The Modern Invention of Ancient White Marble
About this video
An archaeologist explains that ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, both marble and bronze, was originally fully painted, a practice called polychromy. He describes how researchers find traces of color with multi-spectral photography and chemical analysis, and how reconstructions help research and teach the public. He argues that the idea of pure white ancient marble is a Renaissance invention, later reinforced in the 20th century, and a dangerous misconception.
You'll be able to
- explain what polychromy means and that ancient sculpture was originally painted.
- describe the methods researchers use to find and check traces of original color.
- explain where the idea of white ancient marble came from and why it is a misconception.
Key words
- polychromy
- The practice of painting sculpture or architecture in many colors; from Greek words meaning 'many colors'.
- reconstruction
- A model made to show how an object probably looked originally.
- multi-spectral photography
- Photography using special kinds of light to reveal traces the human eye can't easily see.
- hue
- A particular shade of a color.
- misconception
- A widely held idea that is wrong.
Transcript
All of us have a specific expectation towards Greek and Roman marble sculpture. It is white. It is a intellectual beauty and it's not a beauty which derives from gaudy, happy colors and ornaments. And this DNA is difficult to overcome. And this is still true today.
The question is, who produced this DNA in us? If ever a person from antiquity would enter a modern museum, a collection of ancient sculpture, marble sculpture, he would feel like entering a world of ghosts. "Polychromy" is a strange expression. It is a Greek term.
"Poly" means multi and "chrome" is color, multicolored. It's a scientific term, a scholarly term. But it simply means that sculpture had been painted, covered with paint. So the ancient marble sculpture and even the ancient bronze sculpture had been fully colored.
We started to produce reconstructions 30 years ago. We had a classicist education, a classicist DNA and we felt reluctant to create a colorful image of those beautiful marbles. Eventually, we understood that the process of the reconstruction is the only way to do a proper research on an object.
This is the one goal. The other goal is to inform the people, to educate. You need the full third dimension in order to understand the interconnections, the intertwining in between color and form. Color is fragile. It easily chips off, while marble or bronze is very stable.
So there is a competition in between the materials. But as a matter of fact, there are a lot of traces visible under normal conditions. We enhance the capability of the human eye by using modified light conditions like multi-spectral photography. And next to it there are all those physical, chemical, analytical methods enhanced by digital aspects, which enable you to measure a certain hue of color.
And then we double-check it. So we produce test charts with the neighboring hues and get back to the object and measure again. Caligula was a emperor in the first century A.D. in Rome, and he was ruling just for very few years. He was quite young when he started, he was 25.
The Metropolitan Caligula is a very beautiful piece. The surface of the marble is well-preserved. We did research on another Caligula portrait from the collections in Copenhagen where the polychromy is quite well-preserved. And so I can transport it into this white piece.
Meanwhile, after 40 years I start to have a problem. To see a complete white sculpture, it is, for me, a void. The concept of the white Greek and Roman marble is a Renaissance concept. We don't know exactly why and how, since even in Renaissance times they found sculpture with remnants of color.
And even in Renaissance times they could read the ancient authors who repeatedly referred to the fact that sculpture had been painted. But nevertheless, the European Renaissance invented the visual code of white antique marble, which maybe is a visual code which has something to do with political aspects, with supremacy aspects and so forth.
This concept had been maintained to the very moment in the 18th century when people started to dig in Pompeii and the marble sculpture in Pompeii due to the lava and volcano, the polychromy on those statues had been preserved. And so people slowly, gradually changed their mind.
In the 19th century, the issue of polychromy, of color, was an open discussion. It was just received by the public. And there is a sudden change in the beginning of the 20th century and the whole issue of polychromy, of color on ancient Greek marble is some sort of suppressed.
And I would like to believe that there is some connection to ideological tendencies of the 20th century, totalitarian mindsets and so forth. But as archeologists, we are not specialists on this issue. We believe that the reconstruction is the most powerful educational tool in order to transport even the state of knowledge to the public.
And this is very important because to keep the audience in the belief of white purity, which is such a misconception, is almost dangerous. Our research process is a process of approximation. We never will find the full truth. We have no time machine. It is simply a process in order to be as correct as possible.
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