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gaynerdcomic: jinxasaurus: humansofcolor: prokopetz: sarahtypeswords: wetorturedsomefolks: memejacker: several-talking-corpses: memejacker: caligula had anime eyes wait romans painted their marble sculptures it looks like a cheap theme park ride mascot yep here’s a statue of Augustus and 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.) Sorry, I keep reblogging this over and over, the last comment is unbelievable. Wow. Same thing for the pillars. They were all very brightly colored. Michalangello was not primarily a painter, but a sculptor. So if you think that the statues would look gaudy, these artists were painstakingly detailed and you can bet your asses the painting would probably have made them look nearly lifelike. This was an entire system. They didn’t say “eh let’s put some crappy paint on there and call it a day.” No. It would have been amazing. That makes sense. Residual particles of paint would give us the general colors (or at least the base colors) but certainly not the detail. -- source link
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