As the Greek playwright Euripides tells it, princess Helen blamed herself for the tragedy of the Trojan War. If only she hadn’t been so desirable a prize for Paris, she thinks. “If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect,” she says in The Trojan Women, “The way you would wipe color off a statue!”
It’s a famous line from a famous play. So, why is color excluded from the popular imagination of ancient Greece and Rome?
The myth of both civilizations as paragons of whiteness is rooted in assumptions about race and Western aesthetics. Romans and Greeks were born around the Mediterranean and North Africa and while they recognized distinctions in skin tone, they didn’t categorize their world by it like modern Western society. Rather, color carried poetic associations of health, intelligence, and integrity. (Take this much-dissected verse from The Odyssey, in which the goddess Athena beautifies Odysseus: “He became black-skinned again, and the hairs became blue around his chin.”) Color equated to beauty, and ancient representation of the human form, the sinewy sort beloved in the Renaissance, were typically painted with brilliant skin tones, hair colors, and outfits.
This isn’t news. There is significant evidence of ancient polychromy —from “many colors,” in Greek — in marble, bronze, and terracotta figures. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder documented it in his Natural History; contemporaneous pottery and paintings corroborate this. Museum curators and art restorers simply cleaned traces of paint from sculptures out of deference for pure form.
Modern technology, however, has made it possible to identify and recreate millennia-old polychromy. The product isn’t perfect, but it is immensely startling in person, and that’s meant as a compliment.
See for yourself at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color,” for which 17 painted recreations of ancient sculptures have been installed in the museum’s Greek and Roman galleries.
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A Reintroduction to Antiquity
Image Credit: Photo Paul Lachenauer. Courtesy the Met “Chroma” is the result of a collaboration between the Met’s Research Department and Vinzenz Brinkmann, head of antiquity at the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection in Frankfurt am Main, and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, leaders in the field of polychromatic studies.
The show’s chronological display starts in the Bronze Age and ends with a rare example of polychromic sculpture in nineteenth-century America from the Met’s collection. Some of Brinkmann reproductions are juxtaposed with the originals, like a prehistoric figure made in the Cyclades islands that actually had cinnabar red lips and freckles, as well as azurite eyes.
A highlight is a new reproduction of a sphinx that stood guard over a tomb, from when Greek art was more obviously indebted to Egyptian aesthetics. And tucked in a corner is a Trojan archer (about 490-480 B.C.), resplendent as a peacock, inspired by a statue found at the Temple of Aphaia and which some scholars believe he represents Paris, the mythical prince of Troy, who killed Achilles with his arrow. Like an animal bearing its red back, the bright zig-zag design warned enemies from vast distances of his approach. To a modern critic, the costume is kitschy, but to Homeric heroes, color signaled an individual’s allegiance. Strip him of paint and what’s left? A man with no story.
“For an ancient person walking into this museum, it would have felt like they were among ghosts,” Seán Hemingway, head curator of Greek and Roman art at the Met, said. “In Greek mythology, the underworld was described as drained of color.”
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Experiments in Ancient Polychromy
Image Credit: Courtesy the Met. Brinkmann and Koch-Brinkmann began their experiments in ancient polychromy in the nineteen-nineties after discovering that oblique light could illuminate the subtle variations in a sculpture’s surface that were tell-tale remains of paint. They started by identifying the pigment, and even pattern, under ultraviolet light.
Until then, the primary process available to scholars apart from naked-eye examinations was a chemical analysis, which risked damaging the pigments. Light and laser measurements were noninvasive alternatives. Where light failed, they looked to contemporaneous wall paintings and sculptures for clues to the color scheme. Painted panel portraits from Roman Egypt, known as Fayum portraits, of which the Met has a stellar collection, have also been a helpful resource. The aim is to approximate the appearance of the original sculpture, so the reconstructions are created using some of the same materials and techniques used in antiquity. Pliny’s Natural History has been vital for this process as it describes the formulas and preparation for the pigments, as well as their general use in sculpture.
They shared their initial efforts in the 2003 exhibition “Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity”, which opened at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum. During its run, it toured 28 cities in several iterations and reached millions of museumgoers. The critical reception was mixed. The New York Times called the reproduction “bright and brassy, vulgar and almost childlike in their high-key color and frilly detail.”
An earlier reproduction of the Trojan archer was there and derided “as something less than heroic.” The reproductions on view at the Met are clearly improvements on the 2003 iterations. The skin tone of this lost, for example, lost the uncanny glossiness of the earlier iterations. But the disdain of the 2003 show was usually sharp, like it wasn’t the researchers who got it wrong, but the ancient Greeks. They were intruding on a system of order with something as annoying as the truth.
