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Classical statues were not painted horribly

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Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#141

Post by pqtyw »

meindnoch wrote: post #17

I don't really buy the premise of this article, and honestly I'm not sure I want to. Even if the evidence ends up showing that most statues weren't actually that brightly colored, it seems like we should still favor the garish reconstructions anyway. The vivid, borderline-ugly versions tell a better story and a more useful one, societally. They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are, and how the austere w…

>They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are

Have you seen any ancient frescoes or the handful of surviving paintings, though?

The white marble is of course in-accurate but that doesn't mean our tastes were inherently that different.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#142

Post by hibikir »

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…

Not all painters, and not in all cases: See, for instance, grisalle painting. One can then sketch the highlights and shadows first, and then come in with pretty translucent pigments. When the pigment is what is expensive, it can be more economical. We know for sure many a renaissance painting and fresco was done this way, and some of us do it today.

Now, was it possible that, given the pigments available, they were better off just going with the most saturated thing they could possibly have, and then work from there? Absolutely. But the right argument here isn't that "Painters layer paint this way", but that, as the article indicates, they are unlikely to be unsophisticated artists that don't believe shadows and highlights. So the highlighting and the shading must be in the place where we can't see, because we assume they must exist.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#143

Post by xp84 »

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…

This practice of defining a reconstruction so pedantically as to be wholly unlike real life is just so dumb to me, as a layperson. This would be like “recreating” the experience of using a Commodore 64 but we can’t find any intact copies of the software at all so we provide a fake “OS” that requires the user to write code in ASM only, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, behold our reconstruction! This is what it was like!”

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#144

Post by mkoubaa »

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.

Have you encountered modern art?

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#145

Post by pqtyw »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #122
pqtyw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They show us what the base layers were, and what pigments of the day looked like. It may be an academic point. But they are academics.

Well they might as well show the texture of unprocessed marble as well. This is not particularly different.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#146

Post by mkoubaa »

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.

Not amateurs, artists. Look at any modern art and you'll understand that looking like crap is kind of the point nowadays

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#147

Post by xg15 »

wisty wrote: post #111
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…

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. th…

The problem is that there is no "missing data" color, so that discipline would default to marble white, which is just as made up as the rest.

I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.

If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#148

Post by hibikir »

mikkupikku wrote: post #55
empath75 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a middling warhammer miniatures painter would have done a better job of painting these statues than the reconstructions.

Makes me wonder if they ever used the same sort of gimmicky paint, like paint with mica flakes to make something look metallic.

They couldn't use the same paint, if just because for miniature painting we are almost always running acrylics, so it's all plastic binding the pigments. Even a modern oil paint is quite a bit more advanced than what they could do then.

They also had a significant disadvantage in pigment availability. Chances are that there's a whole lot of modern, synthetic pigments among the colors you use regularly. Pyrrole Red is from 1974, for example.

We know that painters were well aware of things like how many good, natural pigments get different outcomes when diluted (go see what happens as you thin ultramarine), so it's not as if they had no technoology. But something like mica vs aluminum vs just gold leaf is a budgetary issue, both today and back then. You will find that good metallics are more expensive and avoid mica. But for an important statue, I suspect they'd take fewer cost cutting shortcuts, just like we can tell in renaissance and medieval art that got to us in relatively good shape. This is the kind of thing some people spend their lives studying.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#149

Post by jtr1 »

arrrg wrote: post #78

Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions? 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…

The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#150

Post by larkost »

pqtyw wrote: post #136
esperent wrote: post #2

I've literally never heard anyone say that classical statues were painted "horribly", and unless I missed it, there's no sources in this article that say that, either (just several links to the same New Yorker article talking about whiteness). 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…

Why would the painting style they used for statues be so massively different from frescoes, mosaics and paintings during the same period, though?

I did find it odd that there was no discussion about whether those other media now represent the exact colors that they had when they were originally created. I know from experience that colors fade, but the argument seems to ignore that.

I also know that most of the old paintings that we have today have been though multiple rounds of "refreshment" in order to counter both the fading and dirt/soot that they were exposed to over the years (remember: most of these were displayed by torchlight/lamplight/candlelight for centuries). Nowadays there is a real emphasis on trying to produce an original ascetic, but that has not always been the case.

So I would want a better discussion of how accurate those "standard candles" are.

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