There was a time when we imagined that most ancient sculpture never had any color except for that of the stone from which it was hewed. Doubt fell upon that notion as long ago as the eighteenth century, when archaeological digging in Pompeii and Herculaneum brought up statues whose color had been preserved, but only in recent years has it come to be presented as an exploded myth. Though some of the coverage of the false “whiteness” of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculpture has divided along drearily predictable twenty-first-century cultural battle lines, this moment has also presented an opportunity to stage fascinating, even groundbreaking exhibitions.
Take Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, which ran from the summer of last year to the spring of this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can still see some of its displays in the Smarthistory video at the top of the post, in which art historians Elizabeth Macaulay and Beth Harris discuss the “world of Technicolor” that was antiquity, the Renaissance origins of the “idea that ancient sculpture was not painted,” and the modern attempts to reconstruct the sculptural color schemes almost totally lost to time.
Architect goes deeper into these subjects in the video from the Met itself just above, paying special attention to the museum’s bust of Caligula — not the finest emperor Rome ever had, to put it mildly, but one whose face has become a promising canvas for the restoration of color.
You can see much more of Chroma in the Art Trip tour video just above. Its wonders include not just genuine pieces of ancient sculpture, but strikingly colorful reconstructions of a finial in the form of a sphinx, a Pompeiian statue of the goddess Artemis, a battle-depicting side of the Alexander Sarcophagus, and “a marble archer in the costume of a horseman of the peoples to the north and east of Greece,” to name just a few. You may prefer these historically educated colorizations to the austere monochrome figures you grew up seeing in textbooks, or you may appreciate after all the kind of elegance that only centuries of ruin can bestow. Either way, your relationship to the ancient world will never be quite the same.
Related content:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Restores the Original Colors to Ancient Statues
How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns
Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid, Bright Colors
The Making of a Marble Sculpture: See Every Stage of the Process, from the Quarry to the Studio
Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Profoundly true. Makes me think. Thank you.
Woooooow it’s amazing how “white and pale” these people stayed under all that sun, especially considering most of their time was spent outside and It was much warmer then. It’s also amazing how so many Caucasian people had nappy hair and dreadlocks.
But I guess that’s just history huh? The world was always just super Caucasian and black folks just stayed in middle Africa far far away from anything civilized throwing spears, confused by all the progress Caucasian made.
(Funny how no one ever mentions how in all ancient art all the people who aren’t wearing wigs have rounded out hair like “afros,” the Hyksos included)
“You should’ve seen it in color”
What a reference — I believe it certainly may apply in this instance.
Of course the Caucasian took the credit for other ppls culture somethings never change even with the so called woke movement the took it and branded it somethings else but it’s here and ppl are learning the truth everyday they can’t stop the real awakening.
My God, why is race being dragged into everything? Can’t we just admire the beauty that an ancient culture produced? There is so much beauty in the world. Can’t we learn from it together?
Can you really call it learning when there’s immediate doubt on the accuracy/ authenticity of what we’re seeing?
Like for real, the old white lady for some reason defaulted to making all the people depicted in the art white. The art from Africa and the Meditteranean. The art from Africa and the Mediterranean produced at a point long beffore globalization and ease of transport.
Sure. It just so happens all the local artists happened to exclusively produce art of white people. Totally believable. We should all learn from that, absolutely.
I instantly knew before I saw it that they’re all white. How can white skin wear a man skirt, with no top, in EGYPT under that sun???
Y’all need to be sued for real.
Actually you are wrong. It was multicultural. Read some history books
we have recreations using chromatic spectrometers that their skin color was light, there are literally white Blue eyes berbers and Moroccans the Egyptians depicted Africans as darker than themselves in multiple exmaples. Especially for Roman and Greece we have fully realistic statues with white features only
Wrong on soo many levels, but then that’s what they do. I’m nearly certain that somewhere in the future Eminem will be named as the Father of Hip Hop with an influence of Vanilla Ice. These people are just stupidly full of themselves. It’s no wonder why black Christians never learn about the ecumenical councils that crafted their cults, or how Serapis Christus became Jesus through Ptolemy I Sorter. Read, read,read, read “reed!!”
“Ptolemy I Soter”
This has to be around the time the European Caucasian Romans rude Egypt because before then the depiction was not white. Take this L
Thanks for providing more proof of historical whitewashing.
Considering the lengths the curator’s went explaining their objective here and the thought process/discussion they hoped to start, it’s painfully ironic that the commentary runs to zero in largely on ethnicity. Interpreting narrow contemporary concerns against antiquarian studies is to hit one point at the expense of several others.
One important ‘other’ is one of interpreting evidence. Simply because evidence of pigments is found only goes so far, it doesn’t begin to tell us how the paint was handled for example. Can evidence of a medium or binder glazes be established? These would have considerable aesthetic consequence, perhaps turning assumed context on it’s head. What the curator’s present us with is best guess work. They cannot point to shading or nuance for lack of current evidence thus it’s all a little crude.
There remains a large ‘we simply don’t know’ over all this. That’s hardly a basis or an invitation to assumption based commentary.