Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Classical statues were not painted horribly

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 351 posts

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#301

Post by simiones »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #239
marcellus23 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally If I'm understanding you right, you're suggesting the author thinks that researchers are intentionally doing poor constructions to undermine public perception of classical art as part of some sort of culture war? I don't see anything in the article to suggest this

> The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling. It's towards the end of the article. He doesn't directly mention culture war stuff but he does talk about it being "iconoclastic." I think it's a reasonable inter…

That phrase suggests more that the author believes this is done for spectacle, knowing that it will attract attention to the researcher far more than a nice-looking painted statue would. Basically he seems to be accusing these researchers of doing flame-bait for clicks, like those kitchen-top meal TikTok videos designed to get engagement by making people angry.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#302

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

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…

I would be curious to know if the treatment of statues in terms of "making them ugly and ridiculous to the point of being insulting" is roughly uniform across the different historical cultures being treated to this "reconstruction" procedure.

i.e. is there evidence that there is comfort in trolling using Roman or Greek vs Assyrian, Nubian etc. Or do they just like to make everything bright and blocky.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#303

Post by arrrg »

mistercheph wrote: post #259
arrrg wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To get closer to an answer to this you should still talk to the people doing the actual work? I know that many scholars have an uncomfortable relationship to the PR work their research institutions are doing, but they themselves don’t strike me as unapproachable or closed to nuanced discussion. Seems weird to ignore that perspective and wildly speculate from the outside.

Who is inside and who is outside depends on your (subjective) spatial interpretation of the situation. It could just as well be said that a bunch of scholars disconnected from the culture, history, and technique of fine arts (except as objects of scholarly interest) are wildly speculating from the outside about the nature of the objects, and people interested in these things are starting to ask "Why are these silly t…

How do you think public discourse spaces are created? By approaching and talking to people when you write about them! That doesn’t just magically happen …

I merely would have expected some humility when you characterize the work of other scholars from the outside without even talking to them. (Outside here is relative. Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside.)

If those scholars don’t want to talk to you, fair enough, probably no humility needed. If you don’t want to talk to them (which, fair enough, not everyone is cut out or wants to do journalistic work) you better be humble and maximally charitable, though.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#304

Post by red75prime »

sudobash1 wrote: post #177
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.

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, ea…

It's all good and spiritual, but it seems that they lost some artistic tools like point-projection perspective during non-that-well-documented ages.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#305

Post by regentbowerbird »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #289
regentbowerbird wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware there are artistic styles beyond photorealism?

Yes, but in that case, as this article argues, you'd expect something that looked good. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/teentitans/images/e/e3/TTO... The Honnecourt illustrations strongly suggest that (a) photorealism is the goal, but (b) Honnecourt doesn't know how to draw it. He does things like place a person's right eye at a different angle to the rest of the face than the left eye has. But hey, how likely is i…

Teen titans as reference xD stop it you're killing me

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#306

Post by notahacker »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #268
notahacker wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you been there? Because the photo you posted does not seem to give a very good representation of those architectual details at all: https://www.alamy.com/stained-glass-window-vitrage-indian-or... 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…

Yes, I've been there, and been struck by the toy/disco vibes they gave off despite being an integral part of a beautifully laid out palace, which is why I posted on the subject, but it wouldn't be HN without someone who hasn't been there being contrary for the sake of it...

Shockingly, some of the windows look different from other windows and some of the colour combinations and pane shapes look better than others! They also have more effect when the light catches them directly. But yes, they're big plain panes of chunky glass (impressively big and impressively consistently plain at the time) which don't resemble the painted detail and tiny leaded panes of European churches at all, as I mentioned, and I suspect the author of TFA would be unimpressed.

Some more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawa_Mahal#/media/File:Hawa_Ma... https://www.alamy.com/hawa-mahal-lit-up-at-night-in-jaipur-i... https://thrillingtravel.in/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ratan-... https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-tr... https://theyoungbigmouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/stai...

And some stained glass windows from some village churches, for comparison http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/stainedglass.html

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#307

Post by Sharlin »

anthk wrote: post #260
Sharlin wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weell, there's a reason the Renaissance is called "renaissance" and not something else.

Go read the Book of the Games from the 1200's and now you'll learn something. The Middle ages were centuries wide. The last centuries had nothing to do, say, with the 5th century.

I should have clarified that I meant there are reasons why the people who branded the Renaissance branded it like that.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#308

Post by JoeAltmaier »

buescher wrote: post #219
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Max had no idea whatsoever what he was doing. He did all the steps, didn't stop at the 'jesus that's disgusting' phase. Saw it through to the end. Even the complaints from his neighbors, he put up with. And got the most divine, golden syrupy sauce you can imagine, at the end. After all the gagging and stirring, straining and filtering and pressing.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#309

Post by nyeah »

watwut wrote: post #297
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.

The medieval art was better then those cave paintings. Like, common. > Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint. They could. And they had wide variety of what they painted and how.

I've given up asking for an example to support that.

Re: Classical statues were not painted horribly

#310

Post by Employee6645 »

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.

"Written By Angelika Semynina" She writes exactly what we're taught in Russian universities; it's a textbook, almost word for word. Apparently, she's simply repeating the words of her teachers. I haven't seen anything like it anywhere else, and it comes not from professional art scholars, but from "philosophers." So I consider it more a form of coping than the result of scientific research. I have two Russian degrees, one in cultural studies and one in philosophy, and this is just my opinion.
Post reply on HN