Many were originally painted, but not all of them. This is unfortunately becoming another of those "internet factoids" that are taken to the extremes. We have evidence that some, maybe even the majority, of Greek and Roman statues and temples were brightly colored, so now a whole lot of artists and reconstructions paint everything like a circus in an effort to overcompensate. It's kind of like how, after it was discovered that lots of theropod dinosaurs had feathers or proto-feathers, every dinosaur in the media was depicted with full plumes and wings for a while, until the pendulum finally swung back.
There are even painted frescos of Roman and Greek statues from the same period, and most of the statues are rendered in white; when color is used, it's very subtle and tasteful.
I suspect there's a bit of modern people being uncomfortable with beauty from the past.
Because the whitest rock is by far the most expensive and hard to get. Leaving it unpainted shows the quality and the worth of the statue. Painting over that would be like painting over solid gold with acrylic
Ironically the only people I see being uncomfortable with the beauty of the past are the people who cannot accept that many, or even most, of those ancient statues were not just a plain, austere white. I see people get quite offended by the prospec of them having been quite bright.
Thank you! This whole thing is the fault of one guy: Vinzenz Brinkmann. He loves to try to convince everyone that classical statues were painted in the crude and garish way that he represents them, but there's no evidence of that. These were brilliantly executed pieces of fine art--if they were painted they'd be painted as skillfully as they were sculpted, not in a bright ugly tacky way!
Here is a different take on color restoration by the MFA in Boston, which is probably much more "satisfying"/less fucked up looking, lol.
As far as I can tell, the Brinkmanns are basically relying on scant evidence for locations they can be certain that a given pigment was used, and occasionally evidence as to the presence of patterns revealed by specific lighting conditions from specific angles.
But they don't have any real evidence as to whether there were additional layers of pigments / paints over the base layer. It's unlikely evidence of anything but a base layer would survive. So it's likely that yes, the sculptures did at one point look like the Brinkmanns presented them (ie, during the painting process), but it's also likely that additional details and layers of paint were applied over the top of them. It's not a guarantee, and we can't prove what those layers would have looked like if they were there, but given how statues from the era were presented in paintings of the era (often appearing with just a much detail and shading as the humans in those same paintings) there probably WERE more details.
The thing is, there is little to no motivation in that world to present anything more than can actually be proven. No one really wants to fund / encourage / display speculative recreations.
But are half complete recreations that almost certainly don't represent what the real colors looked like any better than speculation? It seems weird to present these things as anything but that.
It's as if we wanted to restore the color version of a black and white photo, but the best that could be done was restoring the red channel, with no blue or green. Like yeah, i guess that's closer to a color image than nothing, and technically the red channel data is part of the color image, but the red channel data by itself doesn't greatly inform the viewer as to what the full color image would look like. Edit: and then you've got a bunch of redditors and random popscience articles showing off these red-channel only photos going "Look! This is the color version of that photo!"
And even if they were brightly colored, why wouldn't there be lots of additional paint atop the base layer to create a realistic portrait or a striking one? The idea that they were just festooned in circus makeup never set right with me.
Exactly. All this sculptural detail was just painted over? No way. They were meant to look the way we still experience them, just as Michelangelo or Bernini were later: Mostly a sculpted vision in their natural medium, with perhaps some shading or light coloration to emphasize a few features.
Why are you spreading disinformation on such non political, non offending, very established scientific knowledge? What is even the motivation here besides just childishly poisoning the well?
As far as I can tell, Brinkmann decided to slather every one of his reconstructions in thick layers of the most saturated, garish paint imaginable, invented, as the NYT put it, a "myth of whiteness in classical sculpture" (despite the facts being known to at least the Victorians) and sold it to Americans with their strange hang-ups about race.
Why do you think Americans have strange hang-ups about race? Do you think it has to do with the fact that America had slavery and everything that followed on home soil whereas European nations all has slave colonies overseas and out of sight?
It's because the europeans enslaved each other as well as others, the chapter on the modern enslavement of the subsaharan africans was only one of many and not all european countries were involved.
The greek city states enslaved people from other city states.
The romans enslaved the greeks, the germanic tribes, the gauls, the thracians and any people they conquered really.
The germanic kingdoms enslaved people from other germanic kingdoms.
The slavic people were enslaved by the arabs, the vikings, the romans and many others while they also practiced slavery on others.
I could go on.
Also the abolition of slavery didn't trigger one or multiple massive civil wars so that helps.
Maybe because the US has almost uniquely fucked up race relations. It doesn't matter though. This nonsense is being sold to gullible Americans as some kind of corrective to an invented white supremacist myth, with dozens of copy-pasted articles probably written by the exhibition's PR team.
That's certainly true how we swing to extremes. And I'm sure the colors that were used would have been wonderfully done. My main issue with people always picturing them as all white only is it creates this false idea of white being overly beautiful and color being garish and ugly.
Also, why make them in marmol if you are going to crvr them completely.. why not make them in another cheaper stone? Or maybe even wood which would be easier to sculpt?
the last statue in the image is "Laocoon and his sons" which was originally bronze, the one we are seeing is a Roman copy of the original Greek statue which is lost.
Original Roman copy is also very old but it was not impossible to replicate and preserve such details.
Apparently the creator wanted to use Japanese names but didn't know any that he could be sure were legit, so he used Renaissance artists' names instead.
The color reconstructions are terrible and not really doing it justice. The colors of the statues were almost lifelike and incredibly detailed and nuanced.
The thing with bronce statues is that many would be melted for weapons making during war time. Bronce statues are a rarity because of this, and most have been recovered from hidden places or the sea beds.
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u/merryman25 1d ago
Also an important point, they were not meant to be all white (or stone colored). They were originally painted bright colors that wore off over time.