I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer stuck to the statues, and the rest was washed away.
This 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.
Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to the public
Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed.
The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle.
I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.
Yes, the suggestion that they're trolling goes too far.
However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...
But they still don't add anything without direct evidence - where there's evidence in later statues for more subtle colouring, they include that.
The problem is that there is no "missing data" color, so that discipline would default to marble white, which is just as made up as the rest.
I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.
If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.
>The problem is that there is no "missing data" color
they should use "green screen green" and give you viewing glasses that fill in the colors to your own historical preference (e.g. rose colored? blood-soaked?). then if you point a finger with your "anhistorical" complaints, there will be 3 fingers pointing back at you!
That is how scholarship works. It’s like a math proof: they’re interested in proving the base case. If someone else wants to do more speculative work to theorize what a well-painted version would look like, that would be super cool, but it wouldn’t be scholarship.
And that's a fine standard to maintain when you're writing an academic paper.
When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression.
It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.
“The reason I’m totally misleading you with a speculative example is because of scholarship.”
No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts.
A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
Give the scholars full editorial control of the newspaper the public is getting their news from, and you might get better public understanding of their scholarship.
You generally can't hold someone responsible for what someone else says about them.
"Dance your PhD" exists for several reasons, but one of them is to point out that the divorce between scholarship and art in some academic fields isn't "required" but an accident of how we separated colleges and how hard it can be to do multi-disciplinary work.
You can do both: prove the base case and reach across the aisle to the art college next door to see if someone is interested in the follow up "creative exercise". You can present both "here's what we can prove" and "here's an extrapolation by a skilled artist of what additional layering/contouring might have done".
This practice of defining a reconstruction so pedantically as to be wholly unlike real life is just so dumb to me, as a layperson. This would be like “recreating” the experience of using a Commodore 64 but we can’t find any intact copies of the software at all so we provide a fake “OS” that requires the user to write code in ASM only, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, behold our reconstruction! This is what it was like!”
> have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers
Why do they even bother with the "reconstructions" if they know that they are inherently inaccurate, though
Bare marvel and garish underlayer reconstructions could be seen as two extreme ends.
The article points out that the garish underlayer reconstructions have (maybe accidentally) been successful at correcting the widely held misperception of bare marble.
There’s also something in… the bare marble reconstruction maps somehow to our idea of sophisticated. Garish underplayed reconstruction, our idea of silly, frivolous, or childish. There were a lot of Greeks, they didn’t all live on one end of that spectrum.
Because exhibitions make money, apparently.
The "garish" statues are more akin to a false color image of mars that shows topography or something. That they're a visual representation of a particular portion of the pigments found and are not supposed to be an accurate recreation of how the statue looked at the time it was created.
AIUI, false color images of the cosmos are hand tuned to look pretty / interesting / impressive.
The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.
They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though.
Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases.
And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
We are not dinosaurs, so have rather less skin in the game when it comes to accuracy.
The archaeologists know that and say as much in TFA:
"The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?
This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’."
Contemporary historic preservation sees itself as the guardian of historical substance. The content of a monument is bound to the preservation of the inherited material.
Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated.
It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair.
Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/.
> that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked
Meaning that these "reconstructions" are a pretty pointless and have no real purpose.
Idealy, for me as a layperson who is only going to see these in a museum, I'd love to see a series of pieces...
First, the original, untouched (preserved but not restored?) sculpture.
Second, the reproductions highlighted in the article. With appropriate notations about "these are the base layers, not complete, etc"
And third, a best-guess at what the original could have looked like, based on the first two. Yes, this might be wrong and need to change over time.
They show us what the base layers were, and what pigments of the day looked like.
It may be an academic point. But they are academics.
Well they might as well show the texture of unprocessed marble as well. This is not particularly different.
I mean, showing the texture of the underlying stone is how the vast majority of statues from classical antiquity are displayed, and indeed how most pastiches are created.
(and half the objection to the paint jobs comes from the fact we've come to incorrectly associate decorative elements from the classical period with the colours of bare stone)
Yeah, I've likewise always figured the reason these reconstructions ended up looking so awful is because paint is generally applied in layers (even to this day), so what they're likely reconstructing is the primer layer.
Like we know from Roman frescoes[1] and mosaics[2] that they were pretty skilled painters and solving the problem of how to paint something to have more hues than a King's Quest 3 sprite is unlikely to be an unsolvable aesthetic problem.
[edit] Changed from Secret of Monkey Island since that game has too many versions and remakes.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Chiron_i...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Academy_mosaic#/medi...
"many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject."
Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades.
I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand.
Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
> I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
With the horrible version of the statues?
They just look ... bad.
While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though.
So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project.
But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest.
So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction.
You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this.
You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon.
I'm sure you're right that reconstructions of painted statues are inaccurate. But I'm not sure that a good-looking reconstruction would be any more authentic. Cultural tastes vary a lot. I suspect that if we ever do get enough data for a valid reconstruction, I won't like it any better.
I'm not sure whether they look "bad" is enough justification. The author dismisses the possible explanation "maybe they didn't consider this bad style back then" without any real argument other than "there are other works of art with different styles".
I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence?
Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing.
> You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing
I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
I believe it is basically irresponsible to present the statues with their base layers only. Either extrapolate the aesthetic top layers that might have been there, or just report that the statues were painted without a visual example. Presenting them as poorly as they do contributes to demoralization and a sense of alienation from one's own cultural roots.
Perhaps... it's just that they collaborated with experts on publishing coloring books for five year olds due to some reason.
That's what TFA is saying
> Another 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.
Not all painters, and not in all cases: See, for instance, grisalle painting. One can then sketch the highlights and shadows first, and then come in with pretty translucent pigments. When the pigment is what is expensive, it can be more economical. We know for sure many a renaissance painting and fresco was done this way, and some of us do it today.
Now, was it possible that, given the pigments available, they were better off just going with the most saturated thing they could possibly have, and then work from there? Absolutely. But the right argument here isn't that "Painters layer paint this way", but that, as the article indicates, they are unlikely to be unsophisticated artists that don't believe shadows and highlights. So the highlighting and the shading must be in the place where we can't see, because we assume they must exist.
Makes sense. This is basically how skilled painters of miniatures (Warhammer) do it.
I assume you didn't read the article, since that's their exact point...
"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."
Maybe it's the author of the article? :P
This would be a great time to use AI, because it is very good at style transfer. Feed it a lot of contemporary painted art, feed it the base-coat version of the sculpture, and ask it to style-transfer the paintings on to the sculpture. You'd likely get something very close, and for once we can use "The computer said it, I'm not responsible for it!" for the power of good, by making it so no human is responsible for the heinous crime of assuming something without historical evidence (no matter how sensible the assumption is).
(And lest someone be inclined to downvote because I'm suggesting an AI, the real sarcastic core of my message is about our faith in computers still being alive and well even after we all have decades of personal experience of them not being omniscient infalliable machines.)
looking at it from the absolute simplest of perspectives, money/time/effort, then the notion of a base, or primer layer that seals a surface and provides a non absorbant layer for the much more expensive coulor coat.
primer bieng applied by aprentices and the finnish coat applied by specialists who would be very likely be useing ALL of the tricks of the trade to bring a statue to life, but then wejump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary, with everything from vegas type full primary coulors put on with a mop, and others that were master paintings done on 3d canvases, and still others who believd in.the purity of the "raw" sculpture
> then we jump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary
Most Greek and Roman statues had lost their paint long before the Renaissance. Early modern artists held up those paintless statues as the ideal form, which is why nobody from Michaelangelo to Bernini even tried to paint their sculptures. Instead, Bernini learned how to make marble itself interact with light to look alive. For centuries afterward, the purity of raw marble became the one true ideology. Diversity in this area collapsed, and took a long time to recover.
Even today, most people who are used to Western classical art will probably agree that marble statues look better without paint. We've been conditioned for generations to believe so. The ugly reproductions of painted statues aren't helping, either.
Even a middling warhammer miniatures painter would have done a better job of painting these statues than the reconstructions.
Makes me wonder if they ever used the same sort of gimmicky paint, like paint with mica flakes to make something look metallic.
They couldn't use the same paint, if just because for miniature painting we are almost always running acrylics, so it's all plastic binding the pigments. Even a modern oil paint is quite a bit more advanced than what they could do then.
They also had a significant disadvantage in pigment availability. Chances are that there's a whole lot of modern, synthetic pigments among the colors you use regularly. Pyrrole Red is from 1974, for example.
We know that painters were well aware of things like how many good, natural pigments get different outcomes when diluted (go see what happens as you thin ultramarine), so it's not as if they had no technoology. But something like mica vs aluminum vs just gold leaf is a budgetary issue, both today and back then. You will find that good metallics are more expensive and avoid mica. But for an important statue, I suspect they'd take fewer cost cutting shortcuts, just like we can tell in renaissance and medieval art that got to us in relatively good shape. This is the kind of thing some people spend their lives studying.
They probably used whatever paint was closest in chemical composition to the residue they found on the statue.
