful materialsParian marble, which was commonly used, has a prized translucenceand then painted over the surface, or bedazzled it with gilt and jewels.
Severus was of Berber origin, from an lite family in Libya. A color reconstruction of the sculpture, from the Gods in Color exhibition.
(Classical bronze figures were often blinged out with gemstones for the eyes and with contrasting metals that highlighted anatomical details or dripping wounds.) Brinkmann soon realized that his discovery hardly required a special lamp: if you were looking at an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture up close, some of the pigment was easy to see, even with the naked eye. Westerners had been engaged in an act of collective blindness. It comes out of the medical tradition. We have so much knowledge that those painters would not have had, he said. And then they move, the same way the sculptures seem to move in the reflections of pools and fountains. Acceptance of this view was made easier by the fact that ancient Egyptian sculptures looked very different: they tended to retain brilliant surface color, because the dry climate and the sand in which they were interred did not result in the same kind of erosion. for it to be polychrome. When I shared this feeling with Abbe, he said, We can have our cake and eat it, too. Earlier this year, the BBC and Netflix broadcast Troy: Fall of a City, a miniseries in which the Homeric hero Achilles is played by a British actor of Ghanaian descent. Starting in the Renaissance, artists made sculpture and architecture that exalted form over color, in homage to what they thought Greek and Roman art had looked like. The Tondo will help guide Abbe and Van Voorhis in their work on the busts, just as the Fayum portraits aided Verri. Another idea is to present a video animation in which the color gradually appears on the two Roman busts, suggesting how successive layers of paint might have been applied. Millions turn to Vox to understand whats happening in the news. Now scholars are making a color correction. Ancient sculptures of African people were often made of basalt and painted with reddish-brown layers to create a lifelike effect. newsletter. Auguste Rodin is supposed to have pounded his chest and said, I feel it here that they were never colored. Sculpture and painting had become increasingly independent disciplines, and artists who tried to merge the two were met with scorn. The result is refined and naturalistic. He has a springy energy that reminded me of an actor playing a brainy young inventor. He pointed out a Greek vase, from the third century B.C., that depicts an artist painting a statue.
Understand how policy impacts people. Being a pedestrian in the US was already dangerous.
He told me that, when he first examines a sculpture for signs of polychromy, he looks at it for hours, aided by a device that involves a magnifying glass and an L.E.D. In 1961, archeologists began systematically excavating the city, storing thousands of sculptural fragments in depots.
Today, art history is more concerned with accuracy than it is with what might look better, so teams of researchers use a combination of art and science to painstakingly create reconstructions of ancient statues, showing us the true colors of classical antiquity. Imagine youve got an intact lower body of a nude male statue lying there on the depot floor, covered in dust, Abbe said. Scholars argued that Greek and Roman artists had left their buildings and sculptures bare as a pointed gestureit both confirmed their superior rationality and distinguished their aesthetic from non-Western art.
In the twentieth century, appreciation for ancient polychromy and decoration went further into eclipselargely on aesthetic, rather than racial, grounds. The gods, heroes, and nymphs displayed in museums look that way, as do neoclassical monuments and statuary, from the Jefferson Memorial to the Caesar perched outside his palace in Las Vegas. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. When they are told that their understanding of classical history is flawed, they often get testy. Ancient sculptures were often painted with vibrant hair colors and skin tones. Whereas, in the South, youre being desiccated by the sun, and you have to think about how to conserve your blood. Pale skin on a woman was considered a sign of beauty and refinement, because it showed that she was privileged enough not to have to work outdoors. In this reconstruction, Paris wears the costume of the Scythians, a tribe in Central Asia. Senate Republicans burned a bill that would have helped veterans heres why, Manafort book alleges Michael Cohen spied on Trump campaign, Arizonas 2022 GOP primary is all about 2020, The smallpox vaccine stockpile isnt the monkeypox solution we need yet, The key to universal Covid-19 vaccines lies in your bones.
Please consider making a contribution to Vox today. How the Whitney is transforming the art of museum conservation. As we examined the bust of Julia, Van Voorhis pointed out a tendril of hair peeking out from under her wig. The Phrasikleia Kore, an Archaic Greek funerary statue created in the sixth century B.C.
Mark Bradley, a classicist at the University of Nottingham, believes that in some cases restorers were merely trying to remove residue left by oil lamps that had lit galleries before the advent of electricity. Then, imagine, its the last day, and you finally find something. All this humanizing detail had been conveyed purely through form. Over the millennia, as sculptures and architecture were subjected to the elements, their paint wore off. He gave me one to put on; it looked like a dorky version of a miners lamp. The beautiful statue first described lay on a table in the museum on the Acropolis in May, 1883, and already some of its color had been shaken off; for as it lay it was surrounded by a little deposit of green, red and black powder which had fallen from it. Paint that survived was sometimes concealed in recesses: between strands of hair, or inside navels, nostrils, and mouths.
Leona said, of polychromy, Its like the best-kept secret thats not even a secret. Jan Stubbe stergaard, a former curator at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum, in Copenhagen, and the founder of an international research network on polychromy, told me, Saying youve seen these sculptures when youve seen only the white marble is comparable to somebody coming from the beach and saying theyve seen a whale because there was a skeleton on the beach..
What you want to do is stabilize the patient.
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