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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> the now ascertained fact that ancient statues were indeed painted

"Now ascertained"? Ancient sources specifically say they were painted.

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.

I think the pictures of the reconstructions are source enough, they look horrible

I disagree.

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)

As a data point, I had mostly only seen what the author is complaining about in the past, with articles having more of the "you won't believe what ancient statues actually looked like" angle and implying that it's just our taste that changed.

So I definitely feel that I was misled by what I had read and seen about painted statues (though I was always a bit sceptical), even though everything I'd seen was from secondary sources (news sites etc.), and not articles or papers written by the reconstructioninsts themselves, so I don't blame them directly.

I personally noticed this when shown these reconstructions. I remember being puzzled at the ugliness when going to a museum. This article actually makes a lot of sense.

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.

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