You mean the primer? Why would they use their fancy paint for that?
Good read! The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best.
> 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’.
> The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best.
Have you seen medieval art though? https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/explaining-weird-mediaeva...
The technique is quite different from the "old masters" of later periods that we often think of as fine art.
To roughy summarize your link: in the Medieval period, Europeans were very focused on the sins of greed, vanity and gluttony; it makes sense that they shunned fine artistry.
I'm starting to think we might be heading towards a similar period. Among the hoi polloi, there's a growing pride in rejecting scholarship, effort, careful analysis, rational thought in favor of preconceptions, vibes and loyalty. Among the elite, corporate culture has pillaged universities, and cancelled their end of the social contract to promote a culture of learning and excellence. With LLMs able to replicate works of the old masters, the maturing generations have even less motivation to learn how to use pencil, brush and chisel.
Sure, but medieval European art generally sucked. (Call this a hypothesis if that helps.)
Compare the damn cave paintings of buffalo to most medieval European art. Some of the 10k-year-old stuff is much better observed. Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint. I'm sorry about that.
It's just not always taste. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes people are bad at making art.
I think that the medieval art article is making a different point. The art there had a style that was dictated by its purpose and the beliefs of the artists.
For example, most of the examples given in that article are illustrations from manuscripts. This was something (as far as I know) that was new in the western world. The idea that books should be illustrated. And being before the printing press was introduced, each illustration (of which there were often many per page) was hand made. This added a substantial amount of time to an already labor-intensive process. And each image was not intended to be a standalone work of art.
Also, some of the other examples are of iconography. That style remains, largely unchanged to this day. If you do an image search for "religious iconography", you will see plenty of examples of sacred art that are not visually realistic but are meant to be metaphorically or spiritually realistic.
I have my own take that painting as art peaked long ago. And now we are mostly at similar level to that in middle-ages...
Paintings used to be better, and before that they were worse.
So were the Japanese better at painting circa the 1700s and 1800s? Because you got a whole lot of paints of, uhhh, octopi…
That's hard to call. Both Europe and Japan seemed fine in that time period. Octopi or no octopi.
Weell, there's a reason the Renaissance is called "renaissance" and not something else.
Those are a few examples of weird art from hundreds of years of examples, but even then, those aren't super unskilled paintings. Medieval artists still used shading.
I still don't understand is why they don't even make an attempt to apply overlayers, when (as the author notes) there is ample secondary evidence that it would be present. It's not like there isn't already some element of inference and "filling in the blanks" when reconstructing how something was painted from the scant traces of paint that survived.
This is somewhat an unfounded theory of mine and I was hoping if anyone has any insight: but I sense that this is perhaps a construction of Western restoration/preservationist theory. A lot of effort seems to be taken to either preserve original material, not take liberties etc. While touring temples and museums in Japan, I got a sense that restorations were much more aggressive, and less regard was taken to the preservation of material (or building "fabric"), with a greater focus on the use of traditional techniques during restoration.
I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by more credible modern attempts). There's a tendency the further north you go to think of the classical world as completely lost, discontinuous, and opaque to us, too, which adds to it.
> I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy.
A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]
Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.
[0] https://eatshistory.com/the-oldest-recorded-recipe-babylonia...
[1] https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew
There's probably a village in Iraq that traditionally makes something that would be recognizable to the ancients even if it uses potatoes now.
I have been reading cookbook from 1767. And mostly you get ingredients and probably not all of them. And sometimes you get amounts. And useful instructions like boil so many times... I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.
Huh. That's exactly how you make garum - an unpleasant horror of mashed fish. Refer to Max Miller and his spectacularly successful effort to reproduce Garum in his back yard.
Fish sauce is also really popular in southeast Asia and Worcestershire sauce is often made with fermented fish so can also be considered garum adjacent.
There's even a case that Ketchup is a distant relative, as it started out as South East Asian oyster sauce, was imported to Europe, turned into fermented mushroom sauce, was exported to the colonies, and finally turned into tomato sauce (though originally sometimes with fish in it).
Fermented mushroom sauce sounds so much better than ketchup! Tell me more. Does it still exist commercially?
Yes! Search for "mushroom ketchup", and you'll find various examples for sale. Whatever kinds I've had are nice on bread, and really nice with eggs, but I wouldn't want to eat with chips / fries.
You can still sometimes find mushroom ketchup in UK supermarkets. It tastes a bit like Worcester sauce (spicy and 'brown' tasting), but milder as it has no anchovies in it.
There's speculation that Asian fish sauce came from Greece through the same cultural diffusion processes that brought Greco-Buddhist sculpture as far as Japan.
