It's knowledge. by ancient Greek texts, that the statuary of the time was in fact generally painted. However, we must consider two issues: there were artists responsible only for the color finishing of the sculptures and these artists had great recognition, as much as the artists who created the modeling. Considering the extremely high level of technique and sensitivity achieved by the sculptors, it is to be assumed that the finishing and painting work would be equally harmonious and magnificent. Certainly very different from these modern projections.
Something tells me that ancient sculptors would've been outraged by such reconstructions. It's hard to believe that someone could spend so much effort working out the smallest details only to paint everything in three or four colors. Given that their frescoes and mosaics looked realistic, they knew how to work with pigments. Late antique sculptures did a good job of conveying the tone and emotion, if you imagine them painted at the same level of quality, the colors could have been much less vivid and with more detail. The artists may have further emphasized the shadows and texture of the material, perhaps even with the fading of the colors we have lost some of the original context. It would be interesting to read research on this topic
@@smarthistory-art-history I think some artists might see this view of their sculpts as an insult to their talent. Like "do you really think I'm going to destroy my work by painting it like that?". If we recall the legend of how the Corinthian order was invented, at least some artists treated their art as something personal
It's not just the ancient world that w epas a riot of colour. In medieval times,the church facades that survive are,now stripped white & silent,when in actuality, they would have appeared almost gaudy,with chouristers "hidden behind" this overwhelming facade! Giving people at the time s temporal overload,the insides where also richly decorated, as were ancient temples. The idea that the ancient world & even the notvdo ancient,was monochromatic is erroneous. Every documentary that altered this perception is vitally important to our understanding & recreation of that which came before us.
In some medieval british churches I’ve visited there are some remnants of colour in some parts. They’re mostly cold damp and stony of course but you can come across murals and patterns.
I remember when I was in Nuremberg, Germany a few years ago seeing the interior portal of the Frauenkirche and the Schöner Brunnen (literally "beautiful fountain") both brightly painted. They were probably restored following World War 2 but they really gave me a good glimpse of what medieval sculptures used to look like in their prime!
@@Jonpoo1the church I used to work in had a massive pink archway above the nave, now it’s plain white, but you can see it’s color from a scale model done before it was covered up. So sad we lost these beautiful murals
I spent time in college studying art, especially Mesoamerican, Greek/Roman and it's the oddest feeling when you see them colorized - it's almost unnerving. So cool to see but it really twists your brain not seeing things as detailed white carvings but essentially 3D paintings.
I like the painted ones better. I like ancient sculpture for the connection to history and ancient people it gives not just it's esthetic. I do wish the modern ones were painted with more depth rather than flat single colors
Yes! 100% Agree. I think they should use the opportunity to employ some artistic license seeing that we can never be entirely accurate. The small Pompeian Woman could have looked gorgeous with some rendering of the form around the face. Just because we found traces of a specific pigment doesn't mean the entire area was encased in that one hue.
@@c7261, and I would bet that as good as the carving of the sculpture, the painting would have matched... meaning some of these may have looked almost lifelike.
Had the wonderful opportunity to visit Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis last May. One thing is sure - the Romans painted everything in vibrant colors whenever they could.
Just visit an Indian hindu temple and you'll see its covered in colour and seeing as that is the last great polytheist classical culture to survive into modernity its our greatest proxy for the Greeks and Romans.
It would be interesting to see them fully coloured side by side. I think it would illustrate how cultures are more interconnected in their artistic practices than is widely recognized.
Even some Rome Catholic Churches still put traditional colored statue inside their church building. Many statues of Catholic saints is colored also. So, actually Rome still keep colored statue tradition even after converted to Christianity.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 Yup. Pretty much all the old gothic churches were originally brightly painted. This drab, colourless aesthetic we're used to today is a relatively modern invention.
Yeah even the church I worked in- an early episcopal building from the 1720s- was painted up until the later half of the 19th century. We had a scale model from the 1800s showing us the color of all the gorgeous mural you’d see in engravings- pink, blue, cream- now the church is white
Terme Boxer, Terme Ruler and the statues at 0:36 look incredible! Just imagine the level of craft it takes to make such human body representation from stone. What a level of art. What a level of culture. Most advanced art that has ever appeared on Earth. Congratulations to Smart History to produce another amazing video.
Do we know how saturated the pigments would have looked? I doubt they'd be as harshly colored as they are depicted. Its hard to get such vibrant colors of paint in modern times.
