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.
The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.
The archaeologists know that and say as much in TFA:
"The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?
This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’."
Contemporary historic preservation sees itself as the guardian of historical substance. The content of a monument is bound to the preservation of the inherited material.
Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated.
It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair.
Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/.
Yeah, I've likewise always figured the reason these reconstructions ended up looking so awful is because paint is generally applied in layers (even to this day), so what they're likely reconstructing is the primer layer.
Like we know from Roman frescoes[1] and mosaics[2] that they were pretty skilled painters and solving the problem of how to paint something to have more hues than a King's Quest 3 sprite is unlikely to be an unsolvable aesthetic problem.
[edit] Changed from Secret of Monkey Island since that game has too many versions and remakes.
"many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject."
Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades.
I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand.
Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
> I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though.
So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project.
But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest.
So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction.
You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this.
You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon.
I'm sure you're right that reconstructions of painted statues are inaccurate. But I'm not sure that a good-looking reconstruction would be any more authentic. Cultural tastes vary a lot. I suspect that if we ever do get enough data for a valid reconstruction, I won't like it any better.
I'm not sure whether they look "bad" is enough justification. The author dismisses the possible explanation "maybe they didn't consider this bad style back then" without any real argument other than "there are other works of art with different styles".
I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence?
Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing.
> You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing
I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
> Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
I assume you didn't read the article, since that's their exact point...
"Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence."
looking at it from the absolute simplest of perspectives, money/time/effort, then the notion of a base, or primer layer that seals a surface and provides a non absorbant layer for the much more expensive coulor coat.
primer bieng applied by aprentices and the finnish coat applied by specialists who would be very likely be useing ALL of the tricks of the trade to bring a statue to life, but then wejump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary, with everything from vegas type full primary coulors put on with a mop, and others that were master paintings done on 3d canvases, and still others who believd in.the purity of the "raw" sculpture
> then we jump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary
Most Greek and Roman statues had lost their paint long before the Renaissance. Early modern artists held up those paintless statues as the ideal form, which is why nobody from Michaelangelo to Bernini even tried to paint their sculptures. Instead, Bernini learned how to make marble itself interact with light to look alive. For centuries afterward, the purity of raw marble became the one true ideology. Diversity in this area collapsed, and took a long time to recover.
Even today, most people who are used to Western classical art will probably agree that marble statues look better without paint. We've been conditioned for generations to believe so. The ugly reproductions of painted statues aren't helping, either.
This would be a great time to use AI, because it is very good at style transfer. Feed it a lot of contemporary painted art, feed it the base-coat version of the sculpture, and ask it to style-transfer the paintings on to the sculpture. You'd likely get something very close, and for once we can use "The computer said it, I'm not responsible for it!" for the power of good, by making it so no human is responsible for the heinous crime of assuming something without historical evidence (no matter how sensible the assumption is).
(And lest someone be inclined to downvote because I'm suggesting an AI, the real sarcastic core of my message is about our faith in computers still being alive and well even after we all have decades of personal experience of them not being omniscient infalliable machines.)
I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by more credible modern attempts). There's a tendency the further north you go to think of the classical world as completely lost, discontinuous, and opaque to us, too, which adds to it.
> I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy.
A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]
Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.
Fish sauce is also really popular in southeast Asia and Worcestershire sauce is often made with fermented fish so can also be considered garum adjacent.
There's even a case that Ketchup is a distant relative, as it started out as South East Asian oyster sauce, was imported to Europe, turned into fermented mushroom sauce, was exported to the colonies, and finally turned into tomato sauce (though originally sometimes with fish in it).
Yes! Search for "mushroom ketchup", and you'll find various examples for sale. Whatever kinds I've had are nice on bread, and really nice with eggs, but I wouldn't want to eat with chips / fries.
You can still sometimes find mushroom ketchup in UK supermarkets. It tastes a bit like Worcester sauce (spicy and 'brown' tasting), but milder as it has no anchovies in it.
There's speculation that Asian fish sauce came from Greece through the same cultural diffusion processes that brought Greco-Buddhist sculpture as far as Japan.
Good read! The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best.
> Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly?
> ...may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
That seems plausible -- and somewhat reasonable! To the credit of academics, they seems aware of this (according to the article):
> ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
> The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best.