There was a similar, maybe apocryphal, story recently of academic archaeologists stumped about an ancient tool until a person pulled out a crochet kit to fidget with their hands near the exhibit and it became obvious that it wasn't a lost tool they just hadn't put it in the right context.
That's the roman dodecahedrons that are a bit more mysterious than that - the "this is for knitting gloves" explanation is a real stretch, and not only because the Romans didn't have knitting.
"Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? One factor may be that the specialists who execute them lack the skill of classical artists, who had many years of training in a great tradition."
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?
Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?
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.
The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.
I liked the article but this is a very good point.
This reminds me of efforts to reproduce Ancient Greek music. [1] It's very similar in that there's a lot of hints, but still enough missing parts that there seem to be two schools of thought, that can even present within the same project. That linked audio is unpleasant, but perhaps they just liked it? Yet, this solo [2], comes from the exact same project - and is amazing.
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
[2] - https://youtu.be/UAmuQBnNty8?t=540
[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ninn-CfAMy8
His final conclusion is terrible and spoils an otherwise excellent article. Unless he has really strong evidence of it, the specialists are very unlikely to be "trolling" the public. They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.
"trolling" in this instance seems to be a nicer way of saying "misleading to create attention". It's hard to deny that "look at how garish these beautiful statures originally looked" created a lot more attention than a theoretical "Roman statues looked pretty nice, but with paint"
It's an unsubstantiated theory, but the author does go out of their way to say that this might not even be objectionable, if it happened at all
And an article "experts are trolling public" creates more attention than "experts stick to evidence and aren't artists"
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best, working away in museum backrooms.
Yesterday’s kids are today’s scientists. You what the most popular archeological student prank is? - It’s for a team to bury a modern piece of pottery in another team’s site. So I am not at all surprised if they wanted to play a few practical jokes on the public’s ignorance.
Trolling here means that they followed the tradition of restoring the items - use just the materials they found on the statues. Well the materials found were the base layers - so that’s what you restore. You don’t go adding shading or fades or iridescent paint because it looks cute. They create art that looks like an 8 year old painted it, then laugh at the public “ooh-ing and ah-ing” over the “beautiful” restorations.
Yes, it’s speculating when it would have been better to do some journalism and ask some experts what they were doing.
Even worse so: Why does he not simply ask these people? What is it with this trend of sneering at expert decisions without even doing the bare minimum of engaging with them?
In the case of the humanities, art, or architecture in academia if you disagree with the orthodoxy you might end up labeled something you don’t want to be labeled as, and you don’t get very far.
In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.
Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.
And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s
Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.
Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
This is a point well taken, but it also instills a certain incuriosity about expert opinions which is on display in this article.
In fact you can find a question to this very answer with a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfz67t/comm...
Experts are also not a monolithic block. Within architecture and arts you can find many people who agree with your aesthetic preferences.
It is like claiming that there is a "curly-braced" orthodoxy in programming when you just haven't engaged deep with modern varieties.
Eh, that's overstating the case. There's clearly some aesthetics that are more appealing to more people but for many architectural movements in particular the reason that they look that way is for the way that specific ideological reasons interacted with material constraints and the intended message. Brutalism in particular was intended to be cheap and honest; given the constraints many of these buildings were designed under, it makes sense. There are some quite appealing brutalist buildings; a core tenet of the style was integrating the buildings into the natural landscape, in contrast to the artificial styles that had previously been popular. The post-war shortages limited the available materials, shaping the constraints they were operating under. Raw concrete was honest, cheap, and was allowed to weather naturally.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
Meh. Maybe. Or maybe "click bait" is a better guess than "trolling". Or even maybe he's right, despite writing something "terrible."
1. The professional qualifications of the people doing the actual work should be taken seriously. But the professionals have no control over the people who dictated how the work should be done, or the people who thought out the marketing. I hope this point is clear to engineers.
2. Even if the "trolling" sentiment is both incorrect and "terrible" ... ok. Noted. That doesn't destroy the value of the whole article.
Screed:
Many of us have reached the point where we throw away the baby if we find the slightest imperfection in the bath water. This now includes medicine, values, science, and (at least in the US) our freedom and our functioning society.
We need to grow up. Another example that many modern folks cannot handle is errors in the scientific literature. The scientific literature is incredibly valuable, despite also containing a lot of errors. That's life. Reading the literature is like fixing a car or playing an instrument. It works fine if you know how to use it. We need to grow up and deal.
The statues were obviously carved by expert artists but these "specialists" would have us believe they were subsequently painted by half-assed amateurs. It fails the sniff test so badly, that trolling is a reasonable conclusion. You don't put that much effort into making something only then let some unskilled intern ruin it by covering up all your work with a flat coat of primer and leave it at that.
