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Hacker News Hacker NewsThis whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.
Painters layer paint, starting with a saturated base color. These archaeologists are simply looking at the paint that was left in the crevices.
> Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly?
> ...may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
That seems plausible -- and somewhat reasonable! To the credit of academics, they seems aware of this (according to the article):
> ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
I do not think tastes can change to such a degree that that first link would ever be pleasant to listen to, though that itself could be intentional for theatrical, theological, or other such purposes. Music seems innate to humanity - children generally start 'dancing' of sorts to music, 100% on their own, before their first birthday, long before they can speak or usually even walk!
The thing is that even if we do not personally like some form of music, I think we can still appreciate it. The Chinese guqin [3] is my favorite example - it goes back at least 3000 years, is played in a fashion completely outside the character of modern music - to say nothing of Western musical tradition as a whole, and yet nonetheless sounds amazing and relaxing even to a completely foreign ear.
Culture and tastes may change, but I think our ability to appreciate (or be repelled) by things is fairly consistent.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hOK7bU0S1Y
One way to close that gap would be to offer interpretations to be painted by modern artists to show what was possible and a viewing public could view a range of the conservative evidence based looks, and maybe a celebration of what human artistic ability can offer.
Has he ever met people doing this stuff?.. Why write about something you know so little about? Why do people think that they can talk about things without experience, based on abstract reasoning?
Even worse. They are completely untalented and should have never given the job. Just compare it the existing antique paintings. It's day and night.
Bare brick as an aesthetic choice did not emerge until the late 19th century.
We are hampered even more today because blues and greens tend to be sourced from organic materials that decay quick, while reds and browns are from minerals that don't decay (but flake off). Even in the best preserved art that we have there is still likely significant differences between what we see and what they saw because of this color change.
Would they accurately capture the lack of 'naturalism' (i.e. that flat, almost cartoonish quality) that often strikes modern viewers of Medieval art, or would they make it 'better', interpolating the gap between Roman and Renaissance styles?
This article hints at the idea that classical sculpture can't have been painted like that, because _it looks bad_ and Romans couldn't possibly have thought it looked good, yet early Medieval art was — presumably — perfectly acceptable to the tastemakers of Medieval Europe.
What I've always heard is that classical statues were painted "brightly".
So, is this something that's so well known in the study of antiquities that no source was required, or has the author just got a personal bugbear here?
One quote I remember from the exhibit, which I looked up to make sure I got the wording right, was an anecdote about one of the most famous Greek sculptors, as recorded by Pliny: "When asked which of his works in marble he liked the most, Praxiteles used to say: ‘Those to which Nikias has set his hand’—so highly did he esteem his coloring of the surface."
One takeaway from that quote is the obvious: one reason we know that ancient statues were painted is that ancient authors said so. Another takeaway is that the painters, not just the sculptors, were famous, and the ancients recognized that some were better than others.
I'm pretty sure many museums with reconstructions of classical statues have a note on this topic somewhere on a plaque beside the statues - but who reads those?
All the garish colours were prob heavily muted or diluted with varnish/oil. You don’t pant an artwork like a house, it is a layered technique and fairly similar to historic painting techniques used today:
https://emptyeasel.com/2014/12/02/how-to-paint-using-the-fle...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art...
But that aside, I do think the author has a point here. Many people don't know ancient statues were painted at all, an academic creates a reconstruction based off of the color traces that survive to show otherwise, but likely only the underlayer, then that gets dumbed down to "this is exactly how the statue looked to the Romans!" because that's counter-intuitive and therefore more likely to get attention. It's not just statues too, but in pretty much all popular media that derives from academic subjects.
Oh, I see, if you look at the statue with the right eyes it's really obvious what they did. They started with a white primer then gave it a red-tinted wash all over, thinned down for the body parts so that they look flesh-coloured (ish... ) and progressively darker for the spear, helmet and shield, then the cape, and then the hair. This really helps to keep the mo... the statue together in terms of colour, and it's very efficient since the entire palette is tones of a single tint. I guess they gave the helmet and the spear the old non-metallic metal treatment, then they highlighted the helmet, the cape, the shield and the spear, and blended the feathers on the helmet.
That's a really classically modern paint job that you might find in any miniature painted to modern miniature-painting standards [1]. In fact it's surprisingly modern, I'd even go as far as to say that the one-tint wash job is positively avant-guard. I'm certainly trying that next time I paint a model with nice, big, flat areas like that one... like the statue, I mean.
