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espill:medusamori:argonauticae:beautifuloutlier:prokopetz:sarahtypeswords:wetorturedsomefolks:memejacker:several-talking-corpses:memejacker:caligula had anime eyeswait romans painted their marble sculpturesit looks like a cheap theme park ride mascotyephere’s a statue of Augustusand here’s a reproduction of the statue with the colors restored i honestly think that what we consider the height of sculpture in all of Western civilization being essentially the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit to be evidence of the potential merit of found art“I tried coloring it and then I ruined it”And you know what the funniest part is? The paint didn’t just wear off over time. A bunch of asshole British historians back in the Victorian era actually went around scrubbing the remaining paint off of Greek and Roman statues - often destroying the fine details of the carving in the process - because the bright colours didn’t fit the dignified image they wished to present of the the cultures they claimed to be heirs to. This process also removed visible evidence of the fact that at least some of the statues thus stripped of paint had originally depicted non-white individuals.Whenever you look at a Roman statue with a bare marble face, you’re looking at the face of imperialist historical revisionism.(The missing noses on a lot of Egyptian statues are a similar deal. It’s not that the ancient Egyptians made statues with strangely fragile noses. Many Victorian archaeologists had a habit of chipping the noses off of the statues they brought back, then claiming that they’d found them that way - because with the noses intact, it was too obvious that the statues were meant to depict individuals of black African descent.)There’s a lot of good academic discussion about chromophobia in modern Western aesthetics and how it links to colonialism.a couple of general points:1) the reason the reconstructions here look like “the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit” is because they’re reconstructions. this is not actually what these statues looked like, and in my opinion they do roman art a massive disservice. the reason they look so “gaudy” (which is actually the exact same colonial attitude that led directly to the literal whitewashing of graeco-roman art, nice, very nice) is because the colours have been applied flat, with no shading or blending to give the impression of shadow. looking at contemporary roman portraiture, it’s clear that they did actually have quite a sophisticated grasp of shading and colouring, and to imagine that they would just suddenly forget how to do the dark bits when they were painting on stone is ludicrous. for context, this is a portrait of paquius proculo, a fresco from pompeii, dating from around 20-30AD, ten years earlier than that bust of caligula:(also of interest in this regard are the fayum mummy portraits, dating from the second century AD; again, although they are of varying quality, the best of them demonstrate a clear understanding of shading. for example: and, to be honest: do you really think a civilisation that produced thisjust, what, didn’t get paint? these reconstructions are laughable, not because they’re colourful but because they’re presenting an incredibly sophisticated culture as unable to understand simple artistic concepts; something that i think itself contributes to the idea of colourfully painted statues being ‘silly’ and ‘gaudy’, which again is an incredibly colonially-influenced idea. 2) the reason graeco-roman statues are often missing the noses is because most excavated statues are generally missing the noses. they are fragile. the head of a statue is basically a football with details; the nose is the only protruding part and is comparatively narrow and thin (as opposed to, say, an arm or leg, which takes more force to break off but is still very much detachable, c.f the venus di milo) and is very, very easy to break off. although i am absolutely the last person to deny the racism that has been present in classics, the noses thing is really not a great example.The noses is thing is literally the worst example because it is literally factually untrue, as is the idea that Victorians were scrubbing paint off statues in order to hide ???? IDK what exactly you think they were trying to hide by removing paint. Look at this painting, by a leading academician Lawrence Alma-Tadema and displayed at the Royal Academy:or this:See also, the discussion surrounding John Gibson’s Tinted Venus:John Gibson, of course, being the leading British sculptor of his age, the least controversial and most respected of his generation, and held to be the most Greek of the neoclassical sculptors in his ability to supposefdly reproduce if not surpass the finest works of ancient sculpture– and he polychromed his Venus. Almost everyone knew that statues had been polychromed, the question was one of modern taste and morals as to whether or not new sculpture should follow the ancient practice as closely as possible and tint the marble, or if it was more elevated, refined, and  morally uplifting to retain the white marble and a visible distinction between stone and flesh and to focus on the form rather than the ability to mimic lifelikeness or painting.As for the nose thing and the supposed destruction to hide race: see all of the dialogue surrounding the race of Cleopatra in Victorian art criticism, especially c.f. Edmonia Lewis’s the Death of Cleopatra vs William Wetmore Story’s: the public, critics, artists, and historians were all aware of Egypt’s racial complexity and the fact that most ancient Egyptians were of black African or Semitic descent. Most of the noses broken off deliberately in the post-classical world were done by religiously motivated iconoclasts, not racist Victorians trying to hide The Truth About Africa from Innocent Pure White People or whatever this rumored motivation. If Victorians WERE breaking sculpture, which I would LOVE to see anyone’s primary source documentation or peer-reviewed scholarly articles on because I’ve never seen it, I would guess (and this is an educated guess) that it had more to do with a late Romantic cult of fragments and ruins rather than racism. I’m not saying the Victorians weren’t SUPER RACIST, but for fuckssake go look at a museum website once in a while instead of MedPOC’s nonsense. The comment about Victorians doesn’t make sense either because what about countries that were not Victorian or under the Anglo-Saxon sphere of influence? Spain, Italy, Portugal, we have far more Roman ruins and art than the UK and ours isn’t pigmented either… did we let English people come and unearth Roman ruins, scrub pigment off the statues, and then bury them again? -- source link
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