Unlike the article, your comment, does not provide evidence beyond "sniff test". The article brings up paintings of statues, which is an interesting data point.
If somebody tells you there's a dragon outside, you'd need to be stupid to ask for evidence.
Meh. Nyeah? "Trolling" is a reasonable hypothesis but not a reasonable conclusion.
Not amateurs, artists. Look at any modern art and you'll understand that looking like crap is kind of the point nowadays
It could be survival bias trolling: those who accidentally troll get attention, not understanding that they are trolling.
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best
Perhaps they're simply the wrong people for this problem? I'd very much prefer to see how artists would approach painting the figures, instead of scientists and conservators. Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best.
Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
> Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best.
The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
Do we know for a fact in these reconstructions there is no input whatsoever from artists? I know, for example, that paleo-artists are responsible for the reconstruction of what dinosaurs are currently thought to have looked like, and they are mostly artists that work in collaboration with scientists directing their work. Why do we think this is not the case for the reconstruction of colors of Roman statues?
> The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.
How do you prevent introducing a bias that then becomes what we "know" about how statues were painted? By introducing modern aesthetic sensibilities and present them as plausible, we then reinforce that this is how statues were painted back then, and we don't know.
I think the article is mostly begging the question, and is not particularly rigorous. At most it's appealing to some sort of common sense, and we know how tempting but unreliable common sense can be in science and history.
To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
We do have a non insignificant amount of ancient frescoes, mosaics and even a handful of paintings. As the author has pointed out they generally seem much more appealing to modern aesthetic sensibilities. That seems like reasonably strong evidence than whatever thought processing went into making these so called. "reconstructions".
> To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
Which I agree is not a reasonably view IF we had no other data. Imposing the garrish 5-yeard old colouring book style is no less biased.
So let's introduce a bias then, who cares? It's not a mortal offense. It would be cool to see statues painted realistically and non-horribly. And as TFA notes we have frescoes, mosaics, encaustic portraits etc.. that could be used as a guideline.
> How do you prevent introducing a bias that then becomes what we "know" about how statues were painted? By introducing modern aesthetic sensibilities and present them as plausible, we then reinforce that this is how statues were painted back then, and we don't know.
This is just an argument against doing reconstructions at all. Which I am also okay with. It's not a defense of the existing reconstructions because they have the same problem. You don't want to assume additional layers. The existing reconstructions are assuming there were no additional layers. Neither are valid assumptions, but they are both possible. So present multiple possible alternatives without stating that any of them are accurate reconstructions, only that they are constructions which are consistent with the available evidence.
Surely, if one wanted to produce a "reconstruction" of the Venus deMilo, it would have arms. Even if you don't know what the arms would have looked like. And that you would not reconstruct the arms as just straight lines projecting from the stump and would make some attempt to make them realistic and aesthetically pleasing, even if the end result almost certainly does not look much like what the original arms would have looked like, exactly, it would be more like it in spirit than either the statue with stumps or with some sort of vaguely armed shaped cylindrical attachments.
What about the paintings of statues from Pompeii cited in the article?
You didn't see all of the thinkpieces from leftwing academics (inlcuding Mark Zuckerberg's sister) making the link between white marble and "white supremacy," and emphasizing polychromy as a means of de-whitening the represented figures? It never quite made sense to me, as even with coloration, the figures still appeared European, though the academics seemed to think the (unsurprising) uncommonness of blonde hair and blue eyes in the recreations was a "win."
Are our betters malicious or simply morons. A question as old as time.
Have you encountered modern art?
You know what's crazy too is that in colonial America all the brick buildings you see in Boston, etc were also all painted? Well, limewashed technically. You never would have left a bare brick facade. You would put 10-20 coats of thin whitewash on it, or if you wanted it to look like raw brick you would tint the limewash red, and then go in and touch up the mortar lines trompe l'oeil style with white.
Bare brick as an aesthetic choice did not emerge until the late 19th century.
Did the limewashing impart some kind of protection to the masonry? I know water infiltration and freeze/thaw cycles, particularly with soft brick, can wreck masonry.
Yes, it sheds water and sacrificially resists weathering of the underlying brick, while being breathable so the brick can dry out as well
Wood furniture was elaborately painted with wood grain too.
It seems a shame that there is a gap between the limits of what is possible to deduce from direct evidence, and what is likely possible given human ability. And further that the public viewing the reconstructions doesn't take away the subtleties of the difference. To me it's unlikely that some of these works weren't vastly better works of art created by what were likely master artists and craftsfolk of the day.
