261–270 of 351 posts
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Weell, there's a reason the Renaissance is called "renaissance" and not something else.
The Renaissance is really the tail end of the Middle Ages historically, and the name is a bit of propaganda, just like "Enlightenment". People flatter themselves.
13th century. Not just the art, but for the content. Truly ahead of its time.
Oh, I see, if you look at the statue with the right eyes it's really obvious what they did. They started with a white primer then gave it a red-tinted wash all over, thinned down for the body parts so that they look flesh-coloured (ish... ) and progressively darker for the spear, helmet and shield, then the cape, and then the hair. This really helps to keep the mo... the statue together in terms of colour, and it's very efficient since the entire palette is tones of a single tint. I guess they gave the helmet and the spear the old non-metallic metal treatment, then they highlighted the helmet, the cape, the shield and the spear, and blended the feathers on the helmet.
That's a really classically modern paint job that you might find in any miniature painted to modern miniature-painting standards [1]. In fact it's surprisingly modern, I'd even go as far as to say that the one-tint wash job is positively avant-guard. I'm certainly trying that next time I paint a model with nice, big, flat areas like that one... like the statue, I mean.
>> I have given an example of this below a famous mosaic depicting a statue of a boxer, from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae. Note the subtlety of color recorded by the mosaic, in which the boxer is reddened and sunburned on his shoulders and upper chest, but not his pale upper thighs. There is nothing here to suggest that the statues depicted would have struck a modern viewer as garish.
Oh and here I guess they started with a zenithal primer, with the lighting coming from below and the right, then they did some dry-brushing with a darker tint. Nice job!
No but seriously, it's a bit dumb to think that the ancients would just apply a thick layer of basecoat and call it a day. If we do all those elaborate things today on plastic miniatures, I can imagine what they did.
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One quote I remember from the exhibit, which I looked up to make sure I got the wording right, was an anecdote about one of the most famous Greek sculptors, as recorded by Pliny: "When asked which of his works in marble he liked the most, Praxiteles used to say: ‘Those to which Nikias has set his hand’—so highly did he esteem his coloring of the surface."
One takeaway from that quote is the obvious: one reason we know that ancient statues were painted is that ancient authors said so. Another takeaway is that the painters, not just the sculptors, were famous, and the ancients recognized that some were better than others.
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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!…
The alternative is no reconstruction at all on one hand, and adding fake detail on another hand And if one wants to add fake detail, why should archeologists be involved? Just have AI generate them
Reconstruction, (similar to translation) is an art that combines carefuly study of evidence and craftfully filling in gaps and adding in detail where necessary (or leaving details unfilled and ambiguous to communicate the impossibility of total translation or reconstruction!) to present some communicable form of the original that gives the viewer some closer but imperfect access to it.
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You've highlighted a very cogent comparison! Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex. We might be at t…
I've not seen the latest Jurassic Park movie, but I've seen a clip with velociraptor's with feathers, and maybe quetzlcoatalus too? Along with colourful skin on eg compsagnathus. They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
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Yes, the suggestion that they're trolling goes too far. However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788... But they still don't add anything without direct evidence - where there's evidence in later statues for more subtle colouring, they include that.
I’m reminded of a Reddit thread long ago about a reconstruction of Roman garum by some American scientists. In their paper they conclusively declared that it tasted foul and a Filipino Redditor replied saying “This actually sounds a lot like the fish sauce we use in SE Asia. I wonder if people from a different culinary tradition would find it less off putting or even tasty?” Cue a bunch of Redditors downvoting the po…
Can't find the better source on that specifically now but this is a nice article about the Roman trade with India and mentions the coins found in Vietnam and even Korea about half way down
https://www.thecollector.com/why-was-the-roman-indian-ocean-...
On the other hand, it's not implausible that maritime societies come up with their own fish sauce independently
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Another thing is they may have wanted to use newly available colors to show they had new colors -the novelty aspect. Kind of like when people learned to make aluminum it was sought as a luxury item —whereas now no one would think of aluminum as a luxury item.
Extreme example: here's the Hawa Mahal in India https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:One_of_many_windows_... The large plain panes of boldly coloured stained glass probably looked particularly magnificent when coloured glass was rare and expensive and achieving consistency very difficult. They look somewhat less sophisticated in an era in which the multiple bright coloured translucent pane aesthetic is more often…
Oerhaps they indeed are that garish as in your example, but simple image search shows plenty of examples that seem to suggest the image you posted is simply a very amateurish photograph. After all, European churches are full of glass windows with very strong contrasts of primary colours and they are very pretty indeed.
Yeah. I cannot thank enough those other ancients who dug up all statues and assumed they were all white.
I'm thinking about Michelangelo's The Pieta and oh so many others. Call it a lucky accident or "differing taste" or "mastering new techniques" or whatever you want, I take Michelangelo's The Pieta vs these "correctly re-colored" statues from early Rome any time.
Even once it's been fully known they used to be flashy, hardly anyone started sculpting masterpiece then asking kids to color them: I'm thinking about late 19th Rodin's The Kiss for example.
Just like our usage of the toilets, our taste evolved, not differed.
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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…
Perspective wasn't developed! The Greeks and Romans used it just fine, for example.
What was lost was artistic training because there wasn't sufficient economic market for it. As soon as you got sufficient economic incentive, art magically improves again. This is stunningly obvious if you look at Athens and then Pompeii and then Rome and then the Vatican (with the attendant backslide until the Renaissance as you note).
Interesting parallel to modern--will AI cause a huge backslip in art since the economic market for artists is being destroyed?