"Certainly, we are under no obligation to view these statues in color, so long as we honestly acknowledge their longer history and original appearance as essential facts. And ideas of authenticity are always tricky. The one thing we can never know is whether our ideas of color have any relation to how color was perceived when these works were new.
Indeed, when the ancients wrote about color, from Homer and Parmenides to Plato and Aristotle, their terminology often seems decidedly foreign. Was the wine-dark sea really the color of a fine Chateauneuf-du-Pape, or did that refer to something about luster or sheen or some other visual quality? Nietzsche was convinced that the ancient Greeks couldn’t see blue or green and lived in a world of black, white, red and yellow.
It’s also possible that the original figures were meant to be shocking, and our own sense of shock is an analogue to how they were perceived thousands of years ago.... The ancient sense of surprise may have been no less vigorous...."
There are preserved paintings of statues from Pompeii, and go figure they show that paint was used sparingly, subtlety, and tastefully.
But the WAPO wouldn't print stories about subtle, tasteful reproductions because it wouldn't advance their agenda of degrading everything associated with white people and western civilization.
The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
and leave it at that, but since my comment on the TNG episode didn't appear to make it through, I worry that my unexplained references are seen as hijacking the thread for my own purposes though I there, on the Helen Keller's use and understanding of visual language, I was trying to be relevant.
Here, I reference Jayne's work where he makes the case that connection between the two halves of ancient people's brains was not that strong (Corpus Callosum), and that one side of the brain would appear to the other side of the brain as visualized person speaking to them, for example, as Athena. He discusses Augustine talking about reading without moving his lips as some evidence of this as well. It's been a long time, forgive me if I am not exact.
So normally, no, I would not have written that, I would have just dropped in the reference to Jayne, and yes I did go to the article, and no I cannnot read it, but hopefully there is relevance to what I write and this post. I wish I had not had to write all of this. I could have just blogged it myself. I am reticent now to post anything. I probably should be. I need to leave people alone mostly.
I have seen this type of thing before and it is very interesting.
They may have had terrible taste in color, but just look at the form and shapes of what they built...Pantheon, Parthenon, Pyramids, Forum, Coliseum, etc.
Reproductions of painted Roman and Greek statues are unappealing to me because they mostly seem to use huge expanses of flat colour -- we see that in the video too. It seems odd to me that artists or artisans of the classical period who could achieve such subtle reproductions of the human form would then just dump a flat layer of paint on top and call it a day. We can see from mosaics that Roman artists could represent the subtle gradations of colour in human skin when they wanted to. Why wouldn't they do the same on these statues?
On the pro-plain marble side, the paint used in reconstructions is matte and opaque and skin and marble are translucent and a little shiny. Putting opaque paint on marble means you lose some of what gives marble that human-like glow. Maybe they had translucent paints and glossy finishes (perhaps something to help protect outdoor statuary from the elements)? I think it's partly a matter of medium, not just pigment, so maybe they aren't using the right medium.
Wasn't there a moment when prestige movie directors made their films in b&w because such a medium emphasized the stark beauty and truth that the director wished to impart. That moment has passed.....I don't think artists favor monochrome, but they tend to imitate the great art of their immediate predecessors....I wonder what the ancients did to dress up their golden statues.....When I was a kid, I liked movies like The Ten Commandments. The spectacle was wedded with religious awe and I still believed in God. I looked at such movies in the way that a medieval peasant looked upon the stained glass windows in the Chartres Cathedral. That moment has passed, but Star Wars and the first Matrix provided a loose approximation of such religious awe. Not so much the Marvel movies, but that's part of their appeal.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The ancients produced impressive works of art back then, only a know it all would claim "bad taste" using a modern construct.
I don't know that the Germans are experts in antiquities, much less restoration of same (the reproductions were done by Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt.
I would have more confidence in the accuracy of the work if done by the Italians.
This reminds me of when it was discovered that the colors used in the original restoration of Williamsburg (in the 20's-30's) were actually based on badly-faded paint samples. When I visited there in the 80's, the new corrected colors were amazingly bright, even kind of tacky looking to modern eyes.
I remember seeing photos of the restored-color statues and thinking the colors were ugly. But that was a shallow take even putting aside my own personal taste.
The creators of these pieces didn't have an infinite array of colors to work with; they could get pigments only from certain natural substances. There would have been considerations of what "paint" could actually adhere to the stone, what paint would resist fading, and what paint would aid the viewer in discerning details. I'm guessing that there would have been a lot of motivation for them to emphasize saturated contrasting colors even if they were exaggerations of the real-life objects.
