> Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly?
> ...may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
That seems plausible -- and somewhat reasonable! To the credit of academics, they seems aware of this (according to the article):
> ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
Have you seen medieval art though? https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/explaining-weird-mediaeva...
The technique is quite different from the "old masters" of later periods that we often think of as fine art.
One way to close that gap would be to offer interpretations to be painted by modern artists to show what was possible and a viewing public could view a range of the conservative evidence based looks, and maybe a celebration of what human artistic ability can offer.
Humans?
That said -- I think we actually do have more indirect evidence than what the reconstructions used -- in fact 3 separate lines of evidence A) paintings of statues B) contemporary descriptions of statues and C) contemporary paintings in general. All of which suggest that the coloring would have been more subtle and realistic.
I think if we had contemporary paintings of dinosaurs with feathers and contemporary accounts in writing that dinosaurs had feathers, but no feathers in the fossil record, you would still be fairly justified in saying that dinosaurs probably had feathers.
It's an unsubstantiated theory, but the author does go out of their way to say that this might not even be objectionable, if it happened at all
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best
Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.
The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
Do we know for a fact in these reconstructions there is no input whatsoever from artists? I know, for example, that paleo-artists are responsible for the reconstruction of what dinosaurs are currently thought to have looked like, and they are mostly artists that work in collaboration with scientists directing their work. Why do we think this is not the case for the reconstruction of colors of Roman statues?
You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.
I think the article is mostly begging the question, and is not particularly rigorous. At most it's appealing to some sort of common sense, and we know how tempting but unreliable common sense can be in science and history.
To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.
Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.
And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.
Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
In fact you can find a question to this very answer with a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfz67t/comm...
Experts are also not a monolithic block. Within architecture and arts you can find many people who agree with your aesthetic preferences.
It is like claiming that there is a "curly-braced" orthodoxy in programming when you just haven't engaged deep with modern varieties.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
Most of these "researchers" just lie and make up stuff, to be honest.
It's like when they find a small 2 cm fossil bone and they use it to infer crap like "this creature bathed in hot springs every day at 4pm before eating a meal mainly composed of these leaves". LOL. But I give them points for the show they put up.
Btw, you'd be alarmed if you knew how much psychology is made up as well.
/s
A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]
Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.
[0] https://eatshistory.com/the-oldest-recorded-recipe-babylonia...
[1] https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew
https://classics.rutgers.edu/the-hair-archaeologist-janet-st...
The idea that we should walk this back because the colors might have been subtler feels like missing the point. The educational value isn't in perfect historical accuracy down to the pigment saturation curve, it's in breaking the spell of the solid-white classical canon. The garish reconstructions do that effectively; tasteful, muted ones just slide back into the same old norms. If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.
So yes, even if the evidence points the other way, I'd argue we should lean into the loud, uncomfortable versions. Sometimes a less "accurate" narrative is the more important corrective, especially when the alternative reinforces centuries of aesthetic dogma we should really be questioning.
But the whole point is that the white-marble ideal didn't come from "patriarchal, gatekept taste-making". That the statues were still mostly white marble at the time, with colored ornamental features, or very light pigmentation for something like a sunburn. That there is something timeless about human taste in that sense.
> If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.
When ideology clashes with evidence, isn't it time to let go of the ideology? Also, nothing is "actively harmful" to diversity here. This isn't taking away from space in museums for African art or Chinese art or anything like that, or saying that they are any less beautiful or timeless themselves. Or taking anything away from Norman Rockwell paintings or hip-hop album covers or whatever you consider to be non-elite. The same timeless aesthetic principles can be at play, expressed in different cultural systems.
The garish ones are _equally_ misleading.
Imagine you got a reproduction of a "five year old with finger paints" version of Mona Lisa and you were told this was made by a person considered a geniuous in his time and an artistic giant. What would make that think you of his patrons and him?
There, I fixed it for you.
We are hampered even more today because blues and greens tend to be sourced from organic materials that decay quick, while reds and browns are from minerals that don't decay (but flake off). Even in the best preserved art that we have there is still likely significant differences between what we see and what they saw because of this color change.
This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.
Painters layer paint, starting with a saturated base color. These archaeologists are simply looking at the paint that was left in the crevices.
Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades.
I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand.
Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
They just look ... bad.
While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though.
So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project.
But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest.
So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction.
You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this.
You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence?
Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing.
> You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing
I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
Like we know from Roman frescoes[1] and mosaics[2] that they were pretty skilled painters and solving the problem of how to paint something to have more hues than a King's Quest 3 sprite is unlikely to be an unsolvable aesthetic problem.
[edit] Changed from Secret of Monkey Island since that game has too many versions and remakes.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Chiron_i...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Academy_mosaic#/medi...
"Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence."
> Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
Most Greek and Roman statues had lost their paint long before the Renaissance. Early modern artists held up those paintless statues as the ideal form, which is why nobody from Michaelangelo to Bernini even tried to paint their sculptures. Instead, Bernini learned how to make marble itself interact with light to look alive. For centuries afterward, the purity of raw marble became the ideology, completely against what the Greeks originally intended.
Even today, most people will probably agree that marble statues look better without paint. We've been conditioned for centuries to believe so. The ugly reproductions of painted statues aren't helping, either.
(And lest someone be inclined to downvote because I'm suggesting an AI, the real sarcastic core of my message is about our faith in computers still being alive and well even after we all have decades of personal experience of them not being omniscient infalliable machines.)
"The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?
This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’."
Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated.
It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair.
Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art...
I'm pretty sure many museums with reconstructions of classical statues have a note on this topic somewhere on a plaque beside the statues - but who reads those?
But that aside, I do think the author has a point here. Many people don't know ancient statues were painted at all, an academic creates a reconstruction based off of the color traces that survive to show otherwise, but likely only the underlayer, then that gets dumbed down to "this is exactly how the statue looked to the Romans!" because that's counter-intuitive and therefore more likely to get attention. It's not just statues too, but in pretty much all popular media that derives from academic subjects.
Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
Bare brick as an aesthetic choice did not emerge until the late 19th century.
esperent•1h ago
What I've always heard is that classical statues were painted "brightly".
So, is this something that's so well known in the study of antiquities that no source was required, or has the author just got a personal bugbear here?
sebastianmestre•1h ago
ratatoskrt•1h ago
qsort•1h ago
pmichaud•1h ago