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.
I agree it's frustrating, but also fascinating. How many of us would be reading about ancient sculptures today if not for this debate? I wouldn't.
It's the same problem with trying to reconstruct dinosaurs, with probably the same solution in terms of public communication -- producing a _range_ of possible reconstructions based on the available evidence.
That said -- I think we actually do have more indirect evidence than what the reconstructions used -- in fact 3 separate lines of evidence A) paintings of statues B) contemporary descriptions of statues and C) contemporary paintings in general. All of which suggest that the coloring would have been more subtle and realistic.
I think if we had contemporary paintings of dinosaurs with feathers and contemporary accounts in writing that dinosaurs had feathers, but no feathers in the fossil record, you would still be fairly justified in saying that dinosaurs probably had feathers.
If only there were some system that could start from some sparse and noisy observations and weave together a plausible completion...
Interestingly to me, generative AI is often used to get results that commit the opposite error compared with these statues: they are, essentially, too confident in their choice of details. For any random topic, the average member of the public is likely to believe the AI's results are more accurate than can be backed up by the evidence.
Generative AI exists, but it is very much dependent on the data it has been trained on. Not saying it would not be interesting, but a huge caveat is required.
I would much rather see human artist interpretations after they were briefed by the archeological experts on the evidence.
> If only there were some system that could start from some sparse and noisy observations and weave together a plausible completion...
Humans?
One issue: the paints/pigments available in times past were not the full range we have today. Sometimes they had to make things somewhat ugly to both our and their taste because that is all they have available. They would still have done their best, but there are limits.
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.
This is absolutely not true at all. In physical painting you do not have a colour wheel were you pick colours to slap on. You can create a wash of colours and hues just with Zorn palette. We are taught to use fairly limited palette in oil painting even today, although you can in principle buy every known hue and slap it on - but that is not painting and that won’t produce anything worth the canvas it is painted on.
You don’t need to believe me. Look at Egyptian sculptures that have survived fairly well in the tombs. Or Greek and Roman paintings, some of which have survived quite well and shown in the original article. I spent 3,5h cgoing through the collections of The Archeological Museum of Napoli, and there’s plenty of them. They used muted earth tones like most skilled modern painters would.
I don't see how you are disagreeing with me.
This is true, but it wouldn't produce the sort of flat coloring in the reproductions. It would limit the color space but artists could still blend and fade those colors to create intermediate tones. This is demonstrated in some of the beautiful ancient murals which the article uses for comparison.
Another thing is they may have wanted to use newly available colors to show they had new colors -the novelty aspect. Kind of like when people learned to make aluminum it was sought as a luxury item —whereas now no one would think of aluminum as a luxury item.
Extreme example: here's the Hawa Mahal in India
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:One_of_many_windows_...
The large plain panes of boldly coloured stained glass probably looked particularly magnificent when coloured glass was rare and expensive and achieving consistency very difficult. They look somewhat less sophisticated in an era in which the multiple bright coloured translucent pane aesthetic is more often seen in cheap children's toys.
If it was a restoration job, many people who love the sombre wall colours and intricate decoration of Mughal architecture would be sure to insist they'd got it horribly wrong...
(Other aspects of the article's argument also apply here. Very different culture but theres a lot of aspects of the Hawa Mahal that look fantastic to modern Western tastes, the architects clearly valued detail in their carvings and painting of other items, they surely had the technical ability to produce stained glass in a way modern Europeans familiar with different approaches to stained glass windows in their own cathedrals consider to be tasteful and skilful. But there's no missing layer of subtle decoration that's been lost to the years: they just thought combining boldly coloured panes of glass looked fabulous)
I've literally never heard anyone say that classical statues were painted "horribly", and unless I missed it, there's no sources in this article that say that, either (just several links to the same New Yorker article talking about whiteness).
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?
I believe the argument isn't that ancient statues were ugly, but rather that reconstructions are ugly (unfortunately this has been used to argue against the now ascertained fact that ancient statues were indeed painted). Purely subjective judgement from someone not trained in the arts: that photo of the Augusto di Prima Porta doesn't look like a great paint-job. The idea that, like the statue itself, the painting must instead have been a great work of art lost to time seems solid to me.
I think the pictures of the reconstructions are source enough, they look horrible
For what it's worth, the "fact" Greco-Roman statues were painted garishly was taught in a packed auditorium to me in an art history gen-ed by a PhD. The specific judgement of painted "horribly" wasn't used but it was obviously incredibly ugly.
