Onward and Upward with the Arts

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical

Sculpture
Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have
suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction.

By Margaret Talbot October 22, 2018

0:00 / 36:59

Audio: Listen to this article. To hear more, download the Audm iPhone app.

ark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological

M dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time,
he was a graduate student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and, like
most people, he thought of Greek and Roman statues as objects of pure white marble.
The gods, heroes, and nymphs displayed in museums look that way, as do neoclassical
monuments and statuary, from the Jefferson Memorial to the Caesar perched outside
his palace in Las Vegas.

Aphrodisias was home to a thriving cadre of high-end artists until the seventh century
A.D., when an earthquake caused it to fall into ruin. In 1961, archeologists began
systematically excavating the city, storing thousands of sculptural fragments in depots.
When Abbe arrived there, several decades later, he started poking around the depots
and was astonished to nd that many statues had ecks of color: red pigment on lips,
black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists
and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting
statues and architectural reliefs to the public. “Imagine you’ve got an intact lower body
of a nude male statue lying there on the depot oor, covered in dust,” Abbe said. “You
look at it up close, and you realize the whole thing is covered in bits of gold leaf. Oh,
my God! The visual appearance of these things was just totally different from what I’d
seen in the standard textbooks—which had only black-and-white plates, in any case.”
For Abbe, who is now a professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, the idea
that the ancients disdained bright color “is the most common misconception about
Western aesthetics in the history of Western art.” It is, he said, “a lie we all hold dear.”

In the early nineteen-eighties, Vinzenz Brinkmann had a similar epiphany while

pursuing a master’s degree in classics and archeology from Ludwig Maximilian
University, in Munich. As part of an effort to determine what kinds of tool marks could
be found on Greek marble sculpture, he devised a special lamp that shines obliquely on
an object, highlighting its surface relief. When he began scrutinizing sculptures with
the lamp, he told me, he “quite immediately understood” that, while there was little sign
of tool marks on the statues, there was signi cant evidence of polychromy—all-over
color. He, too, was taken aback by the knowledge that a fundamental aspect of Greek
statuary “had been so excluded” from study. He said, “It started as an obsession for me
that has never ended.”
A color reconstruction of a marble statue, based on surviving traces of pigment.
Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker

Brinkmann soon realized that his discovery hardly required a special lamp: if you were
looking at an ancient Greek or Roman sculpture up close, some of the pigment “was
easy to see, even with the naked eye.” Westerners had been engaged in an act of
collective blindness. “It turns out that vision is heavily subjective,” he told me. “You
need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful
imprint”—a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to
see color as alien, sensual, and garish.

One afternoon this summer, Marco Leona, who runs the scienti c-research
department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gave me a tour of the Greek and
Roman galleries. He pointed out a Greek vase, from the third century B.C., that
depicts an artist painting a statue. Leona said, of polychromy, “It’s like the best-kept
secret that’s not even a secret.” Jan Stubbe Østergaard, a former curator at the Ny
Carlsberg Glyptotek museum, in Copenhagen, and the founder of an international
research network on polychromy, told me, “Saying you’ve seen these sculptures when
you’ve seen only the white marble is comparable to somebody coming from the beach
and saying they’ve seen a whale because there was a skeleton on the beach.”

In the nineteen-nineties, Brinkmann and his wife, Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, who is an

art historian and an archeologist, began re-creating Greek and Roman sculptures in
plaster, painted with an approximation of their original colors. Palettes were
determined by identifying specks of remaining pigment, and by studying “shadows”—
minute surface variations that betray the type of paint applied to the stone. The result
of this effort was a touring exhibition called “Gods in Color. ” Versions of the show,
which was launched in 2003, have been seen by three million museumgoers in twenty-
eight cities, including Istanbul and Athens.

The replicas often deliver a shock. A Trojan archer, from approximately 500 B.C.,
wears tight pants with a harlequin pattern that is as boldly colored as Missoni leggings.
A lion that once stood guard over a tomb in Corinth, in the sixth century B.C., has an
azurite mane and an ochre body, calling to mind Mayan or Aztec artifacts. There are
also reconstructions of naked gures in bronze, which have a disarming eshiness:
copper lips and nipples, luxuriant black beards, wiry swirls of dark pubic hair. (Classical
bronze gures were often blinged out with gemstones for the eyes and with contrasting
metals that highlighted anatomical details or dripping wounds.) Throughout the
exhibition, the colored replicas are juxtaposed with white plaster casts of marble pieces
—fakes that look like what we think of as the real thing.