Those are a few examples of weird art from hundreds of years of examples, but even then, those aren't super unskilled paintings. Medieval artists still used shading.
I still don't understand is why they don't even make an attempt to apply overlayers, when (as the author notes) there is ample secondary evidence that it would be present. It's not like there isn't already some element of inference and "filling in the blanks" when reconstructing how something was painted from the scant traces of paint that survived.
This is somewhat an unfounded theory of mine and I was hoping if anyone has any insight: but I sense that this is perhaps a construction of Western restoration/preservationist theory. A lot of effort seems to be taken to either preserve original material, not take liberties etc. While touring temples and museums in Japan, I got a sense that restorations were much more aggressive, and less regard was taken to the preservation of material (or building "fabric"), with a greater focus on the use of traditional techniques during restoration.
All the garish colours were prob heavily muted or diluted with varnish/oil. You don’t pant an artwork like a house, it is a layered technique and fairly similar to historic painting techniques used today:
You know what's crazy too is that in colonial America all the brick buildings you see in Boston, etc were also all painted? Well, limewashed technically. You never would have left a bare brick facade. You would put 10-20 coats of thin whitewash on it, or if you wanted it to look like raw brick you would tint the limewash red, and then go in and touch up the mortar lines trompe l'oeil style with white.
Bare brick as an aesthetic choice did not emerge until the late 19th century.
Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?
Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
This reminds me of efforts to reproduce Ancient Greek music. [1] It's very similar in that there's a lot of hints, but still enough missing parts that there seem to be two schools of thought, that can even present within the same project. That linked audio is unpleasant, but perhaps they just liked it? Yet, this solo [2], comes from the exact same project - and is amazing.
I do not think tastes can change to such a degree that that first link would ever be pleasant to listen to, though that itself could be intentional for theatrical, theological, or other such purposes. Music seems innate to humanity - children generally start 'dancing' of sorts to music, 100% on their own, before their first birthday, long before they can speak or usually even walk!
The thing is that even if we do not personally like some form of music, I think we can still appreciate it. The Chinese guqin [3] is my favorite example - it goes back at least 3000 years, is played in a fashion completely outside the character of modern music - to say nothing of Western musical tradition as a whole, and yet nonetheless sounds amazing and relaxing even to a completely foreign ear.
Culture and tastes may change, but I think our ability to appreciate (or be repelled) by things is fairly consistent.
His final conclusion is terrible and spoils an otherwise excellent article. Unless he has really strong evidence of it, the specialists are very unlikely to be "trolling" the public. They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.
"trolling" in this instance seems to be a nicer way of saying "misleading to create attention". It's hard to deny that "look at how garish these beautiful statures originally looked" created a lot more attention than a theoretical "Roman statues looked pretty nice, but with paint"
It's an unsubstantiated theory, but the author does go out of their way to say that this might not even be objectionable, if it happened at all
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.
Yesterday’s kids are today’s scientists. You what the most popular archeological student prank is? - It’s for a team to bury a modern piece of pottery in another team’s site. So I am not at all surprised if they wanted to play a few practical jokes on the public’s ignorance.
Trolling here means that they followed the tradition of restoring the items - use just the materials they found on the statues. Well the materials found were the base layers - so that’s what you restore. You don’t go adding shading or fades or iridescent paint because it looks cute. They create art that looks like an 8 year old painted it, then laugh at the public “ooh-ing and ah-ing” over the “beautiful” restorations.
The statues were obviously carved by expert artists but these "specialists" would have us believe they were subsequently painted by half-assed amateurs. It fails the sniff test so badly, that trolling is a reasonable conclusion. You don't put that much effort into making something only then let some unskilled intern ruin it by covering up all your work with a flat coat of primer and leave it at that.
Unlike the article, your comment, does not provide evidence beyond "sniff test". The article brings up paintings of statues, which is an interesting data point.
Meh. Maybe. Or maybe "click bait" is a better guess than "trolling". Or even maybe he's right, despite writing something "terrible."
1. The professional qualifications of the people doing the actual work should be taken seriously. But the professionals have no control over the people who dictated how the work should be done, or the people who thought out the marketing. I hope this point is clear to engineers.
2. Even if the "trolling" sentiment is both incorrect and "terrible" ... ok. Noted. That doesn't destroy the value of the whole article.
