The white lie we've been told about Roman statues
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Published 2019-12-23
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When you think of the ancient world, you probably picture towering buildings of white marble, adorned with statues also made of white marble. You’re not alone — most people picture the same thing. But we’re all wrong.
Ancient buildings and sculptures were actually really colorful. The Greeks and Romans painted their statues to resemble real bodies, and often gilded them so they shone like gods. So why is seemingly every museum on planet earth full of white marble sculptures?
It’s partly an honest mistake. After the fall of Rome, ancient sculptures were buried or left out in the open air for hundreds of years. By the time the Renaissance began in the 1300s, their paint had faded away. As a result, the artists unearthing, and copying ancient art didn’t realize how colorful it was supposed to be.
But white marble couldn’t have become the norm without some willful ignorance. Even though there was a bunch of evidence that ancient sculpture was painted, artists, art historians and the general public chose to disregard it. Western culture seemed to collectively accept that white marble was simply prettier.
Today, art history is more concerned with accuracy than it is with what might look better. So teams of researchers use a combination of art and science to painstakingly create reconstructions of ancient statues, showing us the true colors of classical antiquity.
Most of the reconstruction work shown in this video was done by the Polychromy Research Project, led by conservationists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann. To see more of their work you can buy their book, “Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World” www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/570229/gods-in-co…
Also check out:
“The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture” by Margaret Talbot
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-…
And the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prms/hd_prms.htm
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All Comments (21)
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Watch next: How obsessive artists colorize old photos https://youtu.be/vubuBrcAwtY
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Now it makes sense why ancient statues never had pupils. They were painted on.
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Once in art school our teacher was sick, so a substitute came in, and she went on like a 20 minute RANT about how the sculptures were not white, but colored. She was rlly passionate about that.
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"The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is" wait a minute
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i want a little augustus statue with a painting set so i can paint it, museums should sell them
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It’s like learning that the dinosaurs had feathers
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Colorization of statues should be an augmented reality app for every museum.
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Ancient World: Full of bright and dazzling colors Now: B L A C K - W H I T E - G R A Y
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Italian: didn't you taught about it in school? Rest of the world: 👁👄👁
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But did Romans have arms?
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Augustus rocked that pajama top.
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Next you're going to tell me that the ancient Greeks and Romans didn't speak English with received pronunciation accents.
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The museums usually fail to emphasize this enough, the truth is that at least they could put a picture of a reconstructed colored statue next to the statue's description, something they don't normally do.
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Wait u guys don't know that? In Italy we get taught that the old statues were coloured, they just lost the colours
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Imagine Disneyland faded completely colorless and pale in the future.
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Why is it that whenever the statue of Augustus is painted, his breastplate is white, shouldn't it be gilt bronze?
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Keep in mind, that when you paint on a white surface your colors seem brighter! When I paint on my tiny 25mm metal figures for my D & D game, I often paint the entire piece in gunmetal black and then drybrush colors over the black areas - this leaves a natural dark background in the folds of clothing and highlights raised areas of the figurines. If I want colors to be very bright, I paint white on top of the raised areas and then add color.
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I guess it’s not only Roman statues, but also the Great Sphinx of Giza and the Terracotta Army were painted with colours too.
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If you ever find yourself in Oxford, there’s a room in the Ashmolean Museum that has painted replicas of classical statues. So interesting to see and well worth a visit!
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This is literally taught at school in Italy, how you united States citizens talk about this as if it was a secret? 👁👄👁 Edit: I was referring to the smatterer tone the video use, none tried to hide this information just read from a good book. I don't care if you know it ad you are from Genovia or Israel. My point wasn't to bring down someone but to underline the fact that things like this are in middle school books. No need for sensationalism.
