
Rediscovering the Blazingly Bright Colors of Ancient Sculptures - benbreen
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-sculpture-color-polychromy
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toomanybeersies
This reminds me a lot of how we've discovered that dinosaurs had feathers.

I wonder how long this imagery will take to come into public consciousness,
both painted sculptures and feathered dinosaurs. Popular culture doesn't seem
to be catching on, the new Jurassic Park movies still have scaly dinosaurs and
I expect that any new Ancient Greek or Roman movies will have white statues. I
think it makes people uncomfortable to discover that they've been visualising
something wrong their whole life.

~~~
acheron
Well, certainly this has been known for quite awhile and hasn't really caught
on as far as I know. I mean, people who care are fully aware, but I'm sure
you're right that any new scene depicting ancient Greece will have plenty of
white marble. File it under Reality is Unrealistic. [1]

(Offhand I bet part of the issue is that the general culture probably doesn't
make much distinction between classical statues and Renaissance or
neoclassical statues and carvings, despite the couple millennia of separation.
And obviously the Renaissance statues were not painted.)

[1]
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealis...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealistic)

~~~
colanderman
I wonder whether Renaissance statues were unpainted also due to influence from
the "white" Greek statues.

~~~
labster
Yes, definitely, both during the Renaissance and the Neoclassical eras. Works
that would have been considered unfinished in the Classical era were
appreciated in later periods for representing pure figures without the need
for ostentation. Well, that and the Classical sculpture was pretty darned
good.

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benbreen
Last year I had a chance to go to the archaeological museums in both Athens
and Istanbul and was surprised to see how many classical statues and fragments
still have pigment left on them. Here's one particularly well-preserved
example - from a museum in Berlin, but pretty close to the examples I saw in
Athens:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychrome#/media/File:Altes_M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychrome#/media/File:Altes_Museum-
Tanagra-lady_with_fan.jpg)

It makes me wonder if part of the myth about Greco-Roman sculptures being
pristine and unpainted came not just from the pigment wearing away over the
centuries, but from the fact that 18th and 19th century printed texts tended
only to feature black and white engravings. In person it's strikingly apparent
that many were brightly painted.

~~~
toomanybeersies
I think it's more to do with the fact that Renaissance sculptures weren't
painted.

So the question is why did they believe that ancient sculptures weren't
painted in the 1500's?

~~~
kijin
Most of the paint on ancient sculptures that didn't make it to the 21st
century would already have been gone by the 16th century.

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caio1982
When I visited Egypt a few years ago I was amazed at how colorful some ruins
and temples were. To this day you can go to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortuary_Temple_of_Hatshepsut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortuary_Temple_of_Hatshepsut)
and see colorful walls and columns and such that are about 3500 years old. It
still gives me goosebumps.

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gumby
You need only go to India and see the brightly painted sculpture to understand
what Greek sculpture looked like. The same people moved into/invaded Greece,
Iran, India, Bactria, et al bringing a common language(-root) and
religious(-root). I say (-root) since this process likely took centuries,
perhaps several.

~~~
empath75
There was also a reverse influence from Alexander invading India as well. The
first sculptures of Buddha were made by Greek artists, for example.

~~~
gumby
That’s quite true but I’m talking of a common influence about 1500or more
years prior to Alexander.

Interestingly the first time I encountered Kartikeya under the name “Skanda”
was in fact on a visit to the Bodh Gaya! I guess Alexander was a contemporary
or near contemporary of Ashoka. There was a lot of connection between the
Greek empire and the Mauryan empire!

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huffmsa
Makes sense that they'd have been painted, but I prefer the clean marble look.

Lincoln all fleshy, sitting there in his temple on the Mall seems incorrect to
me.

As would a tonal David.

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ggm
Edinburgh college of art had incredibly fine casts of great works made and
subsequently painted by the Victorians. Apparently a confused college body
decided to remove the polychrome finish and "restore them to the pristine
white' which not only destroyed their heritage, it lost a huge amount of fine
detail. -told to me by my mum who worked there in the sixties and seventies
and eighties.

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ridgeguy
Maybe fabrics, too.

Last November, I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. There were woven
fabrics that showed lovely colors and designs after at least 4 millennia.

Our forebears had lots of coloration options for their art. I doubt they did
everything in neutral color. I'm glad we're using our technology to see better
the beautiful things they made so long ago.

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jackfoxy
No mention of the kinds of pigments and binders. That would be interesting to
know as well.