Screed:
Many of us have reached the point where they throw away the baby if we find the slightest imperfection in the bath water. This now includes medicine, values, science, and (at least in the US) our freedom and our functioning society.
We need to grow up. Another example that many modern folks cannot handle is errors in the scientific literature. The scientific literature is incredibly valuable, despite also containing a lot of errors. That's life. We need to grow up and deal.
Even worse so: Why does he not simply ask these people? What is it with this trend of sneering at expert decisions without even doing the bare minimum of engaging with them?
In the case of the humanities, art, or architecture in academia if you disagree with the orthodoxy you might end up labeled something you don’t want to be labeled as, and you don’t get very far.
In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.
Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.
And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s
Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.
Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
Eh, that's overstating the case. There's clearly some aesthetics that are more appealing to more people but for many architectural movements in particular the reason that they look that way is for the way that specific ideological reasons interacted with material constraints and the intended message. Brutalism in particular was intended to be cheap and honest; given the constraints many of these buildings were designed under, it makes sense. There are some quite appealing brutalist buildings; a core tenet of the style was integrating the buildings into the natural landscape, in contrast to the artificial styles that had previously been popular. The post-war shortages limited the available materials, shaping the constraints they were operating under. Raw concrete was honest, cheap, and was allowed to weather naturally.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best
Perhaps they're simply the wrong people for this problem? I'd very much prefer to see how artists would approach painting the figures, instead of scientists and conservators. Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best.
Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.
> Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best.
The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
Do we know for a fact in these reconstructions there is no input whatsoever from artists? I know, for example, that paleo-artists are responsible for the reconstruction of what dinosaurs are currently thought to have looked like, and they are mostly artists that work in collaboration with scientists directing their work. Why do we think this is not the case for the reconstruction of colors of Roman statues?
> The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.
How do you prevent introducing a bias that then becomes what we "know" about how statues were painted? By introducing modern aesthetic sensibilities and present them as plausible, we then reinforce that this is how statues were painted back then, and we don't know.
I think the article is mostly begging the question, and is not particularly rigorous. At most it's appealing to some sort of common sense, and we know how tempting but unreliable common sense can be in science and history.
To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
So let's introduce a bias then, who cares? It's not a mortal offense. It would be cool to see statues painted realistically and non-horribly. And as TFA notes we have frescoes, mosaics, encaustic portraits etc.. that could be used as a guideline.
You didn't see all of the thinkpieces from leftwing academics (inlcuding Mark Zuckerberg's sister) making the link between white marble and "white supremacy," and emphasizing polychromy as a means of de-whitening the represented figures? It never quite made sense to me, as even with coloration, the figures still appeared European, though the academics seemed to think the (unsurprising) uncommonness of blonde hair and blue eyes in the recreations was a "win."
It seems a shame that there is a gap between the limits of what is possible to deduce from direct evidence, and what is likely possible given human ability. And further that the public viewing the reconstructions doesn't take away the subtleties of the difference. To me it's unlikely that some of these works weren't vastly better works of art created by what were likely master artists and craftsfolk of the day.
One way to close that gap would be to offer interpretations to be painted by modern artists to show what was possible and a viewing public could view a range of the conservative evidence based looks, and maybe a celebration of what human artistic ability can offer.
It's the same problem with trying to reconstruct dinosaurs, with probably the same solution in terms of public communication -- producing a _range_ of possible reconstructions based on the available evidence.
That said -- I think we actually do have more indirect evidence than what the reconstructions used -- in fact 3 separate lines of evidence A) paintings of statues B) contemporary descriptions of statues and C) contemporary paintings in general. All of which suggest that the coloring would have been more subtle and realistic.
I think if we had contemporary paintings of dinosaurs with feathers and contemporary accounts in writing that dinosaurs had feathers, but no feathers in the fossil record, you would still be fairly justified in saying that dinosaurs probably had feathers.
Interestingly to me, generative AI is often used to get results that commit the opposite error compared with these statues: they are, essentially, too confident in their choice of details. For any random topic, the average member of the public is likely to believe the AI's results are more accurate than can be backed up by the evidence.
Generative AI exists, but it is very much dependent on the data it has been trained on. Not saying it would not be interesting, but a huge caveat is required.
One issue: the paints/pigments available in times past were not the full range we have today. Sometimes they had to make things somewhat ugly to both our and their taste because that is all they have available. They would still have done their best, but there are limits.
