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Classical statues were not painted horribly

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Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#111

Post by wisty »

griffzhowl wrote: post #57
Geonode wrote: post #28

I 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…

Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed.

The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle.

I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#112

Post by bluGill »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #97
bluGill wrote: post #19

One 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. Y…

I don't see how you are disagreeing with me.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#113

Post by pqtyw »

griffzhowl wrote: post #57
Geonode wrote: post #28

I 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…

> have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers

Why do they even bother with the "reconstructions" if they know that they are inherently inaccurate, though

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#114

Post by bondarchuk »

the_af wrote: post #90
empath75 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality? 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 contempor…

How do you prevent introducing a bias that then becomes what we "know" about how statues were painted? By introducing modern aesthetic sensibilities and present them as plausible, we then reinforce that this is how statues were painted back then, and we don't know . 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 ho…

So let's introduce a bias then, who cares? It's not a mortal offense. It would be cool to see statues painted realistically and non-horribly. And as TFA notes we have frescoes, mosaics, encaustic portraits etc.. that could be used as a guideline.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#115

Post by pqtyw »

aylons wrote: post #72
Geonode wrote: post #28

I 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…

The archaeologists know that and say as much in TFA: "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…

> that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked

Meaning that these "reconstructions" are a pretty pointless and have no real purpose.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#116

Post by [deleted] »

smallnix wrote: post #100
mikkupikku wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#117

Post by nyeah »

mikkupikku wrote: post #66
rwmj wrote: post #7

His 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.

Meh. Nyeah? "Trolling" is a reasonable hypothesis but not a reasonable conclusion.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#118

Post by cxvrfr »

the_af wrote: post #44
fsloth wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject." 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 e…

> 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?

Perhaps... it's just that they collaborated with experts on publishing coloring books for five year olds due to some reason.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#119

Post by RajT88 »

kijin wrote: post #93
griffzhowl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are not dinosaurs, so have rather less skin in the game when it comes to accuracy.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#120

Post by nyeah »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #82
numlocked wrote: post #3

Good read! The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best. > 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…

> The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best. 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.

Sure, but medieval European art generally sucked. (Call this a hypothesis if that helps.)

Compare the damn cave paintings of buffalo to most medieval European art. Some of the 10k-year-old stuff is much better observed. Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint. I'm sorry about that.

It's just not always taste. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes people are bad at making art.

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