Posted by bensouthwood 6 days ago
Would they accurately capture the lack of 'naturalism' (i.e. that flat, almost cartoonish quality) that often strikes modern viewers of Medieval art, or would they make it 'better', interpolating the gap between Roman and Renaissance styles?
This article hints at the idea that classical sculpture can't have been painted like that, because _it looks bad_ and Romans couldn't possibly have thought it looked good, yet early Medieval art was — presumably — perfectly acceptable to the tastemakers of Medieval Europe.
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?
"Now ascertained"? Ancient sources specifically say they were painted.
I also know that most of the old paintings that we have today have been though multiple rounds of "refreshment" in order to counter both the fading and dirt/soot that they were exposed to over the years (remember: most of these were displayed by torchlight/lamplight/candlelight for centuries). Nowadays there is a real emphasis on trying to produce an original ascetic, but that has not always been the case.
So I would want a better discussion of how accurate those "standard candles" are.
So I definitely feel that I was misled by what I had read and seen about painted statues (though I was always a bit sceptical), even though everything I'd seen was from secondary sources (news sites etc.), and not articles or papers written by the reconstructioninsts themselves, so I don't blame them directly.
One quote I remember from the exhibit, which I looked up to make sure I got the wording right, was an anecdote about one of the most famous Greek sculptors, as recorded by Pliny: "When asked which of his works in marble he liked the most, Praxiteles used to say: ‘Those to which Nikias has set his hand’—so highly did he esteem his coloring of the surface."
One takeaway from that quote is the obvious: one reason we know that ancient statues were painted is that ancient authors said so. Another takeaway is that the painters, not just the sculptors, were famous, and the ancients recognized that some were better than others.
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?
Then you could still have the evidentially "pure" one, but also have a more likely rendering to reduce confusion.
Likewise, where there is paint these guys have recreated it so. But over time we will find that there were more layers more likely to fail over time and so on.
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...
Yeah. I cannot thank enough those other ancients who dug up all statues and assumed they were all white.
I'm thinking about Michelangelo's The Pieta and oh so many others. Call it a lucky accident or "differing taste" or "mastering new techniques" or whatever you want, I take Michelangelo's The Pieta vs these "correctly re-colored" statues from early Rome any time.
Even once it's been fully known they used to be flashy, hardly anyone started sculpting masterpiece then asking kids to color them: I'm thinking about late 19th Rodin's The Kiss for example.
Just like our usage of the toilets, our taste evolved, not differed.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art...
We're clearly not the same society since the Romans either, whilst we take a certain amount of influence from them and other ancestors (and a certain amount more from idealised conceptions of them) we're not a unified state under one Emperor or a mostly agricultural society, don't think that slavery is part of the natural order, consult oracles or worship Jupiter and have big ideas about the importance of human rights and the necessity of universal education.
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