>Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted. Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white, and brown, among other colors.
>One of the most influential art historians of the era was Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He produced two volumes recounting the history of ancient art, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), which were widely read and came to form a foundation for the modern field of art history. These books celebrate the whiteness of classical statuary and cast the Apollo of the Belvedere — a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic bronze original — as the quintessence of beauty. Historian Nell Irvin Painter writes in her book The History of White People (2010) that Winckelmann was a Eurocentrist who depreciated people of other nationalities, like the Chinese or the Kalmyk.
>“Color in sculpture came to mean barbarism, for they assumed that the lofty ancient Greeks were too sophisticated to color their art,” Painter writes. The ties between barbarism and color, civility and whiteness would endure. Not to mention Winckelmann’s pronounced preference for sculptures of gleaming white men over women. Regardless of his own sexual identity — which may have been expressed in this preference — Winckelmann’s gender bias would go on to have an impact on white male supremacists who saw themselves as upholding an ideal.
The colored versions were fucking goofy instead of understated and tasteful.
Eli Rivera
This The Romans/Greeks had their colors, we have our stark whiteness
Cooper Edwards
Colored statues look stupid desu.
Christopher Sullivan
Plebian taste.
Christopher Hughes
She is actually. Factually, Greek sculpture was painted, however an aesthetic preference for white statues began, IIRC, with neoclassicism. This preference has actually caused irreversible damage to ancient works, as when the Elgin Marbles were "cleaned" to "restore" their whiteness. (1/2)
Andrew Taylor
She is right about the colours.
Cooper Long
The reason is that for many this isn't simply a preference for whiteness, as for example this poster , it's a belief in the inherent superiority of whiteness. This is sometimes for reasons of its purity, and sometimes for reasons of racial ideology. For an example of the former, see Italian Fascist architecture. (2/2)
Ryan Richardson
How are you people so gaudy that the statues don't look good painted?
Carter Ramirez
Literal racism.
Stay mad nignogs
Jonathan Turner
Oh no. The paintings have gone from being White to being White!
Isaiah Rodriguez
When everything around you is varying shades of brown, grey, and dull hues, then rich, saturated dyes are expensive and stylish.
When everything around you is overly rich and saturated, plastic-toy colored, then of course pure white marble will look austere.
You morons.
Eli Miller
Because kangz will invariably try to paint them black.
Julian Myers
That's like, just your Eurocentric view dude.
Camden Ross
Bump
Owen Barnes
If they want to make casts and paint them i am okay with that. Id think it be an interesting undertaking.
But stay the fuck away from the antiquities. They are an aesthetic delight as is.
Brody Foster
I don't like it
Parker Gray
If done right, colors can add to an already beautiful image. But a clusterfuck of different tones like and it's terrible.
Thomas Roberts
Marble is the plebian to begin with.
Jayden Green
it looks so awful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Owen Butler
>When everything around you is varying shades of brown, grey, and dull hues, then rich, saturated dyes are expensive and stylish. Source? Classical antiquity wasn't rendered with the Quake engine.
Jacob Rivera
White is objectively superior though.
Tyler Nguyen
I heard once that the recreations of painted status (IE ) are generally amateurishly done, and that it was likely that the ancients actually panted their statues with a bit more skill. They knew how to paint, it'd be silly to spend a lot commissioning a statue just to get some retard to splatter a gaudy extra layer on it senselessly.
Cooper Morales
one could only hope
as that example makes my eyes reel
Cooper Ramirez
marble white and european white aren't even the same. this argument is fundamentally silly when it's claiming that sculptures were whitewashed from euro skin tone because of racist beliefs in the superiority of white people
Kayden Campbell
Acquired taste, it fits the tragic but jovial philosophy of the greeks
Nicholas Barnes
That's not terrible, it's pure 90's.
Ooops, I forgot that nobody on Veeky Forums can use context, I have to spell everything out. When everything humanity makes and surrounds itself with (wood, stone, wattle and daub, wool, linen, cotton, ceramics, non-precious metals, etc.) is varying shades of brown, grey, and dull hues, then rich, saturated dyes and gems are expensive and stylish. You autist. Of course nature is full of bright, expressive colors, and of course humans created brilliant dyes from all sorts of sources, used feathers and striking animal hides in decoration, used their dyes to paint murals of nature scenes, etc.
James Stewart
Coloured looks like pure shit.
Jack Miller
>The colored versions were fucking goofy instead of understated and tasteful. You've never seen the painted versions. You've seen some historians' hackish representations of them based on the paint residue directly on the marble, when for all we know, the gaudy monocolor paint was just the base coat for the final product.
Ethan Wilson
OP didn't even link the video in the article so here you go
And they look like shit. A pure white marble statue has an air of regal authority to it while that looks like something your spinster aunt would have on a shelf.
Hunter Rodriguez
>Modern technology has revealed And, you know, all the art ancient civilizations left behind depicting how they fucking painted their statues.
Justin Murphy
>Historian Nell Irvin Painter writes in her book The History of White People (2010) that Winckelmann was a Eurocentrist who depreciated people of other nationalities, like the Chinese or the Kalmyk. >The ties between barbarism and color, civility and whiteness would endure. >Not to mention Winckelmann’s pronounced preference for sculptures of gleaming white men over women. Regardless of his own sexual identity — which may have been expressed in this preference — >Winckelmann’s gender bias would go on to have an impact on white male supremacists who saw themselves as upholding an ideal. Why do anglos turn everything into a political discussion? She could have stated that he was wrong about the paint and the idea settled in our culture and that in 1764 people thought differently about other cultures. Instead she turns this into muh race muh closet faggot muh white males. Why?
Julian Cook
will new films and documentaries portraying the classic world show colored statues for historical accuracy?