Why did Nietzsche think the Greeks couldn’t see green or blue?
Because there's no specific word in ancient Greek that means blue (not sure about green). 19th century know-it-alls decided that that meant the Greeks had to have been color blind and couldn't see blue. Modern thinking is more along the lines that the ancients could see blue, but thought about it as a shade of another primary color and didn't break it off into its own specific color group. Kind of like if we didn't have the word and concept of 'pink' in English, we'd probably refer to the color as a shade of red.
Why did Nietzsche think the Greeks couldn’t see green or blue?
The story of “blue being invisible in history” begins in 1858 when William Gladstone, who later became Chancellor of the Exchequer then Prime Minister of Great Britain, read Homer’s The Odyssey . Gladstone noticed that Homer described the sea color as "wine-dark” - leading him to ask the question; why not “deep blue?” Gladstone investigated this curiosity and counted the color references in The Odyssey finding that while black was mentioned almost 200 times, and white about 100, blue did not appear once. Broadening his research he then determined that “blue” didn't exist anywhere in Greek writing. Nowhere.
German Jewish philosopher and philologist Lazarus Geiger passionately followed up on Gladstone’s observations and analyzed ancient Icelandic sagas, the Koran, Hindu, Chinese folklore, Arabic, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. His studies discovered that ‘blue’ was never mentioned once in any of these cultures and he wrote:
"These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn's play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again ... but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs ... and that is that the sky is blue.”
Kinda neat that modern Western aesthetics was based on the austerity of pure white Grecian statuary & buildings. Upon visiting our nation's capital, Ictinus laughed.
There are always people who think that the words we use entail that we think or perceive a certain way. I don't think "wine-dark sea" implies that Greeks saw different colors from us, any more than the use of "taken aback", "show them the ropes", or "take a different tack" in common writing and speech implies that most Americans command a sailing vessel.
The properties of light have not changed, and the rods and cones in human eyes have not changed significantly, since ancient times. What has changed is the words used to describe colors. "Orange" for example is named after the fruit. In Old English the color of oranges was described as "red" or "yellow-red". It was not necessary in those times to split colors so finely in speech as we do today.
we like the worn out, bare stone.. Because most things in our world are Brand New. The Only shiny new things in ancient greece were things freshly painted.
We like things old, and faded, and stained; because our life is full of shiny new Here's an example, from far afield. We modern city folk, think that leather jackets (and jeans) should look "distressed".. People pay good money for their clothes to look worn out. Back when people actually worked for a living, for dress up, they'd put on their 'sunday go to meeting' clothes. Their newest, brightest clothes.
William said... Wasn't there a moment when prestige movie directors made their films in b&w because such a medium emphasized the stark beauty and truth that the director wished to impart.
@Balfegor:I think it's partly a matter of medium, not just pigment, so maybe they aren't using the right medium.
I always understood that the reconstructed pigments came from traces actually left on the statue, which are usually detected with UV light or spectroscopy or other modern techniques, and so it's pretty clear what pigment was actually used.
But in many cases the actual pigments are visually present on the statues and for some statuary were scrubbed or polished off in earlier centuries.
Polychrome statuary continued well into the high Middle Ages. There is a great YouTube video of Amiens Cathedral "painted" as it would have looked when new using lasers. It is an overwhelming riot of color and texture. It puts any notion of the Medieval world being drab, grey and dirty and puts it right in the ground.
I recall learning in highschool about anthropologists studying an island or amazonian tribe (at any rate, some group "untainted" by exposure modern western culture) and the suggestion that, in addition to describing our experiences, language can sometimes circumscribe what we are *able* to experience. IIRC, the tribe had one word used to indicate both blue and green. When presented with an array of blue-green shades, they were often unable to make distinctions between them. The argument was that the lack of words to describe the gradients actually prevented them from seeing any appreciable difference. That lesson has always stuck with me, for some reason.
Calvin and Hobbes explained all this Calvin's dad explains why old photographs are in black and white. It's because the WORLD was black and white until about the 1930's.
Most people don't realize that color was discovered during WWII, but the war itself was fought in black and white to save money.
Don't painters often put down a base coat, and then layer paint over that? Perhaps the only pigment actually touching the marble and leaving traces in its pores was the base paint. If so, any shadings or detail on top of that would be long lost and all we have, besides the sculpture itself, is one step in the painting.
There's also the question of presentation / observation distance and lighting. In recent history, everyone should be familiar with the uses of high-contract or garish makeup on e.g. opera actors. It is quite possible that at least some of those statues were not originally displayed indoors, under tasteful indirect lighting.