We are hampered even more today because blues and greens tend to be sourced from organic materials that decay quick, while reds and browns are from minerals that don't decay (but flake off). Even in the best preserved art that we have there is still likely significant differences between what we see and what they saw because of this color change.
This is absolutely not true at all. In physical painting you do not have a colour wheel were you pick colours to slap on. You can create a wash of colours and hues just with Zorn palette. We are taught to use fairly limited palette in oil painting even today, although you can in principle buy every known hue and slap it on - but that is not painting and that won’t produce anything worth the canvas it is painted on.
You don’t need to believe me. Look at Egyptian sculptures that have survived fairly well in the tombs. Or Greek and Roman paintings, some of which have survived quite well and shown in the original article. I spent 3,5h cgoing through the collections of The Archeological Museum of Napoli, and there’s plenty of them. They used muted earth tones like most skilled modern painters would.
This is true, but it wouldn't produce the sort of flat coloring in the reproductions. It would limit the color space but artists could still blend and fade those colors to create intermediate tones. This is demonstrated in some of the beautiful ancient murals which the article uses for comparison.
Another thing is they may have wanted to use newly available colors to show they had new colors. Kind of like when people learned to make aluminum it was sought as a luxury item —whereas now no one would think of aluminum as a luxury item.
Fantastic article. I am deeply convinced that despite what popular knowledge says, human taste for beauty does not change that much across time and distance.
completely correct and so glad to see an article making this point. But, I do think the sculptures look better in ahistoric white. As an artist who has worked both with polychromy in sculpture and with really simple patinas, it's immediately obvious that a complex paint job covers a multitude of sins and distracts from the form of the sculpture, whereas a simple colour, esp white on which shadows appear so easily, shows off the sculptor's skill. Also, sculptures without painted eyes can't follow you around the room, which is a huge improvement.
I've literally never heard anyone say that classical statues were painted "horribly", and unless I missed it, there's no sources in this article that say that, either (just several links to the same New Yorker article talking about whiteness).
What I've always heard is that classical statues were painted "brightly".
So, is this something that's so well known in the study of antiquities that no source was required, or has the author just got a personal bugbear here?
I believe the argument isn't that ancient statues were ugly, but rather that reconstructions are ugly (unfortunately this has been used to argue against the now ascertained fact that ancient statues were indeed painted). Purely subjective judgement from someone not trained in the arts: that photo of the Augusto di Prima Porta doesn't look like a great paint-job. The idea that, like the statue itself, the painting must instead have been a great work of art lost to time seems solid to me.
It made immediate sense to me, since the painted statues do, in fact, look gaudy and horrible. I think he was evoking a widely held feeling that is bot in common knowledge.
Tldr: reconstruction of statue painting is based on residual pigments alone, and tend to look garish because the reconstruction is just an expression of the available data and fully saturated color.
But where we see wall frescoes and the like they are painted with what we would call artistic taste and not like the garish reconstructions.
> But they fail to correct the belief that people naturally form given what is placed before them: that the proffered reconstruction of ancient sculpture is roughly what ancient sculpture actually looked like.
I'm pretty sure many museums with reconstructions of classical statues have a note on this topic somewhere on a plaque beside the statues - but who reads those?
I just learned that the site/magazine publishing this, Works in Progress, is owned by Stripe! I have no idea why, but the content is great so...thanks Stripe!
Loved the article, the author is a smart person to doubt the changing taste hypothesis, I think everything based on "we are smarter and have better taste that the ancients" have to be extremely doubted, knowing we, the west, are the same society since the romans is so humbling
Is there a changing taste hypothesis? It's honestly the first time I've heard that suggested as the explanation, versus the more plausible to me idea of reconstruction from incomplete evidence.
I mean, I kind of disagree with the assumption that bright colors immediately mean horrible; especially when we're comparing to a dirty ruin of a mosaic for the "real" color. That's probably gotten less saturated over time too.
But that aside, I do think the author has a point here. Many people don't know ancient statues were painted at all, an academic creates a reconstruction based off of the color traces that survive to show otherwise, but likely only the underlayer, then that gets dumbed down to "this is exactly how the statue looked to the Romans!" because that's counter-intuitive and therefore more likely to get attention. It's not just statues too, but in pretty much all popular media that derives from academic subjects.
