Sheila Hoffman looks at colour in ancient Greek sculpture. Contrary to popular belief, the ancient Greeks actually painted their statues... they were not white!
Greek sculptors were particularly concerned with proportion, poise, and the idealised perfection of the human body, and their figures in stone and bronze have become some of the most recognisable pieces of art ever produced by any civilization. The majority of Greek sculpture was not polished but painted, often rather garishly for modern tastes. Skin, hair, eyebrows, lips, and patterns on clothing were added in bright colours. Eyes were often inlaid using bone, crystal, or glass.
Color.
We're talking about color today in Greek sculpture, a fresh look at a whitewashed history.
According to Western views of cultural history, the Greeks perfected art.
The Romans, they copied it.
The Dark Ages, they lost it.
And the Renaissance, they rediscovered the perfection of antiquity.
Now, most of these ideas were based on the perfection of human form, of course.
And the idea was that the Greeks had created these beautiful, natural, idealized, posed
forms of the human body.
And everyone else, they just kind of flattened and disfigured it.
This kind of history was written around the 19th and 20th century, when the idea of Greek
antique form had so pervaded Western thought that already they were taking color, something
that had been reserved for royalty and the fabulously wealthy for eons, and they dismissed
it as vulgar and garish.
But now, technology is actually allowing us to reconceive these notions and, frankly,
rewrite our cultural history.
Here's the thing.
They got it wrong.
Inspired by all this ethereal white marble, neoclassicism took off.
But they failed to recognize that throughout ancient Greek history, all this white marble,
the architecture, the sculpture, had been covered with paint.
That was the tradition.
Skin, hair, eyebrows, even eyes were set with colored jewels.
Every bit of marble was covered with beautiful, vibrant colors.
For centuries, anyone that saw the Parthenon would think that other than its obvious ruins,
it was otherwise as it had been created, in this ethereal, beautiful, white marble.
No other change had occurred except that it had fallen over.
And in fact, so great was its form considered to be, that even at the time of its creation,
the architect and the artist behind it, Phidias, was said to have been the only person on Earth
ever to have been able to see and perceive the true forms of the immortal gods.
Now, by the time all these things had been unearthed in the Renaissance or gazed upon
by Renaissance eyes, of course, all of the natural pigments were fugitive and fragile.
They had been scoured away by the wind and faded by the sun and abraded by time.
They looked pure white because they had been existing for thousands of years already.
And so the pure white ideals of classical antiquity pervaded the later generations,
the minds of people of thousands of years later.
And even though we can detect today these micro flecks of pigment
and understand their chemical analysis, their very makeup,
and even the placement of them on these sculptures,
it's hard for people to radically realign their thinking about what Greek antiquity looked like.
You're watching History Etc. Thank you and see you next time.