This issue reminds me of a recent series on, IIRC, BoredPanda or Reddit, about reinterpretations of archeological items by women, correcting various outre or religious explanations from men. The theme of the series was "Oh, look, this isn't some sort of idol, it is clearly a dish scrubber. Aren't men ignorant?"
Balfegor: the great masters of portraiture all used both transparent and opaque paints. You generally start transparent and use more opaques towards the end to help turn the form. One problem with modern painting is the use of titanium white as a mixer which can have a chalky pastel-like finish. The old guys mixed with lead "flake" white. They also used lead cooked in oil mixed with turpentine resins and waxes to enhance the illusion of 3-dimensions.
She has taken beautiful pieces of marble that glow with a naturally translucent luster and painted them over with thick, dull-looking, garish paint that looks like the poster paints in primary colors that we used as kids in school art class. Granted, the ancient Greeks and Romans worked with paint palettes limited by the paints' natural origins--but so did the medieval and Renaissance painters who managed to produce beautiful, subtle effects. Mixing paints made with natural materials was an art in itself then, and Renaissance painters spent years in apprenticeship just learning how to do it. I can't believe that the Greeks and Romans went to the trouble of carving impressive statuary in glowing marble just to cover every square inch of it in loud, matte-finish paint that completely obscured the marble.
gilbar said... William said... Wasn't there a moment when prestige movie directors made their films in b&w because such a medium emphasized the stark beauty and truth that the director wished to impart.
Calvin and Hobbes explained all this Calvin's dad explains why old photographs are in black and white. It's because the WORLD was black and white until about the 1930's. ***************
Calvin's dad often offered such bogus explanations. Once he tried to convince his son that the sun was actually very small, holding up a coin at arm's length to block the solar disk.
"How big can it be", he asked, "when this quarter covers it"?
(C & H was a great cartoon, up there with Bloom County.)
One wonders if Philip Kennicott realizes that it may have been some of his early ancestors that knocked all the noses, nipples and wieners off of some of those statues.
I hope Mr. Kennicott isn't ever exposed to ancient Greek literature. Now that's problematic and completely without any sort of modern sensibilities. CLassist, sexist, cisgendered (though not homophopic), xenophobic, theocratic and all kinds of other problems. We really shouldn't let anyone but approved scholars have access to such poverty of thinking.
This refers to two thoughts about the lack of ancient words (seemingly pan global) for blue. This is based on actual languages and inferences from archaeology.
The textual hypthesis can't explan why ancient Greek statues have patterns with blue paint in them.
This shoots the hypothesis.
2) Before 9000 years ago:
This is even more tenuous. Cave paintings from 20K ago didn't use blue and therefore humans couldn't see blue at that point Note that stable blue minerals are rare and blue didn't really come into use in jewelry/paintings until lapas luzili (hard rock) was mined which unlike ochre, requires grinding into a powder so it *couldn't* be used in cave paintings.
A problem (which also derails the first hypo) is that lapas luzili was traded into Europe since the Neolithic and used in jewelry and art. You don't trade for nondescript stones to use in jewelry when you can pick a nondescript stone up off the ground.
Refers to lead white pigment boiled in flax seed oil.
Warning!: Very dangerous to make.
Lead white is mixed with excess oil and set on heat source until hot enough to just start smoking. It can burst into flame if too hot and will in any case emit fumes, so best done outdoors.
Occasionally stir with disposable stick.
The medium will darken quite a bit and become jelly like while retaining a translucence, kind of like a soft, lumpy vasoline.
Tube this up and use to mix with a normal paint pigment. This should thicken it slightly.
I typically make a full smaller (37ml) tube of color at a time although painting impasto will use up paint very quickly.
Once mixed, the paint has a very smooth but shape holding texture.
Perhaps the whole "wine dark sea" can be explained by the darkness of deep waters being poetically compared to another dark liquid, wine. The Illiad isn't a documentary or a research paper, it is a poem from an oral tradition that will use certain phrases to get the reciter to continue his thread of memory, and also as a common cultural allusion that audience can relate to.
Interesting enough, sure, so long as one isn't looking for an objectively definitive settlement of questions associated with the colorings of statuary in the ancient world. The analogy that occurs to me is with those many attempts to recreate 'how ancient music really sounded'. Good or less good or fanciful attempts, approximations all of one sort or another. People will work at and on what interests them, when given the chance, and I'm glad of it: new ways of seeing or hearing are good. But I well remember the disappointment I experienced when so and so's 'authentic' recreation of the Liturgy of the Temple at Jerusalem (which at first listen seemed to me little less than sublime) proved, on second and third listen and taking into consideration the critics' work on the subject etc etc, well, not so compelling. I prefer the sculpture and statuary that we've actually received, not that which dwells in the imaginations of academics, however unimpeachable their motives and professionalism. I prefer them unpainted.