I wonder why it looks so....scary?? When colored and with eyes?? The bronze at the end, especially creeped me out. But why?? We live in a world of ads and bill boards etc surrounding us with colorful images. So why is this eerie?? Reminds me of the difference between an Easter island statue without and then with its huge white eyes put in. I guess its also like the difference between a mannequin vs a wax museum of accuracy. Its, unnerving somehow.
Spanish polychrome sculpture shows what can be achieved by sensitive polychrome artists. A visit to any confraternity chapel will show things more like what is shown here. It might have been an idea to talk to a decent polychrome artist before coming up with these reconstructions. To be fair I have seen similar things in National Geographic and reconstructions of medieval cathedral façades. The experts really need to talk to some artists
The painting on the reconstructions looks garish and the hair and skin tones are unrealistic. I wonder if in Antiquity the colours were more subtle and naturalistic. The sculpture of the Classical and Hellenistic periods in particular was very sophisticated, detailed and lifelike and I would assume that the painting would have been too.
If you look at frescoes from Pompeii, or the Fayum mummy portraits you can see the artists did understanding the concept of shading/ lighting contrast, but for some reason any modern reconstructions paint with flat out bright colors.
Maybe the originals were much better. Maybe they were intentionally not realistic, in the sense that colors were scarce and hard to come by. So what they had available was eye popping and exciting. Remember these are people who thought anything white was in and of itself unbelievable. Its the reason why the Japanese flag was white with a red circle. White back then was considered unbelievably special. Now we have blank sheets of paper that are white and white is everywhere.
One thing that I have to remind people is that our ability to paint these sculptures pales in comparison to the Ancient's ability to paint. After all, the skills to craft sculpture work of the same quality have been lost, so it's not obscene to think that the skills to paint sculpture work with the same quality have also disappeared.
you are not alone. Have a look at the comments below. And this is the point, isn't it? The sculptures have been stripped of their color to conform to our modern taste.
@anntowey which could be from literally millions of possible sources. They have no idea. They could run the same test on a red shirt from 1950 and come up with tons of different pigments.
Did Wincklemann remove the color or instruct people to remove the color? Or did he find them as white/color faded and assume that was the way they were meant to be?
I am not aware that Wincklemann removed color himself (though that is possible), rather he helped establish value in the unpainted marble, an esthetic that had a profound impact on taste for centuries and that lead to the destruction of the surface patina and the remains of polychromy on many ancient sculptures.
Agreed. The skill of the sculptors seems marred by the flat, garish colors painted on them. I'd be willing to bet that the painters of the time would have done a much better job bringing the statues to life.
1. By the late roman times, weren't the romans finding discolored and by then, ancient, greek statues and imitating them? 2. Does the famous the lack of words in greek and ancient languges (excpetion is egyptian) word for blue, for example, affected the way they painted and perceived colors? 3. How does the science know the painting style was a uniform opaque fill in, like in mspaint? Isn't this a modern assumption projected onto the original artwork? I believe the shock isnt that its colored but that the style is so much like modern hindu art etc.
All good questions but let me address the last since it has been raised in a variety of forms in several of the posts responding to this video. The reconstructed color is indeed flat. Some of that may be the result of an effort on the part of the researchers to be conservative in their approach and to only render what they feel fairly confident of based on the extant color-despite the flattening distortion created. We know that the Greeks and Romans were capable a high degree of naturalism when that was important to them and a great fidelity to naturalistic tonality can be seen in Greek mosaics for example, and so it follows that some sculptural painting would be similarly nuanced. The exhibition does approach this to some degree in the boxer for example. However, it is worth keeping in mind that some sculpture was made to be seen at a significant distance, the archer for example, it does seem plausible that the intention was something bold and garish so that it was clear from afar. We still do this with stage make up.
And sometimes, it is better to be left In white and leave the rest to the imagination to construct. Any added touch is a subjective interpretation. 🌈♥️
I think the problem is that people aren't interpreting it correctly. There is an overwhelming reimagining of classical antiquity as being more bare and stagnant in their artistic practice. Sadly, this has been weaponized by far right revisionists when talking about The West™ It's important to appreciate these works on their own terms as much as possible.
@@c7261 This is one example when the problem is the solution as well. Interpretation of the beholder is all (not only in art). Truth seekers would always appreciate diversity in interpretation, but will always look and find a way to relate (Unite) All to One.
@@c7261 The Only way to grasp the truth is to be there and then. And becoming the one who created it. Since we can not achieve it with so to say methods in hands (strictly material), we need to either be satisfied by whatever is being presented or just get ourselves in the field (of beyond) where all is accessible and all is One.