Weren't they painted so they could be viewed from a distance, as many of them were not exactly eye-level. It's like stage makeup, you wouldn't want to apply the same makeup for performing in a play as you do... as normal.
I think there are a lot of different possibilities. As hinted to in the article, another is that the most evidence is left by pigments close to the raw surface isn't very well representative of the actual statue. If you're familiar with a lot of art processes - a base rough layer of paint is what is used to seal the raw surface and provide stable surface and rough background color sections for much more detailed painted features in following layers.
Most of these "researchers" just lie and make up stuff, to be honest.
It's like when they find a small 2 cm fossil bone and they use it to infer crap like "this creature bathed in hot springs every day at 4pm before eating a meal mainly composed of these leaves". LOL. But I give them points for the show they put up.
Btw, you'd be alarmed if you knew how much psychology is made up as well.
I'm no expert, but having read some archeological papers that do make conclusions like that, the evidence is often quite compelling and well-supported. The context we find something in can convey a lot of data, and conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence are frequently argued against by other archeologists. Granted, if you only read the university press releases or the popular summaries thereof it can be somewhat misleading, but that's more down to the journalism than the research.
Yeah it's so ridiculous when people use spectral lines to say they know the chemical composition of some distant star. Obvious bullshit. The idea that anybody could infer this sort of thing from such scant evidence is just academics making things up. The laypeople know better.
I don't really buy the premise of this article, and honestly I'm not sure I want to. Even if the evidence ends up showing that most statues weren't actually that brightly colored, it seems like we should still favor the garish reconstructions anyway. The vivid, borderline-ugly versions tell a better story and a more useful one, societally. They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are, and how the austere white-marble ideal was elevated by centuries of patriarchal, gatekept taste-making that declared one narrow aesthetic "timeless" and everything else vulgar.
The idea that we should walk this back because the colors might have been subtler feels like missing the point. The educational value isn't in perfect historical accuracy down to the pigment saturation curve, it's in breaking the spell of the solid-white classical canon. The garish reconstructions do that effectively; tasteful, muted ones just slide back into the same old norms. If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.
So yes, even if the evidence points the other way, I'd argue we should lean into the loud, uncomfortable versions. Sometimes a less "accurate" narrative is the more important corrective, especially when the alternative reinforces centuries of aesthetic dogma we should really be questioning.
> They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are, and how the austere white-marble ideal was elevated by centuries of patriarchal, gatekept taste-making that declared one narrow aesthetic "timeless" and everything else vulgar.
But the whole point is that the white-marble ideal didn't come from "patriarchal, gatekept taste-making". That the statues were still mostly white marble at the time, with colored ornamental features, or very light pigmentation for something like a sunburn. That there is something timeless about human taste in that sense.
> If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.
When ideology clashes with evidence, isn't it time to let go of the ideology? Also, nothing is "actively harmful" to diversity here. This isn't taking away from space in museums for African art or Chinese art or anything like that, or saying that they are any less beautiful or timeless themselves. Or taking anything away from Norman Rockwell paintings or hip-hop album covers or whatever you consider to be non-elite. The same timeless aesthetic principles can be at play, expressed in different cultural systems.
I think the museums should hire trained academic artists to do best guess reproductions next to the garish ones.
The garish ones are _equally_ misleading.
Imagine you got a reproduction of a "five year old with finger paints" version of Mona Lisa and you were told this was made by a person considered a geniuous in his time and an artistic giant. What would make that think you of his patrons and him?
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.
Why do they even bother with the "reconstructions" if they know that they are inherently inaccurate, though
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.
"The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?
This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’."
Meaning that these "reconstructions" are a pretty pointless and have no real purpose.
Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated.
It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair.
Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/.
Like we know from Roman frescoes[1] and mosaics[2] that they were pretty skilled painters and solving the problem of how to paint something to have more hues than a King's Quest 3 sprite is unlikely to be an unsolvable aesthetic problem.
[edit] Changed from Secret of Monkey Island since that game has too many versions and remakes.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Chiron_i...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Academy_mosaic#/medi...
Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades.
I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand.
Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
They just look ... bad.
While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though.
So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project.
But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest.
So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction.
You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this.
