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Classical statues were not painted horribly
171–180 of 351 posts
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#172You know what's crazy too is that in colonial America all the brick buildings you see in Boston, etc were also all painted? Well, limewashed technically. You never would have left a bare brick facade. You would put 10-20 coats of thin whitewash on it, or if you wanted it to look like raw brick you would tint the limewash red, and then go in and touch up the mortar lines trompe l'oeil style with white. Bare brick as a…
Did the limewashing impart some kind of protection to the masonry? I know water infiltration and freeze/thaw cycles, particularly with soft brick, can wreck masonry.
Yes, it sheds water and sacrificially resists weathering of the underlying brick, while being breathable so the brick can dry out as well
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#173Earlier 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.
They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though.
Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases.
And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reconstruc…
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Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#175They should have just 3D-printed the whole thing back then already!
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#176His 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.
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best Perhaps they're simply the wrong people for this problem? I'd very much prefer to see how artists would approach painting the figures, instead of scientists and conservators. Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best. Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the…
The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#177Earlier 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.
I think that the medieval art article is making a different point. The art there had a style that was dictated by its purpose and the beliefs of the artists.
For example, most of the examples given in that article are illustrations from manuscripts. This was something (as far as I know) that was new in the western world. The idea that books should be illustrated. And being before the printing press was introduced, each illustration (of which there were often many per page) was hand made. This added a substantial amount of time to an already labor-intensive process. And each image was not intended to be a standalone work of art.
Also, some of the other examples are of iconography. That style remains, largely unchanged to this day. If you do an image search for "religious iconography", you will see plenty of examples of sacred art that are not visually realistic but are meant to be metaphorically or spiritually realistic.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#178"Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? One factor may be that the specialists who execute them lack the skill of classical artists, who had many years of training in a great tradition."
Has he ever met people doing this stuff?.. Why write about something you know so little about? Why do people think that they can talk about things without experience, based on abstract reasoning?
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#179they should get someone who paints warhammer or similar to do it, they'd look amazing!
Provided, of course, that they thin their paints.
Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly
#180This is a thoughtful thread with good points on both sides. It feels like the gap between academic certainty and public expectation is the real issue. Clear context probably matters more than perfect reconstruction. Interesting discussion overall.