Not only does literally nobody imagine white marble sculpture as painted, most people don't even know it was ever painted. This is the entire premise of these attempts at reconstruction. Also, lay off your Plato.
Winckelman is a classic example of how you can find genius and folly in the same person, sheesh... As for steles, I'm not sure I care about people looking at my grave, but I'm grateful we haven't gotten to the point of making social-media style tombstones with videos and memes.
Why do they have to paint them in such distasteful, bright colors? They admit they don’t really know how the original colors looked. So, why not pick colors that are restrained and subdued? Instead they paint them in the most tacky colors imaginable.
I think they made a big mistake in the reproductions to use flat colours for entire areas. As they say, we can never be 100% sure. That means we can use a bit of artistic license in rendering their forms.
Eh, I think I gotta side with ol' Johann on this one. They look better (classier) white (or monochrome). Those colors are garish and make the sculptures look like birthday cakes or children's toys.
It's knowledge. by ancient Greek texts, that the statuary of the time was in fact generally painted. However, we must consider two issues: there were artists responsible only for the color finishing of the sculptures and these artists had great recognition, as much as the artists who created the modeling. Considering the extremely high level of technique and sensitivity achieved by the sculptors, it is to be assumed that the finishing and painting work would be equally harmonious and magnificent. Certainly very different from these modern projections.
Something tells me that ancient sculptors would've been outraged by such reconstructions. It's hard to believe that someone could spend so much effort working out the smallest details only to paint everything in three or four colors. Given that their frescoes and mosaics looked realistic, they knew how to work with pigments. Late antique sculptures did a good job of conveying the tone and emotion, if you imagine them painted at the same level of quality, the colors could have been much less vivid and with more detail. The artists may have further emphasized the shadows and texture of the material, perhaps even with the fading of the colors we have lost some of the original context. It would be interesting to read research on this topic
I suspect the ancient artists would have been disappointed. Outrage seems to be a condition of our historical moment.
@@smarthistory-art-history I think some artists might see this view of their sculpts as an insult to their talent. Like "do you really think I'm going to destroy my work by painting it like that?". If we recall the legend of how the Corinthian order was invented, at least some artists treated their art as something personal
It's not just the ancient world that w epas a riot of colour. In medieval times,the church facades that survive are,now stripped white & silent,when in actuality, they would have appeared almost gaudy,with chouristers "hidden behind" this overwhelming facade!
Giving people at the time s temporal overload,the insides where also richly decorated, as were ancient temples.
The idea that the ancient world & even the notvdo ancient,was monochromatic is erroneous. Every documentary that altered this perception is vitally important to our understanding & recreation of that which came before us.
In some medieval british churches I’ve visited there are some remnants of colour in some parts. They’re mostly cold damp and stony of course but you can come across murals and patterns.
I remember when I was in Nuremberg, Germany a few years ago seeing the interior portal of the Frauenkirche and the Schöner Brunnen (literally "beautiful fountain") both brightly painted. They were probably restored following World War 2 but they really gave me a good glimpse of what medieval sculptures used to look like in their prime!
@@Jonpoo1the church I used to work in had a massive pink archway above the nave, now it’s plain white, but you can see it’s color from a scale model done before it was covered up. So sad we lost these beautiful murals
I spent time in college studying art, especially Mesoamerican, Greek/Roman and it's the oddest feeling when you see them colorized - it's almost unnerving. So cool to see but it really twists your brain not seeing things as detailed white carvings but essentially 3D paintings.
I like the painted ones better. I like ancient sculpture for the connection to history and ancient people it gives not just it's esthetic. I do wish the modern ones were painted with more depth rather than flat single colors
Yes! 100% Agree. I think they should use the opportunity to employ some artistic license seeing that we can never be entirely accurate. The small Pompeian Woman could have looked gorgeous with some rendering of the form around the face. Just because we found traces of a specific pigment doesn't mean the entire area was encased in that one hue.
@@c7261, and I would bet that as good as the carving of the sculpture, the painting would have matched... meaning some of these may have looked almost lifelike.
@@NickRoman definitely! That's what the artists aspired to with those statues. Would be a cool project to try and recreate that.
One of my favorite displays at the Met this year! Thanks so much for the overview and sharing with a broader audience
Wow the ancient world was kitsch. Would love to see this exhibition - thank you for bringing a bit of it to us.
Either that or modernity is kitsch and we fell out of honest touch with human common sense
Had the wonderful opportunity to visit Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, and Oplontis last May. One thing is sure - the Romans painted everything in vibrant colors whenever they could.
Just visit an Indian hindu temple and you'll see its covered in colour and seeing as that is the last great polytheist classical culture to survive into modernity its our greatest proxy for the Greeks and Romans.