The Romans polished their painted walls to make them shine, but the last I read, we're not exactly sure what they used and how they did it. They had a very small supply of lemons to make Pledge.
I'd like know how someone stumbled into garum and their royal purple dye from murex shells.
What a lot of learned critique! Mixed with a lot of nonsense, and "I can't believes." From less than 6 minutes of video.
Someone mentioned that the Professors are painting old statues. It's clear in the clip that they are making copies to work on. (That some amateur botched something different years ago has no relevance.)
Mark commented that he didn't think Germans should be doing this work but rather Italians. I can only hope that's a joke!
Whatever do today's modern nationalities have to do with studying and interpreting the Ancient World?
The Romans may have (I don't know) applied a lacquer or varnish over frescoes to preserve the paint and provide a waterproof coat to allow for cleaning. I build plastic models of aircraft, ships, and tanks and when all is done I spray a lacquer over those models to protect them and give aseal whether it is matte or gloss.
And if you think about the freize of the Parthenon being outside and exposed to the elements, if painted there would have to be a seal of some kind over the paints.
Don't want to upset the gods by having all the paint run off in the first hard rain.
What a fascinating video. I found the colors intriguing, not garish. I visited the MMA many times when I was in school. I've seen ancient art from many cultures, and nothing compares to the Greeks in terms of balance and beauty, particularly the beauty of the human form. The idea that they had terrible taste is silly, especially coming from the culture that invented brutalism.
I recall learning in highschool about anthropologists studying an island or amazonian tribe (at any rate, some group "untainted" by exposure modern western culture) and the suggestion that, in addition to describing our experiences, language can sometimes circumscribe what we are *able* to experience. IIRC, the tribe had one word used to indicate both blue and green. When presented with an array of blue-green shades, they were often unable to make distinctions between them. The argument was that the lack of words to describe the gradients actually prevented them from seeing any appreciable difference. That lesson has always stuck with me, for some reason.
That's basically what's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after two linguists who wrote about the idea. Wikipedia has the basics. Long story short, it's probably not a true hypothesis, at least not in any really robust way (like, "Amazonian natives can't distinguish between greens and blues"). It might be true in some limited ways (like, "Speakers of languages without a future tense think somewhat differently about the future than speakers of languages with a future tense").
Possibly more on topic, Russian has a separate word for "light blue" – Đ³Đ¾Đ»ÑƒĐ±Đ¾Đ¹. I have read somewhere that no language is known to have more basic color words than Russian. Interesting.
Here's a fun story. I have a friend, great representational artist, paints dog pictures for a living now from the perspective of the dog, small dogs on flying carpets with flying toys, dogs' faces exploding in water bowls, etc, but she used to do illustrations of bones for forensic textbooks and trained at the Bone Farm. So, artist and scientist.
Someone took her to a long lecture by some guy who was trying to find some philosophical or religious cause for the huge predominance of drawings and cave scratchings of left hands in ancient art. After hours of this, she raised her hand and said: "Hands are really hard to draw. 80-plus percent of humans throughout history have been right-handed. so of course they would draw pictures of their left hands."
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They can hire Ted Turner as a consultant.
Maybe we have terrible taste.
There are preserved paintings of statues from Pompeii, and go figure they show that paint was used sparingly, subtlety, and tastefully.
But the WAPO wouldn't print stories about subtle, tasteful reproductions because it wouldn't advance their agenda of degrading everything associated with white people and western civilization.
Normally I would just write:
The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
and leave it at that, but since my comment on the TNG episode didn't appear to make it through, I worry that my unexplained references are seen as hijacking the thread for my own purposes though I there, on the Helen Keller's use and understanding of visual language, I was trying to be relevant.
Here, I reference Jayne's work where he makes the case that connection between the two halves of ancient people's brains was not that strong (Corpus Callosum), and that one side of the brain would appear to the other side of the brain as visualized person speaking to them, for example, as Athena. He discusses Augustine talking about reading without moving his lips as some evidence of this as well. It's been a long time, forgive me if I am not exact.
So normally, no, I would not have written that, I would have just dropped in the reference to Jayne, and yes I did go to the article, and no I cannnot read it, but hopefully there is relevance to what I write and this post. I wish I had not had to write all of this. I could have just blogged it myself. I am reticent now to post anything. I probably should be. I need to leave people alone mostly.
