Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity, a new exhibition currently making its rounds in the United States, features meticulous copies several sculptures from the Hellenist period using chemical analysis to accurately render the original coloration. The catalog from the exhibition, when it was at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, provides some nice background:
The ideal of unpainted sculpture and of unadulterated contour and volume took shape in Renaissance Rome, inspired by the finds and early collections of classical marble statues, such as the Laocoön Group discovered in 1506. These were denuded of their painted surfaces by prolonged exposure to the elements, burying conditions, and often, most likely, a good scrub upon recovery. With the works of Michelangelo, white marble sculpture was established as the noblest of arts. It was greatly admired in the neoclassical period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when ancient Greek sculpture was regarded as the ultimate expression of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” to use the famous phrase of the German art historian Johann Jachim Winckelmann
When I see these color palettes atop this elegant and mythic marble it is really quite unsettling. There is such an ingrained picture in my mind of Hellenistic art as having this elegance of expression that, to see it contradicted with bright colors, does not sit right. I wonder if, by some fluke of chemistry, most of the sculptures from this period had retained their color profile over the years, then certain inflections and modes of idealization in the neoclassical period would have been changed or diverted. I, anyway, like to imagine that they would.
[via archaeology.org - includes more images and links]
Are there new imperatives to restoring art, specifically along the original colours?