It would be interesting to see them fully coloured side by side. I think it would illustrate how cultures are more interconnected in their artistic practices than is widely recognized.
Also the Greeks and Romans and Persians would have had interactions with Indians as well. So they would have seen each other and the commonalities.
Even some Rome Catholic Churches still put traditional colored statue inside their church building. Many statues of Catholic saints is colored also. So, actually Rome still keep colored statue tradition even after converted to Christianity.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 Yup. Pretty much all the old gothic churches were originally brightly painted. This drab, colourless aesthetic we're used to today is a relatively modern invention.
Yeah even the church I worked in- an early episcopal building from the 1720s- was painted up until the later half of the 19th century. We had a scale model from the 1800s showing us the color of all the gorgeous mural you’d see in engravings- pink, blue, cream- now the church is white
Please, make a video about Roman gravestones. There's much to say about them.
I think the colored statues are pretty. I hope to see more in the future.
I just cant picture everything brightly colored! The white marble is embedded into my brain! I'm 62 now, and I just can't my idea of Beauty
Sorry. Mistake. I can't change my idea of Beauty. I find the marble texture as part of the Beauty of the statue..I mean, Marble, to me, is Gorgeous!!
Terme Boxer, Terme Ruler and the statues at 0:36 look incredible! Just imagine the level of craft it takes to make such human body representation from stone. What a level of art. What a level of culture. Most advanced art that has ever appeared on Earth. Congratulations to Smart History to produce another amazing video.
Do we know how saturated the pigments would have looked? I doubt they'd be as harshly colored as they are depicted. Its hard to get such vibrant colors of paint in modern times.
Please see our response to a similar question below.
absolute tosh, have you seen the green from malachite, the red from cinnebar or the blue from azurite or lapis lazulli ?
I wonder why it looks so....scary?? When colored and with eyes?? The bronze at the end, especially creeped me out. But why?? We live in a world of ads and bill boards etc surrounding us with colorful images. So why is this eerie?? Reminds me of the difference between an Easter island statue without and then with its huge white eyes put in. I guess its also like the difference between a mannequin vs a wax museum of accuracy. Its, unnerving somehow.
uncanny valley
Spanish polychrome sculpture shows what can be achieved by sensitive polychrome artists. A visit to any confraternity chapel will show things more like what is shown here. It might have been an idea to talk to a decent polychrome artist before coming up with these reconstructions. To be fair I have seen similar things in National Geographic and reconstructions of medieval cathedral façades. The experts really need to talk to some artists
See my comment from soon after the video was published.
Thank you for sharing this.
Wonderful!!!
I wish we could travel back in time to correct Winckelmann
The painting on the reconstructions looks garish and the hair and skin tones are unrealistic. I wonder if in Antiquity the colours were more subtle and naturalistic. The sculpture of the Classical and Hellenistic periods in particular was very sophisticated, detailed and lifelike and I would assume that the painting would have been too.
If you look at frescoes from Pompeii, or the Fayum mummy portraits you can see the artists did understanding the concept of shading/ lighting contrast, but for some reason any modern reconstructions paint with flat out bright colors.
Maybe the originals were much better. Maybe they were intentionally not realistic, in the sense that colors were scarce and hard to come by. So what they had available was eye popping and exciting. Remember these are people who thought anything white was in and of itself unbelievable. Its the reason why the Japanese flag was white with a red circle. White back then was considered unbelievably special. Now we have blank sheets of paper that are white and white is everywhere.
One thing that I have to remind people is that our ability to paint these sculptures pales in comparison to the Ancient's ability to paint. After all, the skills to craft sculpture work of the same quality have been lost, so it's not obscene to think that the skills to paint sculpture work with the same quality have also disappeared.
agreed. Many of these "recreations" look like a third grader did it
Where's your proof?
Whoa 😀😀😀😀thank you.
I know I'm alone here, but I think they are more aesthetically appealing unpainted.
you are not alone. Have a look at the comments below. And this is the point, isn't it? The sculptures have been stripped of their color to conform to our modern taste.
Why do they assume that they had to be so brightly painted, they were painted yeah, so they couldn't have earth tones or something?
Its 100% assumption. They've no idea about what colours they were painted.
There are pigment fragments in the stone that they use to pick the paint palette
@anntowey which could be from literally millions of possible sources. They have no idea. They could run the same test on a red shirt from 1950 and come up with tons of different pigments.
Did Wincklemann remove the color or instruct people to remove the color? Or did he find them as white/color faded and assume that was the way they were meant to be?
