It's an unsubstantiated theory, but the author does go out of their way to say that this might not even be objectionable, if it happened at all
In architectural design I think it’s rather pronounced. We already know how to design great buildings for the human environment. There ain’t anything new to learn here, so in order to stand out in the field you have to invent some bullshit.
Well, you do that, you create Brutalism or something similarly nonsensical, and in order to defend your creation you have to convince a lot of other academics that no, in fact, buildings that look like bunkers or “clean lines” with “modern materials” are the pinnacle of architecture and design.
And as time has gone on we still go and visit Monet’s Gardens while the rest of the design and art world continues circle jerking to ever more abstract and psychotic designs that measurably make people unhappy.
Not all “experts” in various fields are weighted the same. And in some cases being an expert can show you don’t really know too much.
In fact you can find a question to this very answer with a quick search: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1nfz67t/comm...
Experts are also not a monolithic block. Within architecture and arts you can find many people who agree with your aesthetic preferences.
It is like claiming that there is a "curly-braced" orthodoxy in programming when you just haven't engaged deep with modern varieties.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
> They are scientists and conservators doing their best
Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.
The end result would surely look better, but how would we be assured it resembled historical reality?
Do we know for a fact in these reconstructions there is no input whatsoever from artists? I know, for example, that paleo-artists are responsible for the reconstruction of what dinosaurs are currently thought to have looked like, and they are mostly artists that work in collaboration with scientists directing their work. Why do we think this is not the case for the reconstruction of colors of Roman statues?
You can be fairly sure that no reproduction would literally resemble the reality, _including the existing reconconstructions_, but you can certainly produce a range of possible reconstructions which would have produced the same evidentiary record, and which would be at least inspired by what we know about contemporary taste that we can derive from surviving paintings and the textual record.
I think the article is mostly begging the question, and is not particularly rigorous. At most it's appealing to some sort of common sense, and we know how tempting but unreliable common sense can be in science and history.
To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
> To me TFA reads mostly as "this reconstruction looks bad, I refuse to believe ancient Romans painted statues like this, therefore it must be an incorrect reconstruction."
Which I agree is not a reasonably view IF we had no other data. Imposing the garrish 5-yeard old colouring book style is no less biased.
I don't think they claim this is what the statues actually looked. In fact, the article quotes an expert saying the opposite: "we can never know what they looked like".
These are conservative but incomplete "this is the part we have strong evidence for".
This is just an argument against doing reconstructions at all. Which I am also okay with. It's not a defense of the existing reconstructions because they have the same problem. You don't want to assume additional layers. The existing reconstructions are assuming there were no additional layers. Neither are valid assumptions, but they are both possible. So present multiple possible alternatives without stating that any of them are accurate reconstructions, only that they are constructions which are consistent with the available evidence.
Surely, if one wanted to produce a "reconstruction" of the Venus deMilo, it would have arms. Even if you don't know what the arms would have looked like. And that you would not reconstruct the arms as just straight lines projecting from the stump and would make some attempt to make them realistic and aesthetically pleasing, even if the end result almost certainly does not look much like what the original arms would have looked like, exactly, it would be more like it in spirit than either the statue with stumps or with some sort of vaguely armed shaped cylindrical attachments.
Yesterday’s kids are today’s scientists. You what the most popular archeological student prank is? - It’s for a team to bury a modern piece of pottery in another team’s site. So I am not at all surprised if they wanted to play a few practical jokes on the public’s ignorance.
Trolling here means that they followed the tradition of restoring the items - use just the materials they found on the statues. Well the materials found were the base layers - so that’s what you restore. You don’t go adding shading or fades or iridescent paint because it looks cute. They create art that looks like an 8 year old painted it, then laugh at the public “ooh-ing and ah-ing” over the “beautiful” restorations.
And for that matter, people who admire Sparta and like, eventually end up doing nazi salutes.
1. The professional qualifications of the people doing the actual work should be taken seriously. But the professionals have no control over the people who dictated how the work should be done, or the people who thought out the marketing. I hope this point is clear to engineers.
2. Even if the "trolling" sentiment is both incorrect and "terrible" ... ok. Noted. That doesn't destroy the value of the whole article.
Screed:
Many of us have reached the point where we throw away the baby if we find the slightest imperfection in the bath water. This now includes medicine, values, science, and (at least in the US) our freedom and our functioning society.
We need to grow up. Another example that many modern folks cannot handle is errors in the scientific literature. The scientific literature is incredibly valuable, despite also containing a lot of errors. That's life. Reading the literature is like fixing a car or playing an instrument. It works fine if you know how to use it. We need to grow up and deal.