Ultraviolet light reveals how ancient Greek statues really looked | Hacker News Reader

Ultraviolet light reveals how ancient Greek statues really looked

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234 pointsjawngee45 comments

I knew that ancient architecture was usually vividly painted, but it didn't occur to me that the statues might be as well. The interesting thing is how nowadays we model buildings and statues after our notion of what classical art looked like, but the models were never intended to look like that. It's almost cargo-cultish, in its own way. Of course, the non-color elements like the shapes and the proportions still stand through, and those are definitely worthy of study. But painting such a sculpture or building like this would probably be outright offensive to some people.

The color-restored versions somehow look less... impressive with the colors on, but that could be just because I'm used to thinking of the colorless versions as more regal. On the other hand, black-and-white photographs look more artistic as well, so it could be something about the lack of color itself.

If you want to see how ancient classical buildings looked when they were in use, check out the old British TV series "I, Claudius." It's strange to see everything so bright and garish, but it's accurate in spirit, if not in detail.

Offensive? I think the sculptures with colours on, especially the one of the archer, is absolutely gorgeous.

I think also that painting buildings would add some variety and brightness to the dull streets of cities. The problem is of course however that paint wears off quite often.

Back in Roman times, and even today, it's common to have cheap durable plain wallpaint up to a yard above the floor, and then fancier decoration above.

The approach of painting cities was taken by mayor Edi Rama in Tirana (Albania) to aesthetically revive the "concrete jungle" style eastern bloc buildings: http://www.vagabondjourney.com/travelogue/colorful-painted-b...

While the interior remains as depressing as ever, the response has been very positive. I imagine it has the same psychological effect of waking up to a sunny vs rainy day.

There's a gorgeous villa that Nero owned at Oplontis. It was dug up under 50 years ago, so the air hasn't degraded the fresco quality at all. It looks, to the untrained eye, like a Donatella Versace set for Saturday Night Live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oplontis

http://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotos-g187786-d622819-Op...

I prefer the sketches of cartoons to the finished, painted product. Perhaps I appreciate the texture of shapes, or seeing how things are made, or their underlying structure; but successful cartoonists tend to go on to paint them. It may be to do with mainstream art (which ancient statues were in their time) tries to be as vibrant as possible, like commercial art today.

For what it's worth, unpainted marble has a much higher degree of subsurface scattering (light diffusion within the material) than a painted surface does, which makes it a more lifelike approximation to flesh -- deemphasizing surface detail and softening the transition from light to shadow. Wax has the same property, which is one of the reasons wax figures look so realistic.

Examples of computer-generated images with and without subsurface scattering can be seen on Henrik Wann Jensen's page. In particular, see the images of the lips: http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/images/subsurf.html

It is a little cargo cultish. The architecture looks good, though, and that's what counts, and why it continues to be influential. I'm rather more annoyed with idiotic signs on buildings which say "PVBLIC BVILDING" or "COVRT HOVSE". Just because Latin does not need to distinguish between "u" and "v" in writing (they're unambiguous in context as either a vowel or a consonant), does not justify torturing English.

Just in case anyone did not know: 'V' was a lot easier to chisel than 'U' (why they are interchangeable)

Incorrect. The letter U was simply not a part of the Roman/Latin alphabet. It, and the letter W, were Carolingian-era developments.

Besides: why would "U" be hard to chisel compared to, say, "R"?

I'm no expert on the antiquities of English, but they were interchangable in English in Shakespeare's time. Here are some asciified lines from Macbeth:

  I goe, and it is done: the Bell inuites me.
  Heare it not, Duncan, for it is a Knell,
  That summons thee to Heauen, or to Hell.

Are you sure that isn't just cruddy OCR?

Apparently U and J came into English in the sixteenth century as undifferentiated alternatives, and were split into separate letters about 1700. It was very surprising to me to learn that English picked up three new letters only three hundred years ago. Note that "w" is pronounced "double U" rather than "double V", which seems to not be an accident.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2696/why-is-the-alp...

In French it's called "double V".

The statues on the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art are painted in the old style:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediment,_Philly_Art_...

Those look much better than the colored statues in the original article. Any idea if the difference is due to the lighting, the quality of the job, or historical accuracy?

Here's a different couple of reconstructions: http://www.leica-microsystems.com/news-media/our-customer-ma...

I think the ones in the original article are painted on plaster replicas and the lighting is horrid compared to the professionally lit marble sculptures. It does seem hard to believe the artists would have caked on 'fond de teint' on the face and arms of the statue like in the reconstruction, without any subtlety, and losing all the lovely skin-like glow of marble.

I imagine a huge number of shades and variations would give similar spectrograph results a couple of thousand years later.

In the Euripides play about Helen of Troy:

My life and fortunes are a monstrosity, Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty. If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect The way you would wipe color off a statue.

Strange as it seems to our modern eyes, they really did consider this beautiful. I'd guess that such bright colors were rare (and expensive) back then, so anything that vivid would have been extraordinary.

Also, though we can detect which pigments were used on the statues we cannot determine the quantity. The degree of artistry, and perhaps subtlety, that was used to paint these statues is lost to us. We know that they were not plain, but beyond that we know very little of what they actually looked like.

The terracota army - a tens of thousands strong army buried close to Xi'an in China is also colored brightly but the colors fade away quickly. And the scientist have decided not to continue with the excavations so that in the future when we have the technology to conserve the real colors we can dig up the rest and see it and keep it in its current beauty.

