Ancient Statues in Living Colors

Sarah Bond:

Although we often romanticize the bare marble of ancient sculpture today, most of these specimens were in fact painted in bright shades of blue, red, yellow, brown and many other hues. Over the past few decades, scientists have worked diligently to study the often-minute traces of paint, inlay and gold leaf used on ancient statues and to use digital technologies to restore them to their original polychromy.

As this history of painted statuary returns to view, it brings with it an unsettling question: if we know these statues were polychromatic, why do they remain lily white in our popular imagination?…

The Apollo of the Belvedere is itself a marble copy of a Greek original likely done in bronze in the 4th century BCE. While many Greek sculptors used bronze for their statuary work, Romans preferred the more durable marble. Particularly during the Roman empire of the second and third centuries CE, sculptors made use of marble more regularly in their copies of bronze originals. While the Romans were, in part, making material decisions, Winckelmann saw something else. In white marble classical sculpture, he viewed the embodiment of ideal beauty. As emerita Princeton historian Nell Irvin Painter details in her book The History of White People, Winckelmann was himself a Eurocentrist who regularly denigrated non-European nationalities such as the Chinese or the Kalmyk. As she puts it, “color in sculpture came to mean barbarism, for they assumed that the lofty ancient Greeks were too sophisticated to color their art.” Winckelmann was wrong, of course, but his visual narrative continues to be told. …

So what does it say to viewers today when museums display gleaming white statues? What does it say when the only people of color one is likely to see appear on a ceramic vessel? Intentional or not, museums present viewers with a false color binary of the ancient world. One that, in its curation, perpetuates this skewed representation of antiquity. The excellent Tumblr “People of Color in European Art History” addresses the dearth of people of color in art history, and museums should take note. As noted on their Tumblr page, the group’s mission is to return color to the past: “All too often, these works go unseen in museums, Art History classes, online galleries, and other venues because of retroactive whitewashing of Medieval Europe, Scandinavia, and Asia.”