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Classical statues were not painted horribly

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Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#211

Post by archagon »

nyeah wrote: post #120
CGMthrowaway wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Utterly bizarre to claim that a diverse group of people within an 800-year period were simply “bad at art.”

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#212

Post by mkehrt »

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…

A while back the Met in New York had an exhibit of painted reconstructed statues where they let artists make reasonable guesses about what the statues would have looked like. It was pretty fantastic.

Here's an article with one picture I could find, along with a few of the more saturated ones (NSFW artistic nudity): https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibi...

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#213

Post by golemotron »

Jakob wrote: post #84
aylons wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Contemporary historic preservation sees itself as the guardian of historical substance. The content of a monument is bound to the preservation of the inherited material. Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated. It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments…

I'm in the conserving camp. It's more truthful than the narrativization that accompanies attempts to restore. We should remember that we all had a reptilian vision of dinosaurs for decades (centuries?) before the latest feathered view. We would have been better with neither. Just display the bones: what we have. Everything else burdens the public with guesses.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#214

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #208
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…

Are there really no statues with surviving full paint remnants?

No. 2000 years is a long time.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#215

Post by thaumasiotes »

qsort wrote: post #11
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…

I believe the argument isn't that ancient statues were ugly, but rather that reconstructions are ugly (unfortunately this has been used to argue against the now ascertained fact that ancient statues were indeed painted). Purely subjective judgement from someone not trained in the arts: that photo of the Augusto di Prima Porta doesn't look like a great paint-job. The idea that, like the statue itself, the painting mus…

> the now ascertained fact that ancient statues were indeed painted

"Now ascertained"? Ancient sources specifically say they were painted.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#216

Post by nyeah »

archagon wrote: post #211
nyeah wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Utterly bizarre to claim that a diverse group of people within an 800-year period were simply “bad at art.”

No need to generalize. Post some clear exceptions. Or if the statement turns out to be "utterly bizarre but correct" I'm fine with that.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#217

Post by twelvechairs »

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 other side is lack of colourfast pigments back then. Underlayers would be cheap and colourfast. Top layers would usually be more expensive and deteriorate much more quickly.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#218

Post by archagon »

nyeah wrote: post #216
archagon wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utterly bizarre to claim that a diverse group of people within an 800-year period were simply “bad at art.”

No need to generalize. Post some clear exceptions. Or if the statement turns out to be "utterly bizarre but correct" I'm fine with that.

What do you mean by “exceptions”? Who are we, in our own infinitesimal slice of human history, to judge historic taste in art? And is naturalism the be-all, end-all of good taste? If so, we need to throw out the majority of art in the 20th century.

This is a question for an art historian, not some anon on a tech forum. (For what it’s worth, I find Medieval and Renaissance art to be about equally tepid despite the difference in execution. And plenty of people non-ironically enjoy Medieval art despite its supposed deficiencies.)

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#219

Post by buescher »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #123
buescher wrote: post #14

I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by mor…

Huh. That's exactly how you make garum - an unpleasant horror of mashed fish. Refer to Max Miller and his spectacularly successful effort to reproduce Garum in his back yard.

It's one thing if you make a youtube video starting from already knowing how to make modern fish sauces, and what they're supposed to taste like, and quite another level of horror if you don't. My recollection of the letter or paper or whatever it was was that the person who wrote it was not at all pleased with the result.

There are folks that will insist that we don't know at all what Roman garum really tasted like or everything involved in its preparation, and they're not exactly wrong since Colatura di Alici can only be traced back to the middle ages, but it's also oddly obtuse. I think it was probably like modern fish sauces but Roman garum could have been as different from Colatura and Asian fish sauce as those are from Worcestershire.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#220

Post by nyeah »

archagon wrote: post #218
nyeah wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to generalize. Post some clear exceptions. Or if the statement turns out to be "utterly bizarre but correct" I'm fine with that.

What do you mean by “exceptions”? Who are we, in our own infinitesimal slice of human history, to judge historic taste in art? And is naturalism the be-all, end-all of good taste? If so, we need to throw out the majority of art in the 20th century. This is a question for an art historian, not some anon on a tech forum. (For what it’s worth, I find Medieval and Renaissance art to be about equally tepid despite the dif…

"some anon on a tech forum"

Don't sell yourself short. Post some art from those 800 years that doesn't suck, and I'll change my views.

Sure, there's plenty of crap in 20th century art. I've seen examples of that. But that's a different subject.

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