It made immediate sense to me, since the painted statues do, in fact, look gaudy and horrible. I think he was evoking a widely held feeling that is bot in common knowledge.
Why would the painting style they used for statues be so massively different from frescoes, mosaics and paintings during the same period, though?
I did find it odd that there was no discussion about whether those other media now represent the exact colors that they had when they were originally created. I know from experience that colors fade, but the argument seems to ignore that.
I also know that most of the old paintings that we have today have been though multiple rounds of "refreshment" in order to counter both the fading and dirt/soot that they were exposed to over the years (remember: most of these were displayed by torchlight/lamplight/candlelight for centuries). Nowadays there is a real emphasis on trying to produce an original ascetic, but that has not always been the case.
So I would want a better discussion of how accurate those "standard candles" are.
Statues were typically large and outdoors and viewed at a distance, frescoes were typically viewed in close proximity and needed details adding to not look completely flat. Some of those also were rather "garish" compared with modern tastes, particularly when freshly painted and not after years of fading and being covered up (and very sensitively restored according to protocols which frown on adding pigment)
Yeah same. I took a course on this years ago and it was explained that the garish colors were to make the statues more visible at long distances. Nuance would be lost. A lot of collosal roman sculpture was designed with the perspective of the viewer in mind. Proportions were exaggerated based on where they were being viewed from.
A thought I had halfway through reading this article: if, hypothetically, early Medieval European art had been lost, how would it be reconstructed by modern scholars?
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.
Strange article. Why didn't the author just try to talk to someone that does this work and ask?
It's written by a philosopher.
The archer example is interesting, because the original seems pretty styalized, unlike the Augustus of the Prima Porta which is obviously more realistic. I do wonder when we analyze these things, are these necessarily monocultures, or were their modern artists in ancient greece?
What a great article. I miss when Hacker News was for the interested and curious!
Even concrete made hundreds to thousands of years ago is stronger than modern day. It’s quite interesting.
At least when astronomers fake the colours on space pictures, they end up looking prettier than the original :) :)
Just as classicists might not be the best painters, metaphysics should stay out of criticizing methodology. Ralph seems completely clueless of the research literature, and is basing his whole argument on vibes from looking at some pictures. Ridiculous.
> But they fail to correct the belief that people naturally form given what is placed before them: that the proffered reconstruction of ancient sculpture is roughly what ancient sculpture actually looked like.
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?
I fail to understand what's the point in even having those reconstructions there if we are fairly certainly they looked nothing alike the originals. Making them pure white seems less dishonest.
completely correct and so glad to see an article making this point. But, I do think the sculptures look better in ahistoric white. As an artist who has worked both with polychromy in sculpture and with really simple patinas, it's immediately obvious that a complex paint job covers a multitude of sins and distracts from the form of the sculpture, whereas a simple colour, esp white on which shadows appear so easily, shows off the sculptor's skill. Also, sculptures without painted eyes can't follow you around the room, which is a huge improvement.
This is a thoughtful thread with good points on both sides. It feels like the gap between academic certainty and public expectation is the real issue. Clear context probably matters more than perfect reconstruction. Interesting discussion overall.
Loved the article, the author is a smart person to doubt the changing taste hypothesis, I think everything based on "we are smarter and have better taste that the ancients" have to be extremely doubted, knowing we, the west, are the same society since the romans is so humbling
Is there a changing taste hypothesis? It's honestly the first time I've heard that suggested as the explanation, versus the more plausible to me idea of reconstruction from incomplete evidence.
I mean, some change in taste is indisputable fact: we like our classical statues in bare marble but we know Romans generally painted them in some way. The Romans also didn't build brutalist buildings or listen to rock music. Nothing about this change in taste necessarily implies that we're smarter than them.
We're clearly not the same society since the Romans either, whilst we take a certain amount of influence from them and other ancestors (and a certain amount more from idealised conceptions of them) we're not a unified state under one Emperor or a mostly agricultural society, don't think that slavery is part of the natural order, consult oracles or worship Jupiter and have big ideas about the importance of human rights and the necessity of universal education.
I think this is just one of those instances where historians go for “most justifiable” vs. “most likely”. E.g. all dinosaurs were stretched skin, fatless, featherless because that’s the minimum thing that fits the evidence.
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.
They should have just 3D-printed the whole thing back then already!
I am of course not a historian, but whenever some historical (or contemporary political theory) flies against what we know about human nature, I always hold it in deep suspicion
they should get someone who paints warhammer or similar to do it, they'd look amazing!
Provided, of course, that they thin their paints.
I just learned that the site/magazine publishing this, Works in Progress, is owned by Stripe! I have no idea why, but the content is great so...thanks Stripe!