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The Fantasy of White Marble Takes Hold
Image Credit: Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art In truth, the myth of white marble statues was an accident of time. For more than a millennia, sculpture and architecture was exposed to the elements, stripping them of paint and adornments. Buried objects retained traces of pigments, but they were hidden by dirt and easily lost to cleaning and contact with light and air.
In 1489, the monument Apollo Belvedere—a Roman marble replica of a Greek bronze statue—caused a sensation when it was exhibited in the courtyard of the Vatican. Renaissance artists exalted its sense of movement and play of shadow and light. The aesthetic was studied and reproduced in architecture and sculpture.
A series of excavations in the 18th and 19th centuries that produced sculpture with visible pigment should have dispelled the fantasy. Painted reliefs and sculptures were unearthed at the Acropolis in Athens. The architect Gottfried Semper reported traces of paint on Trajan’s Column in Rome. But the ardor for unpainted sculpture was too strong by this point.
Scholars who discussed polychromy were dismissed and artists who tried to bridge the mediums of painting and sculpture were met with scorn. When British neoclassical artist John Gibson debuted Tinted Venus, a mostly white goddess with pale yellow hair, one critic called the figure a “naked, impudent Englishwoman.” This attitude carried into Modernism, where the celebration of abstracted white forms flourished.
Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar whose 1764 publication Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums provided a foundation for the study of art history, said that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is.” Winckelmann, whose work is cited in the Met’s exhibition, has a complicated legacy. In 2018, University of Iowa professor Sarah Bond published an incisive essay in Hyperallergic linking Winckelmann’s ideals to 20th century European fascism and white male supremacist ideology. Brinkmann believes that Winckelmann would have embraced polychromy if he hadn’t died in 1768, at the age of fifty, after being murdered by a fellow traveler in his hotel bed in Trieste.
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Realigning Expectations of Perfection in Polycromy
Image Credit: Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen. Courtesy of The Met Brinkmann and Hemingway acknowledge that some visitors to the Met won’t like the recreations.
How could ancient sculptors, “driven by a naturalistic aesthetic so intense that they labored in marble in order to replicate muscles beneath the surface of human skin and to painstakingly re-create delicate drapery” allow painters to “effectively obliterate the subtlety of their hard effort with daubs of color,” wrote one critic of Margaret Talbot’s 2018 New Yorker feature on the new polycromy movement.
“Chroma” makes the point that ancient painters and sculptors were a team, with an understanding of how deftly applied pigment could enhance marble’s intrinsic gleam. In Rome, statues were often installed in public places, so when painted by a master, the distinction between art and life would blur under dim light.
No living artist can paint exactly as an ancient painter, that would require the unlearning of centuries of art history. The show includes a reconstruction of a late classical marble statue called “Small Herculaneum Woman” based on an iteration found in Delos, the Greek island and mythical birthplace of Artemis and Apollo. She was examined in “ultraviolet, infrared, and raking light” as well as with x-ray fluorescence analysis, which can identify the periodic elements in a material, and measures of electromagnetic radiation. The reproduction does an impressive imitation of transparent drapery—in some spots, the rich pink pigment of her undergarments is visible beneath her malachite green mantle.
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New Interpretations of Old Stories Emerge in Color
Image Credit: Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen. Courtesy of The Met The most narratively compelling entries are the reproductions of two pairs of classical bronze statues. They are a fleshy vision, with a mix of metals mimicking black hair, tanned skin, and gold weaponry.
In the main hall, a hulky boxer is slumped over, dripping blood—simulated by inlaid copper—and a shiner (created by a comparable alloy lead mixed with bronze). His head is jerked sharply to the side, towards a hulking warrior. The originals were found in the vicinity of the Quirinal Hill of Rome in 1885 and dubbed the Hellenistic Ruler and the Boxer at Rest. They are some of the most famous examples of Greek sculpture and have been largely treated in scholarship as independent artworks.
Brinkmann believes this interpretation is immediately, obviously inaccurate. He and Hemingway follow an interpretation by an American scholar in the 1940s that posited that they represent an episode from the mythology of the Argonauts, in which Polydeukes, the son of Zeus, defeated the Amykos, king of the Bebrykes, a people who lived in northern Anatolia. Amykos was in the habit of killing strangers to his land—until he found himself at the mercy of another.
“It was peculiar that no one had ever checked whether the two had an interaction, to establish eye contact, which is so easily done,” Brinkmann said. “Some German colleagues say this is a victorious scene, then why such a posture of defeat? Why the blood? Who has he turned toward so abruptly with a stunned expression?”
By now, Brinkmann and his colleagues have established a formal scientific method to identify ancient polychromy that they hope will become commonplace at archaeological digs. The protocol is already proving useful: researchers from the Çukurbağ Archaeological Project were delighted to report that a set of Roman marble reliefs recently discovered in old Nicomedia, Turkey, were “awash in purple”.