You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
I'm sure you're right that reconstructions of painted statues are inaccurate. But I'm not sure that a good-looking reconstruction would be any more authentic. Cultural tastes vary a lot. I suspect that if we ever do get enough data for a valid reconstruction, I won't like it any better.
I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence?
Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing.
> You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing
I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
> Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
"Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence."
Most Greek and Roman statues had lost their paint long before the Renaissance. Early modern artists held up those paintless statues as the ideal form, which is why nobody from Michaelangelo to Bernini even tried to paint their sculptures. Instead, Bernini learned how to make marble itself interact with light to look alive. For centuries afterward, the purity of raw marble became the one true ideology. Diversity in this area collapsed, and took a long time to recover.
Even today, most people who are used to Western classical art will probably agree that marble statues look better without paint. We've been conditioned for generations to believe so. The ugly reproductions of painted statues aren't helping, either.
(And lest someone be inclined to downvote because I'm suggesting an AI, the real sarcastic core of my message is about our faith in computers still being alive and well even after we all have decades of personal experience of them not being omniscient infalliable machines.)
A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]
Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.
[0] https://eatshistory.com/the-oldest-recorded-recipe-babylonia...
[1] https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew
https://classics.rutgers.edu/the-hair-archaeologist-janet-st...
> Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly?
> ...may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
That seems plausible -- and somewhat reasonable! To the credit of academics, they seems aware of this (according to the article):
> ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
Have you seen medieval art though? https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/explaining-weird-mediaeva...
The technique is quite different from the "old masters" of later periods that we often think of as fine art.
All the garish colours were prob heavily muted or diluted with varnish/oil. You don’t pant an artwork like a house, it is a layered technique and fairly similar to historic painting techniques used today:
https://emptyeasel.com/2014/12/02/how-to-paint-using-the-fle...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grisaille
Bare brick as an aesthetic choice did not emerge until the late 19th century.
Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
I do not think tastes can change to such a degree that that first link would ever be pleasant to listen to, though that itself could be intentional for theatrical, theological, or other such purposes. Music seems innate to humanity - children generally start 'dancing' of sorts to music, 100% on their own, before their first birthday, long before they can speak or usually even walk!
The thing is that even if we do not personally like some form of music, I think we can still appreciate it. The Chinese guqin [3] is my favorite example - it goes back at least 3000 years, is played in a fashion completely outside the character of modern music - to say nothing of Western musical tradition as a whole, and yet nonetheless sounds amazing and relaxing even to a completely foreign ear.
Culture and tastes may change, but I think our ability to appreciate (or be repelled) by things is fairly consistent.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y
[2] - https://youtu.be/UAmuQBnNty8?t=540
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ninn-CfAMy8
It's an unsubstantiated theory, but the author does go out of their way to say that this might not even be objectionable, if it happened at all
Yesterday’s kids are today’s scientists. You what the most popular archeological student prank is? - It’s for a team to bury a modern piece of pottery in another team’s site. So I am not at all surprised if they wanted to play a few practical jokes on the public’s ignorance.
Trolling here means that they followed the tradition of restoring the items - use just the materials they found on the statues. Well the materials found were the base layers - so that’s what you restore. You don’t go adding shading or fades or iridescent paint because it looks cute. They create art that looks like an 8 year old painted it, then laugh at the public “ooh-ing and ah-ing” over the “beautiful” restorations.
1. The professional qualifications of the people doing the actual work should be taken seriously. But the professionals have no control over the people who dictated how the work should be done, or the people who thought out the marketing. I hope this point is clear to engineers.
2. Even if the "trolling" sentiment is both incorrect and "terrible" ... ok. Noted. That doesn't destroy the value of the whole article.
Screed:
Many of us have reached the point where they throw away the baby if we find the slightest imperfection in the bath water. This now includes medicine, values, science, and (at least in the US) our freedom and our functioning society.
We need to grow up. Another example that many modern folks cannot handle is errors in the scientific literature. The scientific literature is incredibly valuable, despite also containing a lot of errors. That's life. We need to grow up and deal.
In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.
Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.
And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.
Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
In fact you can find a question to this very answer with a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfz67t/comm...
Experts are also not a monolithic block. Within architecture and arts you can find many people who agree with your aesthetic preferences.
It is like claiming that there is a "curly-braced" orthodoxy in programming when you just haven't engaged deep with modern varieties.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.