Have a good day.
I have seen this type of thing before and it is very interesting.
They may have had terrible taste in color, but just look at the form and shapes of what they built...Pantheon, Parthenon, Pyramids, Forum, Coliseum, etc.
They sure as hell could do architecture...
'Maybe we have terrible taste.'
Ha! My first thought as well.
When my son was younger he would have said, 'You have terrible taste!'
: )
I've been on a wine dark sea.
The Greeks were around water a lot, it can take on all kinds of curious aesthetics
Philip Kennicott of the Year Zero culture.
Reproductions of painted Roman and Greek statues are unappealing to me because they mostly seem to use huge expanses of flat colour -- we see that in the video too. It seems odd to me that artists or artisans of the classical period who could achieve such subtle reproductions of the human form would then just dump a flat layer of paint on top and call it a day. We can see from mosaics that Roman artists could represent the subtle gradations of colour in human skin when they wanted to. Why wouldn't they do the same on these statues?
On the pro-plain marble side, the paint used in reconstructions is matte and opaque and skin and marble are translucent and a little shiny. Putting opaque paint on marble means you lose some of what gives marble that human-like glow. Maybe they had translucent paints and glossy finishes (perhaps something to help protect outdoor statuary from the elements)? I think it's partly a matter of medium, not just pigment, so maybe they aren't using the right medium.
Wasn't there a moment when prestige movie directors made their films in b&w because such a medium emphasized the stark beauty and truth that the director wished to impart. That moment has passed.....I don't think artists favor monochrome, but they tend to imitate the great art of their immediate predecessors....I wonder what the ancients did to dress up their golden statues.....When I was a kid, I liked movies like The Ten Commandments. The spectacle was wedded with religious awe and I still believed in God. I looked at such movies in the way that a medieval peasant looked upon the stained glass windows in the Chartres Cathedral. That moment has passed, but Star Wars and the first Matrix provided a loose approximation of such religious awe. Not so much the Marvel movies, but that's part of their appeal.
Wow! They used manipulated images, just like scientists did with the Webb telescope, to try to get to the truth of the original sculpture.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The ancients produced impressive works of art back then, only a know it all would claim "bad taste" using a modern construct.
I don't know that the Germans are experts in antiquities, much less restoration of same (the reproductions were done by Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt.
I would have more confidence in the accuracy of the work if done by the Italians.
This reminds me of when it was discovered that the colors used in the original restoration of Williamsburg (in the 20's-30's) were actually based on badly-faded paint samples. When I visited there in the 80's, the new corrected colors were amazingly bright, even kind of tacky looking to modern eyes.
Why did Nietzsche think the Greeks couldn’t see green or blue?
I remember seeing photos of the restored-color statues and thinking the colors were ugly. But that was a shallow take even putting aside my own personal taste.
The creators of these pieces didn't have an infinite array of colors to work with; they could get pigments only from certain natural substances. There would have been considerations of what "paint" could actually adhere to the stone, what paint would resist fading, and what paint would aid the viewer in discerning details. I'm guessing that there would have been a lot of motivation for them to emphasize saturated contrasting colors even if they were exaggerations of the real-life objects.
Kay said...
Why did Nietzsche think the Greeks couldn’t see green or blue?
Because there's no specific word in ancient Greek that means blue (not sure about green). 19th century know-it-alls decided that that meant the Greeks had to have been color blind and couldn't see blue. Modern thinking is more along the lines that the ancients could see blue, but thought about it as a shade of another primary color and didn't break it off into its own specific color group. Kind of like if we didn't have the word and concept of 'pink' in English, we'd probably refer to the color as a shade of red.
Why did Nietzsche think the Greeks couldn’t see green or blue?
The story of “blue being invisible in history” begins in 1858 when William Gladstone, who later became Chancellor of the Exchequer then Prime Minister of Great Britain, read Homer’s The Odyssey . Gladstone noticed that Homer described the sea color as "wine-dark” - leading him to ask the question; why not “deep blue?” Gladstone investigated this curiosity and counted the color references in The Odyssey finding that while black was mentioned almost 200 times, and white about 100, blue did not appear once. Broadening his research he then determined that “blue” didn't exist anywhere in Greek writing. Nowhere.
German Jewish philosopher and philologist Lazarus Geiger passionately followed up on Gladstone’s observations and analyzed ancient Icelandic sagas, the Koran, Hindu, Chinese folklore, Arabic, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. His studies discovered that ‘blue’ was never mentioned once in any of these cultures and he wrote:
"These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn's play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again ... but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs ... and that is that the sky is blue.”
https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/color-blue-0010720
Kinda neat that modern Western aesthetics was based on the austerity of pure white Grecian statuary & buildings. Upon visiting our nation's capital, Ictinus laughed.
