Rediscovering the Blazingly Bright Colors of Ancient Sculptures

benbreen | 71 points

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.

toomanybeersies | 6 years ago

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...

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.

benbreen | 6 years ago

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 and see colorful walls and columns and such that are about 3500 years old. It still gives me goosebumps.

caio1982 | 6 years ago

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.

gumby | 6 years ago

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.

huffmsa | 6 years ago

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.

ggm | 6 years ago

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.

ridgeguy | 6 years ago

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

jackfoxy | 6 years ago