Color, Taste and the Ancient Greeks and Romans
Back in 2018, which is of course an age ago in terms of all that has transpired since then, I wrote about a New Yorker article suggesting that lush, lavish, bright color was not just a possibility but a probability in the sculpture of ancient Greece and Rome.
Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World by Vinzenz Brinkmann et al.
You’d have thought we’d be used to that idea by now, that it would no longer be a shocker. Because why on earth would people as creative, and as pagan, as those ancients choose to present their sacred imagery devoid of color? I never understood that.
To my color-saturated eye, reared on the fabulously clamorous palettes of India, those pure white marbles seemed unrepresentative of the vibrant, bizarre stories of that other pagan world with which I felt a kind of affinity.
I had no data to base this on, of course, but from 2008 onward, I’ve been delighted to see emerging research supporting my instincts that all those white marbles aren’t quite authentic.
Now here’s this Washington Post article, titled What if the ancient Greeks and Romans actually had terrible taste?
Terrible taste? Say what? Reviewer Philip Kennicott warns “modern viewers” that they may find the riot of color in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, “disconcerting.” The exhibition includes reconstructions of how Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture may have appeared, based on analysis of pigment fragments from many surviving antiquities.
Be that as it may, it seems that even today, the white gaze is the one that dictates art appreciation—the same gaze that lay behind more than one ill-conceived effort to clean the so-called Elgin marbles.
Kennicott writes:
…the belief that ancient sculpture was monochrome — white as marble or uniformly patinated bronze — remains more durable and persistent than the scholarship.
He goes on to say:
But our resistance isn’t always irrational or rooted in pernicious ideas. Sometimes it is just a matter of baggage. All the colorized statues are interpretations of what the polychrome scholars believe they may have looked like. And small, subjective decisions can bring about unwanted or unexpected ideas in the mind of the viewer.
True, those who added the color brought their own baggage. Me, I’m grateful that scholars keep trying to uncover color in ancient Greek and Roman art. I wonder if my taste and that of the ancients might align quite nicely. Something tells me I can't possibly be alone.