>> I have given an example of this below a famous mosaic depicting a statue of a boxer, from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae. Note the subtlety of color recorded by the mosaic, in which the boxer is reddened and sunburned on his shoulders and upper chest, but not his pale upper thighs. There is nothing here to suggest that the statues depicted would have struck a modern viewer as garish.
Oh and here I guess they started with a zenithal primer, with the lighting coming from below and the right, then they did some dry-brushing with a darker tint. Nice job!
No but seriously, it's a bit dumb to think that the ancients would just apply a thick layer of basecoat and call it a day. If we do all those elaborate things today on plastic miniatures, I can imagine what they did.
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Likewise, where there is paint these guys have recreated it so. But over time we will find that there were more layers more likely to fail over time and so on.
But where we see wall frescoes and the like they are painted with what we would call artistic taste and not like the garish reconstructions.
Yeah. I cannot thank enough those other ancients who dug up all statues and assumed they were all white.
I'm thinking about Michelangelo's The Pieta and oh so many others. Call it a lucky accident or "differing taste" or "mastering new techniques" or whatever you want, I take Michelangelo's The Pieta vs these "correctly re-colored" statues from early Rome any time.
Even once it's been fully known they used to be flashy, hardly anyone started sculpting masterpiece then asking kids to color them: I'm thinking about late 19th Rodin's The Kiss for example.
Just like our usage of the toilets, our taste evolved, not differed.
The linked article by Ralph S. Weir critically examines well-known color reconstructions of ancient sculptures (specifically Vinzenz Brinkmann’s "Gods in Color" exhibition). To answer your question: The text reflects current research only in part. It is primarily a polemical essay or a debate contribution rather than a neutral scientific summary. Here is a detailed breakdown of how the article compares to the current state of archaeological research: 1. Points of Agreement with Research * The Fact of Polychromy: The text correctly states that ancient statues were almost exclusively painted. This has been consensus since the 19th century. * Methodological Limitations: The author rightly points out that reconstructions like Brinkmann’s are based on detectable pigment residues. Because organic binders and fine glazes have largely vanished over millennia, these reconstructions often appear flat and garish. Today’s researchers openly admit these models are "working hypotheses" meant to show distribution of color, not necessarily final aesthetic masterpieces. 2. Where the Text Diverges or Simplifies * Aesthetic Criticism vs. Function: The author relies heavily on modern taste ("it looks awful"). Archaeology, however, emphasizes that ancient coloring was often signaling—designed for visibility from a distance, under bright Mediterranean sun, or atop high pedestals. What looks "tacky" in a neon-lit museum was often a functional necessity in antiquity. * The "Trolling" Hypothesis: The claim that archaeologists intentionally make statues "ugly" to generate headlines is a subjective provocation. In reality, current research (such as the Tracking Colour project at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek) is working hard to understand ancient layering and encaustic techniques to move away from the "plastic look." * Outdated Focus: The article focuses heavily on Brinkmann’s early reconstructions from the early 2000s. The field has moved on since then. Newer reconstructions use authentic binders and multi-layered techniques to achieve much more nuanced and naturalistic results (e.g., the recent reconstructions of Caligula). 3. Classification of the Article The article is a classic piece of reception criticism. The author uses his background as a philosopher to question how science is presented to the public. Summary: * If you are asking if statues were painted: Yes, the text is accurate. * If you are asking if the "garish" look is the final word in science: No. Modern research is moving away from flat primary colors toward complex, naturalistic painting techniques—exactly what the author demands in his essay. The text is more of a critique of museum communication than an up-to-date report on archaeometric analysis. Would you like me to find examples of more recent, "naturalistic" reconstructions that address the author's concerns?
The idea that we should walk this back because the colors might have been subtler feels like missing the point. The educational value isn't in perfect historical accuracy down to the pigment saturation curve, it's in breaking the spell of the solid-white classical canon. The garish reconstructions do that effectively; tasteful, muted ones just slide back into the same old norms. If we end up concluding "actually, ancient art was basically compatible with modern elite taste" that's not just boring, it's actively harmful to diversity of ideas about beauty.
So yes, even if the evidence points the other way, I'd argue we should lean into the loud, uncomfortable versions. Sometimes a less "accurate" narrative is the more important corrective, especially when the alternative reinforces centuries of aesthetic dogma we should really be questioning.
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