This is fun though I sort of wonder if it's attacking a straw man. Are there any reconstruction folks who defend these?
Why did so many people swallow this crap in the first place?
Fantastic article. I am deeply convinced that despite what popular knowledge says, human taste for beauty does not change that much across time and distance.
This is a thoughtful thread with good points on both sides. It feels like the gap between academic certainty and public expectation is the real issue. Clear context probably matters more than perfect reconstruction. Interesting discussion overall.
So where are all the plausible painted statue reconstructions?
Yes, it's because our acquired taste. They were painted.
I mean, I kind of disagree with the assumption that bright colors immediately mean horrible; especially when we're comparing to a dirty ruin of a mosaic for the "real" color. That's probably gotten less saturated over time too.
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.
Tldr: reconstruction of statue painting is based on residual pigments alone, and tend to look garish because the reconstruction is just an expression of the available data and fully saturated color.
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.
Weren't they painted so they could be viewed from a distance, as many of them were not exactly eye-level. It's like stage makeup, you wouldn't want to apply the same makeup for performing in a play as you do... as normal.
I think there are a lot of different possibilities. As hinted to in the article, another is that the most evidence is left by pigments close to the raw surface isn't very well representative of the actual statue. If you're familiar with a lot of art processes - a base rough layer of paint is what is used to seal the raw surface and provide stable surface and rough background color sections for much more detailed painted features in following layers.
I agree with this.
Most of these "researchers" just lie and make up stuff, to be honest.
It's like when they find a small 2 cm fossil bone and they use it to infer crap like "this creature bathed in hot springs every day at 4pm before eating a meal mainly composed of these leaves". LOL. But I give them points for the show they put up.
Btw, you'd be alarmed if you knew how much psychology is made up as well.
I'm no expert, but having read some archeological papers that do make conclusions like that, the evidence is often quite compelling and well-supported. The context we find something in can convey a lot of data, and conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence are frequently argued against by other archeologists. Granted, if you only read the university press releases or the popular summaries thereof it can be somewhat misleading, but that's more down to the journalism than the research.
Yeah it's so ridiculous when people use spectral lines to say they know the chemical composition of some distant star. Obvious bullshit. The idea that anybody could infer this sort of thing from such scant evidence is just academics making things up. The laypeople know better.
/s
I don't really buy the premise of this article, and honestly I'm not sure I want to. Even if the evidence ends up showing that most statues weren't actually that brightly colored, it seems like we should still favor the garish reconstructions anyway. The vivid, borderline-ugly versions tell a better story and a more useful one, societally. They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are, and how the austere white-marble ideal was elevated by centuries of patriarchal, gatekept taste-making that declared one narrow aesthetic "timeless" and everything else vulgar.
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.
> They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are, and how the austere white-marble ideal was elevated by centuries of patriarchal, gatekept taste-making that declared one narrow aesthetic "timeless" and everything else vulgar.
But the whole point is that the white-marble ideal didn't come from "patriarchal, gatekept taste-making". That the statues were still mostly white marble at the time, with colored ornamental features, or very light pigmentation for something like a sunburn. That there is something timeless about human taste in that sense.
> 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.
When ideology clashes with evidence, isn't it time to let go of the ideology? Also, nothing is "actively harmful" to diversity here. This isn't taking away from space in museums for African art or Chinese art or anything like that, or saying that they are any less beautiful or timeless themselves. Or taking anything away from Norman Rockwell paintings or hip-hop album covers or whatever you consider to be non-elite. The same timeless aesthetic principles can be at play, expressed in different cultural systems.
I think the museums should hire trained academic artists to do best guess reproductions next to the garish ones.
The garish ones are _equally_ misleading.
Imagine you got a reproduction of a "five year old with finger paints" version of Mona Lisa and you were told this was made by a person considered a geniuous in his time and an artistic giant. What would make that think you of his patrons and him?
If your goal as a historian is to "tell a better story" then you are not fit to be a historian. You should go find a job as a political hack or maybe federal judge.
Preferring a narrative that supports your politics over fact is the most dangerous trend today. Please stop that.
>They force us to confront how contingent our tastes are
Have you seen any ancient frescoes or the handful of surviving paintings, though?
The white marble is of course in-accurate but that doesn't mean our tastes were inherently that different.
Thing is, the old paintings that survive aren't garish and are beautiful and that beauty is not obviously contingent.
Please let this be masterful sarcasm
> Even if the evidence ends up showing that [I'm wrong] it seems like we should still [say I'm right]. [I like post-modernism more than I like truth]
There, I fixed it for you.
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