There are always people who think that the words we use entail that we think or perceive a certain way. I don't think "wine-dark sea" implies that Greeks saw different colors from us, any more than the use of "taken aback", "show them the ropes", or "take a different tack" in common writing and speech implies that most Americans command a sailing vessel.
The properties of light have not changed, and the rods and cones in human eyes have not changed significantly, since ancient times. What has changed is the words used to describe colors. "Orange" for example is named after the fruit. In Old English the color of oranges was described as "red" or "yellow-red". It was not necessary in those times to split colors so finely in speech as we do today.
we like the worn out, bare stone.. Because most things in our world are Brand New.
The Only shiny new things in ancient greece were things freshly painted.
We like things old, and faded, and stained; because our life is full of shiny new
Here's an example, from far afield. We modern city folk, think that leather jackets (and jeans) should look "distressed".. People pay good money for their clothes to look worn out.
Back when people actually worked for a living, for dress up, they'd put on their 'sunday go to meeting' clothes. Their newest, brightest clothes.
William said...
Wasn't there a moment when prestige movie directors made their films in b&w because such a medium emphasized the stark beauty and truth that the director wished to impart.
Calvin and Hobbes explained all this
Calvin's dad explains why old photographs are in black and white. It's because the WORLD was black and white until about the 1930's.
Here's the complete cartoon
My all time favorite Calvin and Hobbes - Color photos of a black and white world
@Balfegor:I think it's partly a matter of medium, not just pigment, so maybe they aren't using the right medium.
I always understood that the reconstructed pigments came from traces actually left on the statue, which are usually detected with UV light or spectroscopy or other modern techniques, and so it's pretty clear what pigment was actually used.
But in many cases the actual pigments are visually present on the statues and for some statuary were scrubbed or polished off in earlier centuries.
Polychrome statuary continued well into the high Middle Ages. There is a great YouTube video of Amiens Cathedral "painted" as it would have looked when new using lasers. It is an overwhelming riot of color and texture. It puts any notion of the Medieval world being drab, grey and dirty and puts it right in the ground.
I recall learning in highschool about anthropologists studying an island or amazonian tribe (at any rate, some group "untainted" by exposure modern western culture) and the suggestion that, in addition to describing our experiences, language can sometimes circumscribe what we are *able* to experience. IIRC, the tribe had one word used to indicate both blue and green. When presented with an array of blue-green shades, they were often unable to make distinctions between them. The argument was that the lack of words to describe the gradients actually prevented them from seeing any appreciable difference. That lesson has always stuck with me, for some reason.
gilbar said...
Calvin and Hobbes explained all this
Calvin's dad explains why old photographs are in black and white. It's because the WORLD was black and white until about the 1930's.
Most people don't realize that color was discovered during WWII, but the war itself was fought in black and white to save money.
In other news; sex was invented in 1963.
Don't painters often put down a base coat, and then layer paint over that? Perhaps the only pigment actually touching the marble and leaving traces in its pores was the base paint. If so, any shadings or detail on top of that would be long lost and all we have, besides the sculpture itself, is one step in the painting.
There's also the question of presentation / observation distance and lighting. In recent history, everyone should be familiar with the uses of high-contract or garish makeup on e.g. opera actors. It is quite possible that at least some of those statues were not originally displayed indoors, under tasteful indirect lighting.
This issue reminds me of a recent series on, IIRC, BoredPanda or Reddit, about reinterpretations of archeological items by women, correcting various outre or religious explanations from men. The theme of the series was "Oh, look, this isn't some sort of idol, it is clearly a dish scrubber. Aren't men ignorant?"
Balfegor: the great masters of portraiture all used both transparent and opaque paints. You generally start transparent and use more opaques towards the end to help turn the form. One problem with modern painting is the use of titanium white as a mixer which can have a chalky pastel-like finish. The old guys mixed with lead "flake" white. They also used lead cooked in oil mixed with turpentine resins and waxes to enhance the illusion of 3-dimensions.
Very different than Alfresco which I know little.
