The glory (and tackiness) of ancient Greek art

A life-size figure of a Trojan archer from the temple of Aphaia on the Greek island of Aegina wears a shirt and leggings covered all over with an intricate red, yellow, blue, and green diamond pattern. Photo courtesy Stiftung Archäologie, Munich.

Colored statues? To us, classical antiquity means white marble. Not so to the Greeks, who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were also in color. Time and weather stripped most of the hues away, and for centuries people who should have known better turned a blind eye to the hues of the past.

White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth. The sculpture of Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons struggling with serpents sent by Poseidon (discovered in 1506 in Rome and now at the Vatican Museums) is one of the greatest early finds. Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color. Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art.

We now know that the unblemished white surface of Michelangelo’s “David” or Bernini’s “St. Teresa in Ecstasy” would have been considered unfinished according to classical standards. The sculpture and architecture of the ancient world was, in fact, brightly and elaborately painted. The only reason it appears white to us is that centuries of weathering have worn off most of the paint.

By the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek and Roman sites produced a great numbers of statues, and there were scholars on hand to document the scattered traces of their multicolored surfaces. Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though much of the remaining color faded, or disappeared entirely, once the statues were again exposed to light and air. Some of the pigment was scrubbed off by restorers whose acts, while well intentioned, were tantamount to vandalism.

In the 18th century, the pioneering archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann chose to view the bare stone figures as pure—if you will, Platonic—forms, all the loftier for their austerity. “The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well,” he wrote. “Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence.” Against growing evidence to the contrary, Winckelmann’s view prevailed. For centuries to come, antiquarians who envisioned the statues in color were dismissed as eccentrics, and such challenges as they mounted went ignored.

German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann, armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.

Call them gaudy, call them garish, his scrupulous color reconstructions made their debut in 2003 at the Glyptothek museum in Munich, which is devoted to Greek and Roman statuary. Displayed side by side with the placid antiquities of that fabled collection, the replicas shocked and dazzled those who came to see them. As Time magazine summed up the response, “The exhibition forces you to look at ancient sculpture in a totally new way.”

Yes, the Greco-Roman statuary and monuments we know as serene, white marble were, originally, ridiculously RGB. Io9 has a great piece up explaining how researchers definitively documented the multicolored nature of classical art using ultraviolet light.

First, they scan the pieces with UV light, looking for fluorescent traces of organic pigments. Then, infrared and X-ray spectroscopy narrow down the chemical make-up of those pigments.

Spectroscopy relies on the fact that atoms are picky when it comes to what kind of incoming energy they absorb. Certain materials will only accept certain wavelengths of light. Everything else they reflect. Spectroscopes send out a variety of wavelengths, like scouts into a foreign land. Inevitably, a few of these scouts do not come back. By noting which wavelengths are absorbed, scientists can determine what materials the substance is made of. Infrared helps determine organic compounds. X-rays, because of their higher energy level, don’t stop for anything less than the heavier elements, like rocks and minerals. Together, researchers can determine approximately what color a millennia-old statue was painted.

Posted by Andrew
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