Yes, it's because our acquired taste. They were painted.
Classical statues were not painted horribly
91–100 of 351 posts
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#92Loved the article, the author is a smart person to doubt the changing taste hypothesis, I think everything based on "we are smarter and have better taste that the ancients" have to be extremely doubted, knowing we, the west, are the same society since the romans is so humbling
Is there a changing taste hypothesis? It's honestly the first time I've heard that suggested as the explanation, versus the more plausible to me idea of reconstruction from incomplete evidence.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#93I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer stuck to the statues, and the rest was washed away. 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 sim…
Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to t…
The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#94completely correct and so glad to see an article making this point. But, I do think the sculptures look better in ahistoric white. As an artist who has worked both with polychromy in sculpture and with really simple patinas, it's immediately obvious that a complex paint job covers a multitude of sins and distracts from the form of the sculpture, whereas a simple colour, esp white on which shadows appear so easily, shows off the sculptor's skill. Also, sculptures without painted eyes can't follow you around the room, which is a huge improvement.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
With the horrible version of the statues? 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 _a…
An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon.
I'm sure you're right that reconstructions of painted statues are inaccurate. But I'm not sure that a good-looking reconstruction would be any more authentic. Cultural tastes vary a lot. I suspect that if we ever do get enough data for a valid reconstruction, I won't like it any better.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#96His final conclusion is terrible and spoils an otherwise excellent article. Unless he has really strong evidence of it, the specialists are very unlikely to be "trolling" the public. They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.
"trolling" in this instance seems to be a nicer way of saying "misleading to create attention". It's hard to deny that "look at how garish these beautiful statures originally looked" created a lot more attention than a theoretical "Roman statues looked pretty nice, but with paint" 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 a…
And an article "experts are trolling public" creates more attention than "experts stick to evidence and aren't artists"
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#97One issue: the paints/pigments available in times past were not the full range we have today. Sometimes they had to make things somewhat ugly to both our and their taste because that is all they have available. They would still have done their best, but there are limits. 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…
This is absolutely not true at all. In physical painting you do not have a colour wheel were you pick colours to slap on. You can create a wash of colours and hues just with Zorn palette. We are taught to use fairly limited palette in oil painting even today, although you can in principle buy every known hue and slap it on - but that is not painting and that won’t produce anything worth the canvas it is painted on.
You don’t need to believe me. Look at Egyptian sculptures that have survived fairly well in the tombs. Or Greek and Roman paintings, some of which have survived quite well and shown in the original article. I spent 3,5h cgoing through the collections of The Archeological Museum of Napoli, and there’s plenty of them. They used muted earth tones like most skilled modern painters would.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#98[flagged]
I'm no expert, but having read some archeological papers that do make conclusions like that, the evidence is often quite compelling and well-supported. The context we find something in can convey a lot of data, and conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence are frequently argued against by other archeologists. Granted, if you only read the university press releases or the popular summaries thereof it can be somewhat misleading, but that's more down to the journalism than the research.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's even a case that Ketchup is a distant relative, as it started out as South East Asian oyster sauce, was imported to Europe, turned into fermented mushroom sauce, was exported to the colonies, and finally turned into tomato sauce (though originally sometimes with fish in it).
Fermented mushroom sauce sounds so much better than ketchup! Tell me more. Does it still exist commercially?
You can still sometimes find mushroom ketchup in UK supermarkets. It tastes a bit like Worcester sauce (spicy and 'brown' tasting), but milder as it has no anchovies in it.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#100His final conclusion is terrible and spoils an otherwise excellent article. Unless he has really strong evidence of it, the specialists are very unlikely to be "trolling" the public. They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.
The statues were obviously carved by expert artists but these "specialists" would have us believe they were subsequently painted by half-assed amateurs. It fails the sniff test so badly, that trolling is a reasonable conclusion. You don't put that much effort into making something only then let some unskilled intern ruin it by covering up all your work with a flat coat of primer and leave it at that.
Unlike the article, your comment, does not provide evidence beyond "sniff test". The article brings up paintings of statues, which is an interesting data point.