Prof. "V." Brinkmann's work reminds me of the lady who wrecked the fresco of Jesus in the Spanish church a couple of years ago:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/09/20/161466361/woman-who-ruined-fresco-of-jesus-now-wants-to-be-paid
She has taken beautiful pieces of marble that glow with a naturally translucent luster and painted them over with thick, dull-looking, garish paint that looks like the poster paints in primary colors that we used as kids in school art class. Granted, the ancient Greeks and Romans worked with paint palettes limited by the paints' natural origins--but so did the medieval and Renaissance painters who managed to produce beautiful, subtle effects. Mixing paints made with natural materials was an art in itself then, and Renaissance painters spent years in apprenticeship just learning how to do it. I can't believe that the Greeks and Romans went to the trouble of carving impressive statuary in glowing marble just to cover every square inch of it in loud, matte-finish paint that completely obscured the marble.
gilbar said...
William said...
Wasn't there a moment when prestige movie directors made their films in b&w because such a medium emphasized the stark beauty and truth that the director wished to impart.
Calvin and Hobbes explained all this
Calvin's dad explains why old photographs are in black and white. It's because the WORLD was black and white until about the 1930's.
***************
Calvin's dad often offered such bogus explanations. Once he tried to convince his son that the sun was actually very small, holding up a coin at arm's length to block the solar disk.
"How big can it be", he asked, "when this quarter covers it"?
(C & H was a great cartoon, up there with Bloom County.)
What the hell does "taste" have to do with it, if everyone back then thought the coloring looked just fine.
I detect here a hanky-sniffing Mr. Blackwell asserting HIS superior standards.
One wonders if Philip Kennicott realizes that it may have been some of his early ancestors that knocked all the noses, nipples and wieners off of some of those statues.
I hope Mr. Kennicott isn't ever exposed to ancient Greek literature. Now that's problematic and completely without any sort of modern sensibilities. CLassist, sexist, cisgendered (though not homophopic), xenophobic, theocratic and all kinds of other problems. We really shouldn't let anyone but approved scholars have access to such poverty of thinking.
The Japanese word "aoi" ambiguously refers to green, blue and in between.
Another word, "midori" refers unambiguously to a bright, unnatural green.
https://cotoacademy.com/japanese-color-blue-green-aoi-midori-%E9%9D%92%E3%81%84-%E3%81%BF%E3%81%A9%E3%82%8A/
the idiocy of blue - opinion piece
This refers to two thoughts about the lack of ancient words (seemingly pan global) for blue. This is based on actual languages and inferences from archaeology.
1) From languages: In the Odyssey, for example, Homer makes hundreds of references to white and black, but colors like red and yellow are only mentioned a few times. The color blue, it turns out, is never mentioned. Instead, the author uses descriptions like "wine-dark" to describe blue items such as the sea. As pointed out by others, the sea can actually take on a wine color (red bloom).
In ancient story texts: From the greek, wine-dark literally translates to "wine-face" (wine-faced, wine-eyed). It is attested five times in the Iliad and twelve times in the Odyssey, often to describe rough and stormy seas. In that sense, the color described what was going on (and perhaps sunset thrown in, the worst time for sea troubles).
This is supported by Mark Bradley:
Greeks viewed chroma (in Latin color) as essentially the visible outermost shell of an object. So a table wouldn't be brown, it was wood-coloured. A window would be glass-coloured. Hair would be hair-coloured, skin would be skin-coloured. 'They wouldn't talk in terms of the abstract colours that we are used to today.'.
The textual hypthesis can't explan why ancient Greek statues have patterns with blue paint in them.
This shoots the hypothesis.
2) Before 9000 years ago:
This is even more tenuous. Cave paintings from 20K ago didn't use blue and therefore humans couldn't see blue at that point Note that stable blue minerals are rare and blue didn't really come into use in jewelry/paintings until lapas luzili (hard rock) was mined which unlike ochre, requires grinding into a powder so it *couldn't* be used in cave paintings.
A problem (which also derails the first hypo) is that lapas luzili was traded into Europe since the Neolithic and used in jewelry and art. You don't trade for nondescript stones to use in jewelry when you can pick a nondescript stone up off the ground.
Biology disproves both. Genetically, Old world monkeys and apes mainly see as humans do – they are trichomats, so they pick up red, green, and blue..
In short, Nietzsche should have stayed with psychiatry.
boiled white - informational
Refers to lead white pigment boiled in flax seed oil.
Warning!: Very dangerous to make.
Lead white is mixed with excess oil and set on heat source until hot enough to just start smoking. It can burst into flame if too hot and will in any case emit fumes, so best done outdoors.
Occasionally stir with disposable stick.
The medium will darken quite a bit and become jelly like while retaining a translucence, kind of like a soft, lumpy vasoline.
Tube this up and use to mix with a normal paint pigment. This should thicken it slightly.
I typically make a full smaller (37ml) tube of color at a time although painting impasto will use up paint very quickly.