Jack Powell
>it's another thread where Veeky Forums is too stupid to realise that modern reproductions of the colored statues only show the base layer of paint
Tyler Myers
>clusterfuck of tones it's literally just primary colors you moron
Isaac Cox
t. non-STEM brainlet who thinks they have to "leave behind" anything
Of course they look like shit to someone like you who can't imagine how other people think and live. To the Romans a pure white marble statue is just unfinished and unpainted, no air of regal authority to it.
Logan Torres
>real statue coloring has never been tried
Aaron Cooper
looks like an american casino
Jack Diaz
Some cultures, like Hindus, still paint their statues and no it actually looks like that.
You just want them to look better because you admire the ancients and put them on a pedestal
Tyler Wright
>Sarah E. Bond Because it is a woman who wrote this article and women are dumb
Wyatt Roberts
Why do we find the raw marble more beautiful than the painted ones?
Levi Phillips
It does look very weird (especially the eyes in this case)
Gabriel Hill
...
Christopher Hall
>For an example of the former, see Italian Fascist architecture. (2/2)
Mussolini didn't believe in whiteness you fucking retard, in fact whiteness was never and is still not a concept in Europe. It's a term used by burgers that want to look down on other people while still being mutts
Nathaniel Ramirez
I would guess that with the colors we can appreciate much less the form and craft of the stone When it is a uniform color we exclusively pay attention the the forms of the skin, the hair, the cloth In addition i would say it is less "aggressive" to the eye, blend in better to the environnement and is percived as more elegant In a way when you paint the statues it means that you are trying to make them more real while when you leave them unpainted they keep this ethreal feeling to them as well as being exclusively an exercice in craft rather than an object of whorship When they are not painted we keep this cold distance between us and the past and it leaves more to the imagination and the ideal while when they are painted it just reminds us that they were humans just like us That's my analysis anyway
Andrew Ramirez
this, bunch o idiots itt
Connor Carter
He did though once he got aggressive and expanded. eh even had his own racial hierarchy and used colour in it. Seriously just google it up.
Liam King
thats fucking beautiful
Liam Rogers
This is actually a really heated debate in art history circles right now. representations like this have little bearing on reality, however.
The whole debate ties into the wider debate on the history of pigments and painting in general, where from what I can see a bunch of well established tenured pseuds dont want to admit that greeks painted, despite the ever mounting examples of greek paintings. academia really is a shit show
Cameron Miller
>academia really is a shit show Classics isn't really the rest of academia. Classics are especially a shitshow because there's been almost no self-criticism in the field since the early 20th century. For the past 100 years, Classicists have just been repeating the same shit with little regard for developments or findings from outside fields. Now that it's harder to avoid being challenged, many of them are losing their shit and trying to defend positions they thought were settled before they were born.
Owen Campbell
Classics is literally the last bulwark of traditional Western higher education.
If you're gonna start with your deconstructive nihilism there too, at least admit that what you want is to destroy the last vestiges of Western civilization.
Jackson Lewis
He's not wrong. Archaelogists butt heads with academics on a regular basis.
Jackson Peterson
Well them butting heads is a good thing because at least they believe in something, unlike these postmodern shills trying to invade every discipline.
Nathaniel Williams
>useless smug assholes are the last bastion of western civilization Whew, no wonder the West is in decline
Sebastian Reed
>Painter Painter is so americacentric it hurts to read her works. Search for some other source
Joshua Clark
>Marble was a precious metal for Greco-Roman artisans
>marble >a metal Stopped reading right there
Connor Howard
>Stopped reading right there
apparently your reading comprehension is that of a child because it clearly says material
Ryan Williams
Is this seriously a contentious topic, though? There are friezes that still have the original paint on them in places. Everything else is obviously just weather beaten. Isn't that just common knowledge? We literally learn that in grade school. I know the whole neoclassical thing got the idea going associating white marble with purity and cleanliness, but that was centuries ago.
Daniel Peterson
>Archaelogists butt heads with academics on a regular basis. Not sure what you mean by this (technically all archaeologists that work at universities are academics), but most archaeologist usually view classical archaeologists as kind of a joke. I've known a few people who either quit classics programs, or did something else to change their focus because of frustration with how classics is full of outdated bullshit that no one ever questions.
Chase Butler
>outdated bullshit that no one ever questions.
What exactly does this statement mean in the context of Classics?
You are literally teaching people about ancient civilization, language and culture, it's by definition "outdated bullshit".
Sure as hell doesn't mean it isn't valuable.
Joshua Jackson
With regards to archaeology specifically, most of the field methods are ludicrously outdated. People at classical sites are still using pickaxes and discarding lots of potential data because people haven't been keeping up with more modern digging techniques don't think certain things are worth collecting. And in general, the way people discuss those cultures is still the same way people were thinking about them 100 years ago. Classicists don't really care about things like how normal people were living, which is the focus of most other archaeology. And in general, they tend to be more focused on description than actually trying to explain anything (ex: caring more about the classification of a vessel instead of thinking about what it was used for); other archaeology moved on from that, and classicists never did. The lack of self-reflection in those classifications can be kind of funny, too; I had one former professor who used to rant about how ridiculous it was that every dig in Greece uses Athenian terms to classify things, regardless of how accurate it is.
Asher Bell
>People at classical sites are still using pickaxes and discarding lots of potential data because people haven't been keeping up with more modern digging techniques don't think certain things are worth collecting
No wonder though, all the interesting shit in archaeology was found 100 years ago.
Aiden Carter
We still don't have Ghenghis Khan's tomb
Austin Bennett
This sounds like thinly-veiled WE.
Jack Rogers
They probably had similar painting styles to this, complete with highlights, shading, gradients etc. The base layers in those reconstructions should never be taken at face value.
