The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle.
I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.
No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts.
A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
You generally can't hold someone responsible for what someone else says about them.
When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression.
It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.
Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex.
We might be at that point with repainted statues. Museum visitors are now starting to expect the ugly garish colours.
They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
I could imagine there's some great videos out there? I'd be keen to have scientific basis given rather than speculative artwork.
You can do both: prove the base case and reach across the aisle to the art college next door to see if someone is interested in the follow up "creative exercise". You can present both "here's what we can prove" and "here's an extrapolation by a skilled artist of what additional layering/contouring might have done".
Likewise archeologists will classify finds as tools when they don't have nearly enough knowledge about the craft in question to be able to do this properly (see the extensive mis-classification of weaving swords/beaters as weapons [0], but there are many other cases).
So I'm a little reluctant to cut them some slack and say "this is how scholarship" works when they get all petulant about including colours that we know the ancients had, in ways we know they used them, for this kind of reconstruction.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/67863215/Weapon_or_Weaving_Swords_a...
I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.
If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.
they should use "green screen green" and give you viewing glasses that fill in the colors to your own historical preference (e.g. rose colored? blood-soaked?). then if you point a finger with your "anhistorical" complaints, there will be 3 fingers pointing back at you!
However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...
But they still don't add anything without direct evidence - where there's evidence in later statues for more subtle colouring, they include that.
Can't find the better source on that specifically now but this is a nice article about the Roman trade with India and mentions the coins found in Vietnam and even Korea about half way down
https://www.thecollector.com/why-was-the-roman-indian-ocean-...
On the other hand, it's not implausible that maritime societies come up with their own fish sauce independently
This gives you a general trend of how brightly underlayed statues tended to be painted afterwards to finish them, and lets you infer how other statues without surviving coloured pictures of them would have appeared based on the likely prevailing style at the time
>As a result, we internalized a deep-seated attachment to an unblemished white image of Greek and Roman art. We became, to use David Bachelor’s term, chromophobes. It is this accidental association between Greek and Roman art and pristine white marble, we are told, that accounts for the displeasure we feel when we see the statues restored to color.
And there's indeed been quite a bit of push-back since the story first broke. Unspoken is the reason. Primacy bias is probably a part of it, but what really accounts for the intensity of the attachment to the idea of white marble finishes? I'm sure you can imagine.
>Bond told me that she’d been moved to write her essays when a racist group, Identity Evropa, started putting up posters on college campuses, including Iowa’s, that presented classical white marble statues as emblems of white nationalism. After the publication of her essays, she received a stream of hate messages online. She is not the only classicist who has been targeted by the so-called alt-right. Some white supremacists have been drawn to classical studies out of a desire to affirm what they imagine to be an unblemished lineage of white Western culture extending back to ancient Greece. When they are told that their understanding of classical history is flawed, they often get testy.
https://archive.is/qTreQ#selection-1695.0-1695.693
So, yes, it was important to categorically falsify the notion that the statues, frescoes, etc., were unpainted. Anything that left it open would have been something for the worst sorts of people to latch onto. Now that that's out of the way, possibly even more accurate explanations can be given the time of day, instead of being stuck having to hash out, "Oh, but were they even colored at all?"
>Folks closer to center see it as controlling the narrative, lies, and conspiracy when the full truth comes out.
And this, I reject. The people who think this way aren't in the center, and they were never interested in the truth. Their aim has always been promoting the primacy of Western classical art (often as part of larger notions of white supremacy). They fought hard for the debunked no-chroma interpretation until another angle presented itself: that the chroma scientists were trying to purposely make the statues seem ugly, in order to devalue Western classical art, or to dictate its value outside of their control and terms. It's the same tack as right-wing gamers claiming that female characters are being made purposely "ugly" in order to alienate male heterosexual gamers.
And while the reason for changes in female representation in games are less objective and more complicated than the scientific inquiry that produced the knowledge of painted statues, most of the people driven to the fringes by the evolution of these topics, as knowledge and circumstances develop, are people who share their fringe (and incorrect) ideas. Implicit there is that there's no "full truth coming out", just a developing collective understanding.
If you want narrative control, lies, and conspiracy, look at Wall Street.
i.e. is there evidence that there is comfort in trolling using Roman or Greek vs Assyrian, Nubian etc. Or do they just like to make everything bright and blocky.
And if one wants to add fake detail, why should archeologists be involved? Just have AI generate them
Reconstruction, (similar to translation) is an art that combines carefuly study of evidence and craftfully filling in gaps and adding in detail where necessary (or leaving details unfilled and ambiguous to communicate the impossibility of total translation or reconstruction!) to present some communicable form of the original that gives the viewer some closer but imperfect access to it.
Here's an article with one picture I could find, along with a few of the more saturated ones (NSFW artistic nudity): https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibi...
Why do they even bother with the "reconstructions" if they know that they are inherently inaccurate, though
The article points out that the garish underlayer reconstructions have (maybe accidentally) been successful at correcting the widely held misperception of bare marble.
There’s also something in… the bare marble reconstruction maps somehow to our idea of sophisticated. Garish underplayed reconstruction, our idea of silly, frivolous, or childish. There were a lot of Greeks, they didn’t all live on one end of that spectrum.
And frankly, if I wanted to ridicule the ancients and flatter my own age, I could think of no better way than to make the old stuff look bad.
I would much rather have an exhibit that showed the bare marble, then a conservative reconstruction based on what direct evidence merits (to the degree possible, noting that it is not a complete reconstruction), then more liberal but reasonable reconstructions based on indirect evidence.
Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases.
And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.
Would be interesting to see a painted statue that's actually pleasant to look at, rather than these "let's smear this one pigment we found in the armpit all over the face"-style "reconstructions"