The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
Do we know for a fact in these reconstructions there is no input whatsoever from artists? I know, for example, that paleo-artists are responsible for the reconstruction of what dinosaurs are currently thought to have looked like, and they are mostly artists that work in collaboration with scientists directing their work. Why do we think this is not the case for the reconstruction of colors of Roman statues?
You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.
I think the article is mostly begging the question, and is not particularly rigorous. At most it's appealing to some sort of common sense, and we know how tempting but unreliable common sense can be in science and history.
To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
One way to close that gap would be to offer interpretations to be painted by modern artists to show what was possible and a viewing public could view a range of the conservative evidence based looks, and maybe a celebration of what human artistic ability can offer.
That said -- I think we actually do have more indirect evidence than what the reconstructions used -- in fact 3 separate lines of evidence A) paintings of statues B) contemporary descriptions of statues and C) contemporary paintings in general. All of which suggest that the coloring would have been more subtle and realistic.
I think if we had contemporary paintings of dinosaurs with feathers and contemporary accounts in writing that dinosaurs had feathers, but no feathers in the fossil record, you would still be fairly justified in saying that dinosaurs probably had feathers.
Humans?
We are hampered even more today because blues and greens tend to be sourced from organic materials that decay quick, while reds and browns are from minerals that don't decay (but flake off). Even in the best preserved art that we have there is still likely significant differences between what we see and what they saw because of this color change.
You don’t need to believe me. Look at Egyptian sculptures that have survived fairly well in the tombs. Or Greek and Roman paintings, some of which have survived quite well and shown in the original article. I spent 3,5h cgoing through the collections of The Archeological Museum of Napoli, and there’s plenty of them. They used muted earth tones like most skilled modern painters would.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art...
What I've always heard is that classical statues were painted "brightly".
So, is this something that's so well known in the study of antiquities that no source was required, or has the author just got a personal bugbear here?
But where we see wall frescoes and the like they are painted with what we would call artistic taste and not like the garish reconstructions.
I'm pretty sure many museums with reconstructions of classical statues have a note on this topic somewhere on a plaque beside the statues - but who reads those?
But that aside, I do think the author has a point here. Many people don't know ancient statues were painted at all, an academic creates a reconstruction based off of the color traces that survive to show otherwise, but likely only the underlayer, then that gets dumbed down to "this is exactly how the statue looked to the Romans!" because that's counter-intuitive and therefore more likely to get attention. It's not just statues too, but in pretty much all popular media that derives from academic subjects.
Most of these "researchers" just lie and make up stuff, to be honest.
It's like when they find a small 2 cm fossil bone and they use it to infer crap like "this creature bathed in hot springs every day at 4pm before eating a meal mainly composed of these leaves". LOL. But I give them points for the show they put up.
Btw, you'd be alarmed if you knew how much psychology is made up as well.
/s
The idea that we should walk this back because the colors might have been subtler feels like missing the point. The educational value isn't in perfect historical accuracy down to the pigment saturation curve, it's in breaking the spell of the solid-white classical canon. The garish reconstructions do that effectively; tasteful, muted ones just slide back into the same old norms. If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.
So yes, even if the evidence points the other way, I'd argue we should lean into the loud, uncomfortable versions. Sometimes a less "accurate" narrative is the more important corrective, especially when the alternative reinforces centuries of aesthetic dogma we should really be questioning.
But the whole point is that the white-marble ideal didn't come from "patriarchal, gatekept taste-making". That the statues were still mostly white marble at the time, with colored ornamental features, or very light pigmentation for something like a sunburn. That there is something timeless about human taste in that sense.
> If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.
When ideology clashes with evidence, isn't it time to let go of the ideology? Also, nothing is "actively harmful" to diversity here. This isn't taking away from space in museums for African art or Chinese art or anything like that, or saying that they are any less beautiful or timeless themselves. Or taking anything away from Norman Rockwell paintings or hip-hop album covers or whatever you consider to be non-elite. The same timeless aesthetic principles can be at play, expressed in different cultural systems.
The garish ones are _equally_ misleading.
Imagine you got a reproduction of a "five year old with finger paints" version of Mona Lisa and you were told this was made by a person considered a geniuous in his time and an artistic giant. What would make that think you of his patrons and him?
There, I fixed it for you.