I wonder whether I think the 'traditional" blank white statues look more dignified because that's what I'm familiar with, or because they actually do look more dignified.

Perhaps we should paint all the DC monuments in festive colors?

Well, it seems to me that without the colors one can project different expressions onto the face, and thus one can read it as more dignified. With the paint, the possible expressions are narrowed down toward what expression the painter put there.

The particular pictures in the article look fairly awful; you'll notice they all have a bunch of bright primary colours right next to each other. I can only think of one place you'd see that many bright colours close together nowadays, and that's on a clown outfit.

Go ahead, you try looking dignified when you're wearing that archer's pants.

Maybe in the modern world we've developed colour fatigue from over-exposure. Back then very few man-made objects were brightly coloured, so the vivid ones tend to stand-out. They also speak for the level of craftsmanship and thus value.

Many years ago a Middle-Eastern family bought a famous mansion in Beverly Hills. There was a huge outrage that they had the Greek statuary colorized. The press seemed to think that it proved the lack of taste of those "foreigners". It's funny to now realize that they were probably more correct than the sophisticated Americans who thought the statues should be undecorated.

Why do the have a painted statue of a roman emperor in a article about painted Greek statues?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_of_Prima_Porta

Also, weren't many roman and greek statues sheltered somewhat and protected against wearing off all this paint?

I'm sure how to express it, but this information could be disruptive in a fairly serious way. The whole purity of the white Greek statues sort of connects to the modern minimalist aesthetic. I think the way the statuary has been presented to us in popular culture and in general education in the US has given us a sense of the Greeks that is subtly changed by this realization that they weren't what we thought of them as. At least many of us.

Greek art may be less like the Miro in the Guggenheim and more like the mural in the barrio. And as the truth spreads that their art was in many ways closer to what white Americans think of as "immigrant" art, it will probably slightly help with multiculturism. And influence design.

And as StavrosK appropriately snarked, "Pity the ancients didn't share our fashion sense, eh." Yes, and I think there was/is a pretty strong myth that they did.

While I agree this will challenge a lot of popular assumptions about classical art, this information isn't exactly new. See for instance Alma-Tadema's representation of the Parthenon:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1868_Lawrence_Alma-Ta...

"The color? Always something tacky."

Pity the ancients didn't share our fashion sense, eh.

Just wait until this article hits 4chan or fark, and you'll get your Lady Gaga / Venus de Milo mashup.

I think the Rome TV show had lots of color all over the place, which appeared a first to me, compared to the classic peplum movies.

Didn't we simply copy what we thought was their fashion sense. If their statues or architecture came down to us in colour, we would have a preference for colourful statue and architecture. Just goes perhaps to show how much influence does culture have on ones perception of such things.

That was my original point, that it's our culture that makes us consider these statues garish and tacky. Back then, they were (obviously) the height of fashion and pleasing design.

Nashville, TN has a full scale replica of Athens' Parthenon, complete with four story Athena. She was originally unpainted, but recently was updated to match what she looked like in ancient days. Lots of gilt and garish paint.

Before: http://legacy.lclark.edu/~ndsmith/Acropolis/Nashville%20Part...

After: http://people.vanderbilt.edu/~amanda.n.krauss/AthenaGilded.j...

Better article:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors.html

This is one of those slow news day tropes "rediscovered" and recycled every few years.

In the Hermitage in Russia, there are several centuries old paintings with incidental Greek statuary in the background, painted in living colors. This is one of those nuggets even art historians keep forgetting to pass along.

Did they also use ultraviolet light to determine the colors and patterns painted on the missing quiver of the bowman statue? Amazing. Also, could it be true that the colors are not exact? Certain pigments could degrade more, leave less of a trace, so assuming the reconstructed colors might be off slightly, they could have been significantly less ugly than these depictions.

I was thinking about the metal ones, and a comment in the site said "And yes it is generally thought that the bronze originals were painted too."

I wonder if those solid colors were just the base of the paint, and some shading effect was applied on top to make the statues look more realistic. I mean, I have a hard time imagining that artists like the Ancient Greeks, who got the human shape so right, would also get the color so wrong.

(By the way, the little color left on the Elgin Marbles look like a badly weathered garden gnome. Oh well.)

It makes all those monumental neoclassical buildings and art look quite funny. Like your idea of beauty was based on a skeleton of some beauty queen of old and you didn't even realize that it's not how she was expected to appear. (Hyperbole, of course. But if you, for example, think about that history shows parodied in Futurama, hey, it seems that we're exactly like that…)

I wonder if there was certain lightning requirements.

For example, the famous bust of Abraham Lincoln requires light over head and behind it to give it a serious, solemn almost brooding and suffering look

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3504/3753443355_6ed82e886f.jp...

In full light, though, it looks less impressive.

but "ultraviolet light" is a contradiction in terms

What?

Light, by definition, is visible. "Ultraviolet radiation" would be a preferable usage.

Nonsense.

Light, as defined by dictionary.com:

2. Physics

a. Also called luminous energy, radiant energy. electromagnetic radiation to which the organs of sight react, ranging in wavelength from about 400 to 700 nm and propagated at a speed of 186,282 mi./sec (299,972 km/sec), considered variously as a wave, corpuscular, or quantum phenomenon.

b. a similar form of radiant energy that does not affect the retina, as ultraviolet or infrared rays.

Somewhere, Ted Turner is smiling.

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