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Course: Ancient Mediterranean + Europe > Unit 1
Lesson 2: Polychromy in Ancient SculptureIn Full Color, Ancient Sculpture Reimagined
At the exhibit "Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay and Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Smarthistory.
Video transcript
(soothing piano music) - [Host] When we think
of the ancient world, I think of Pompeiian wall paintings that are brightly colored of mosaics from the Greek world that
are full of different colors. It was a world of Technicolor. So, what did sculpture
look like in antiquity? Because when we walk through
the hollowed halls of museums, we see all this white sculpture
that looks somehow pristine, where in fact marble sculptures
and bronze sculptures in the classical world, that is in the Greek and Roman world, and of course also in the as Syrian world, also in the Egyptian world
were brightly colored. And as it turns out, antiquity has a lot to teach
us about our own values and who we've excluded from art history. This idea that ancient sculpture was not painted started
in the Renaissance, and there were some challenges to that as people started to pull sculpture up in the 18th and 19th century. But there were very
important art historians. One in particular, Johann Winckelmann, who's often considered
to be almost the founder of art history as a discipline. Johann Winckelmann liked his
sculpture white and pure. In fact, Winckelmann wrote, "The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is." And so we have the
development of this connection between whiteness and ideas
of purity, of nobility, and an association of
those things specifically with Western culture. And this is where we are so fortunate to have modern science and technology and the working together of archeologists with conservationists and other
types of material scientists to study the marble, to
look for traces of paint, because we know when sculpture
was pulled up from the ground that in fact painting survived
on many of these sculptures. And so one of the statues we're looking at is a reconstruction of the
so-called small Herculaneum woman from the island of Delos. And she was excavated in
the late 19th century. And we actually have descriptions
of how colorful she was when she came out of the ground. So, the first thing we should say is we can never reconstruct these sculptures with absolute certainty. We absolutely know it was painted how exactly the colors look. There's always a little bit of guesswork. One of the things that the color does is it allows us to really
understand her clothing. And what we can see very clearly
is that she's wearing silk. The silk is crinkling, as
you can see down by her feet. And then she has this lovely
mantle wrapped around her. She is the so-called small
Herculaneum woman type, because a statue almost identical to this was found at Herculaneum in about 1706. This type of sculpture was very popular among the ancient Romans
who adopted so much of Greek culture as their own. I believe there are 160
examples of this portrait type, both from the ancient Greek world and the ancient Roman world. In the ancient Roman world,
you'd purchase the body and you'd have a separate
head or portrait done and that head would be
put into the statue. So, now we're looking at
a sculpture of a sphinx. And what's so wonderful
is that in this gallery, we can compare it to the
sculpture as it looks today, and a plaster cast of it showing
us how it would've looked on the original stele. This is an archaic stele. Stele is a grave marker. That means this monument marked
the grave of an individual. In all likelihood, the
youth that it's depicted and possibly his younger
sister who stands next to him. One of the things that's so remarkable about the stele is its
preservation of color in both the stele and
in the original sphinx that stood on top of it. There is a lot of color surviving that is visible still to the naked eye. In the case of the stele,
we can see a lot of red, but when we go up and
look at the sphinx closely we can see that on the sphinx's breast, there was a very detailed pattern that almost looks like scales, as if she was a bird or having feathers. And that we can even also start to see that pattern and decorating on her wing that is clear that she was polychrome. And so in this
reconstruction we see oranges and yellows and golds and blues, and not seeing the stone
itself feels shocking. If you think about this stele being erected in a graveyard, all those steles are
competing for your attention. Having something bright, shining, and gold meant that people walking
by would look at your grave, look at your stele, and remember you. We may not be looking at
exactly what this sculpture looked like in antiquity, but in a way, art history is an attempt to understand these objects the way that they were originally
intended to be seen. And we can only do that imperfectly. But what we do have to acknowledge is that the aesthetic
that we often ascribe to works of art as objects in museums, their audience who would've seen them in antiquity in a different way and interacted with
them in a different way. And that is a world that by
using science and technology, we can understand is part
of the "Western tradition." We are a part of this larger conversation about art and color, and that we need to embrace those changes and rethink the way we look at art. (soothing piano music) (piano music ending)