I am not aware that Wincklemann removed color himself (though that is possible), rather he helped establish value in the unpainted marble, an esthetic that had a profound impact on taste for centuries and that lead to the destruction of the surface patina and the remains of polychromy on many ancient sculptures.
@@smarthistory-art-history this helps a lot. How did the paint get removed? Did it just deteriorate, or was their any intentional removal process?
In some instances stone was scrubbed, perhaps even bleached apparently.
Color was removed to hide the true image of the Greeks. The darker skin
The bust of Caligula is a masterpiece, so the cartoonish paint-job presented is simply not believable
I would love to see some "weathering" effects, gradients and less bright, "more real" colors on this representations
100% this 👆
Agreed. The skill of the sculptors seems marred by the flat, garish colors painted on them. I'd be willing to bet that the painters of the time would have done a much better job bringing the statues to life.
I prefer the white one. It’s like seeing a sketch. Just a matter of taste 😊
Thumbs up ! 👍
Where is this exhibit?
1. By the late roman times, weren't the romans finding discolored and by then, ancient, greek statues and imitating them?
2. Does the famous the lack of words in greek and ancient languges (excpetion is egyptian) word for blue, for example, affected the way they painted and perceived colors?
3. How does the science know the painting style was a uniform opaque fill in, like in mspaint? Isn't this a modern assumption projected onto the original artwork? I believe the shock isnt that its colored but that the style is so much like modern hindu art etc.
All good questions but let me address the last since it has been raised in a variety of forms in several of the posts responding to this video. The reconstructed color is indeed flat. Some of that may be the result of an effort on the part of the researchers to be conservative in their approach and to only render what they feel fairly confident of based on the extant color-despite the flattening distortion created. We know that the Greeks and Romans were capable a high degree of naturalism when that was important to them and a great fidelity to naturalistic tonality can be seen in Greek mosaics for example, and so it follows that some sculptural painting would be similarly nuanced. The exhibition does approach this to some degree in the boxer for example. However, it is worth keeping in mind that some sculpture was made to be seen at a significant distance, the archer for example, it does seem plausible that the intention was something bold and garish so that it was clear from afar. We still do this with stage make up.
Maybe I'm oldschool, but I think every single one of them looks better without the color.
And sometimes, it is better to be left In white and leave the rest to the imagination to construct. Any added touch is a subjective interpretation. 🌈♥️
I think the problem is that people aren't interpreting it correctly. There is an overwhelming reimagining of classical antiquity as being more bare and stagnant in their artistic practice. Sadly, this has been weaponized by far right revisionists when talking about The West™ It's important to appreciate these works on their own terms as much as possible.
@@c7261 This is one example when the problem is the solution as well. Interpretation of the beholder is all (not only in art). Truth seekers would always appreciate diversity in interpretation, but will always look and find a way to relate (Unite) All to One.
@@c7261 The Only way to grasp the truth is to be there and then. And becoming the one who created it. Since we can not achieve it with so to say methods in hands (strictly material), we need to either be satisfied by whatever is being presented or just get ourselves in the field (of beyond) where all is accessible and all is One.
Not only does literally nobody imagine white marble sculpture as painted, most people don't even know it was ever painted. This is the entire premise of these attempts at reconstruction. Also, lay off your Plato.
@@Unbrutal_Rawr Can not do this, pal. I am in the field. It is everywhere. 👍🌈♥️ Choose your readings, writings and interpretations.
Winckelman is a classic example of how you can find genius and folly in the same person, sheesh... As for steles, I'm not sure I care about people looking at my grave, but I'm grateful we haven't gotten to the point of making social-media style tombstones with videos and memes.
Why do they have to paint them in such distasteful, bright colors? They admit they don’t really know how the original colors looked. So, why not pick colors that are restrained and subdued? Instead they paint them in the most tacky colors imaginable.
With paint, looks so cheap. Just my two cents.
I think they made a big mistake in the reproductions to use flat colours for entire areas. As they say, we can never be 100% sure. That means we can use a bit of artistic license in rendering their forms.
@@c7261they look like cheap ~ Gaudy Coloured Tijuana artesians
To modern eyes, they look like mannequins. We prefer to see the stone, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Eh, I think I gotta side with ol' Johann on this one. They look better (classier) white (or monochrome). Those colors are garish and make the sculptures look like birthday cakes or children's toys.
Whiteness isn't only associated with western culture, Asian culture too associates white skin and garb with purity too. good vid though.
Ancient Greek & Roman was really NOT Western Culture but Near Eastern