Once mixed, the paint has a very smooth but shape holding texture.
What a terribly convoluted way of saying "I prefer them unpainted."
Perhaps the whole "wine dark sea" can be explained by the darkness of deep waters being poetically compared to another dark liquid, wine. The Illiad isn't a documentary or a research paper, it is a poem from an oral tradition that will use certain phrases to get the reciter to continue his thread of memory, and also as a common cultural allusion that audience can relate to.
>>The Origin of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Holy cannoli! That one takes me.back about fifty years. I'm sure I still have a copy of the book somewhere.
--gpm
Interesting enough, sure, so long as one isn't looking for an objectively definitive settlement of questions associated with the colorings of statuary in the ancient world. The analogy that occurs to me is with those many attempts to recreate 'how ancient music really sounded'. Good or less good or fanciful attempts, approximations all of one sort or another. People will work at and on what interests them, when given the chance, and I'm glad of it: new ways of seeing or hearing are good. But I well remember the disappointment I experienced when so and so's 'authentic' recreation of the Liturgy of the Temple at Jerusalem (which at first listen seemed to me little less than sublime) proved, on second and third listen and taking into consideration the critics' work on the subject etc etc, well, not so compelling. I prefer the sculpture and statuary that we've actually received, not that which dwells in the imaginations of academics, however unimpeachable their motives and professionalism. I prefer them unpainted.
You don't hear much about indigo anymore.
It probably has something to do with slavery.
The Romans polished their painted walls to make them shine, but the last I read, we're not exactly sure what they used and how they did it. They had a very small supply of lemons to make Pledge.
I'd like know how someone stumbled into garum and their royal purple dye from murex shells.
What a lot of learned critique! Mixed with a lot of nonsense, and "I can't believes." From less than 6 minutes of video.
Someone mentioned that the Professors are painting old statues. It's clear in the clip that they are making copies to work on. (That some amateur botched something different years ago has no relevance.)
Mark commented that he didn't think Germans should be doing this work but rather Italians. I can only hope that's a joke!
Whatever do today's modern nationalities have to do with studying and interpreting the Ancient World?
Ralph L.
The Romans may have (I don't know) applied a lacquer or varnish over frescoes to preserve the paint and provide a waterproof coat to allow for cleaning. I build plastic models of aircraft, ships, and tanks and when all is done I spray a lacquer over those models to protect them and give aseal whether it is matte or gloss.
And if you think about the freize of the Parthenon being outside and exposed to the elements, if painted there would have to be a seal of some kind over the paints.
Don't want to upset the gods by having all the paint run off in the first hard rain.
What a fascinating video. I found the colors intriguing, not garish. I visited the MMA many times when I was in school. I've seen ancient art from many cultures, and nothing compares to the Greeks in terms of balance and beauty, particularly the beauty of the human form. The idea that they had terrible taste is silly, especially coming from the culture that invented brutalism.
Red Feather said...
I recall learning in highschool about anthropologists studying an island or amazonian tribe (at any rate, some group "untainted" by exposure modern western culture) and the suggestion that, in addition to describing our experiences, language can sometimes circumscribe what we are *able* to experience. IIRC, the tribe had one word used to indicate both blue and green. When presented with an array of blue-green shades, they were often unable to make distinctions between them. The argument was that the lack of words to describe the gradients actually prevented them from seeing any appreciable difference. That lesson has always stuck with me, for some reason.
That's basically what's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after two linguists who wrote about the idea. Wikipedia has the basics. Long story short, it's probably not a true hypothesis, at least not in any really robust way (like, "Amazonian natives can't distinguish between greens and blues"). It might be true in some limited ways (like, "Speakers of languages without a future tense think somewhat differently about the future than speakers of languages with a future tense").
Possibly more on topic, Russian has a separate word for "light blue" – Đ³Đ¾Đ»ÑƒĐ±Đ¾Đ¹. I have read somewhere that no language is known to have more basic color words than Russian. Interesting.
Here's a fun story. I have a friend, great representational artist, paints dog pictures for a living now from the perspective of the dog, small dogs on flying carpets with flying toys, dogs' faces exploding in water bowls, etc, but she used to do illustrations of bones for forensic textbooks and trained at the Bone Farm. So, artist and scientist.
Someone took her to a long lecture by some guy who was trying to find some philosophical or religious cause for the huge predominance of drawings and cave scratchings of left hands in ancient art. After hours of this, she raised her hand and said: "Hands are really hard to draw. 80-plus percent of humans throughout history have been right-handed. so of course they would draw pictures of their left hands."
Sometimes there's a really simple explanation.
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