For many people, the colors are jarring because their tones seem too gaudy or opaque.
In 2008, Fabio Barry, an art historian who is now at Stanford, complained that a boldly
colored re-creation of a statue of the Emperor Augustus at the Vatican Museum looked
“like a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi.” Barry told me, in an e-mail, that he still found
the colors unduly lurid: “The various scholars reconstructing the polychromy of
statuary always seemed to resort to the most saturated hue of the color they had
detected, and I suspected that they even took a sort of iconoclastic pride in this—that
the traditional idea of all-whiteness was so cherished that they were going to really
make their point that it was colorful.”

VIDEO FROM THE N YORKER

What the Notre-Dame Fire Means for Paris

But some of the disorientation among viewers comes from seeing polychromy at all.
Østergaard, who put on two exhibitions at the Glyptotek which featured painted
reconstructions, said that, to many visitors, the objects “look tasteless.” He went on,
“But it’s too late for that! The challenge is for us to try and understand the ancient
Greeks and Romans—not to tell them they got it wrong.”

ately, this obscure academic debate about ancient sculpture has taken on an
L unexpected moral and political urgency. Last year, a University of Iowa classics
professor, Sarah Bond, published two essays, one in the online arts journal
Hyperallergic and one in Forbes
Hyperallergic Forbes, arguing that it was time we all accepted that ancient
sculpture was not pure white—and neither were the people of the ancient world. One
false notion, she said, had reinforced the other. For classical scholars, it is a given that
the Roman Empire—which, at its height, stretched from North Africa to Scotland—
was ethnically diverse. In the Forbes essay, Bond notes, “Although Romans generally
differentiated people on their cultural and ethnic background rather than the color of
their skin, ancient sources do occasionally mention skin tone and artists tried to convey
the color of their esh.” Depictions of darker skin can be seen on ancient vases, in small
terra-cotta gures, and in the Fayum portraits, a remarkable trove of naturalistic
paintings from the imperial Roman province of Egypt, which are among the few
paintings on wood that survive from that period. These near-life-size portraits, which
were painted on funerary objects, present their subjects with an array of skin tones,
from olive green to deep brown, testifying to a complex intermingling of Greek,
Roman, and local Egyptian populations. (The Fayum portraits have been widely
dispersed among museums.)

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
awed, they often get testy.
With modern technology, it is easier to re-create ancient polychrome sculpture.
Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker
Earlier this year, the BBC and Net ix broadcast “Troy: Fall of a City,” a miniseries in
which the Homeric hero Achilles is played by a British actor of Ghanaian descent. The
casting decision elicited a backlash in right-wing publications. Online commenters
insisted that the “real” Achilles was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and that someone with
skin as dark as the actor’s surely would have been a slave. It’s true that Homer describes
the hair of Achilles as xanthos, a word often used to characterize objects that we would
call yellow, but Achilles is ctional, so imaginative license in casting seems perfectly
acceptable. Moreover, several scholars explained online that, though ancient Greeks and
Romans certainly noticed skin color, they did not practice systematic racism. They
owned slaves, but this population was drawn from a wide range of conquered peoples,
including Gauls and Germans.

Nor did the Greeks conceive of race the way we do. Some of the ancients’ racial
theories were derived from the Hippocratic idea of the humors. Rebecca Futo Kennedy,
a classicist at Denison University, who writes on race and ethnicity, told me, “Cold
weather made you stupid but also courageous, so that was what people from the Far
North were supposed to be like. And the people they called Ethiopians were thought
of as very smart but cowardly. It comes out of the medical tradition. In the North, you
have plenty of thick blood. Whereas, in the South, you’re being desiccated by the sun,
and you have to think about how to conserve your blood.” Pale skin on a woman was
considered a sign of beauty and re nement, because it showed that she was privileged
enough not to have to work outdoors. But a man with pale skin was considered
unmasculine: bronzed skin was associated with the heroes who fought on battle elds
and competed as athletes, naked, in amphitheatres.

In an essay for the online magazine Aeon, Tim Whitmarsh, a professor of Greek
culture at the University of Cambridge, writes that the Greeks “would have been
staggered” by the suggestion that they were “white.” Not only do our modern notions of
race clash with the thinking of the ancient past; so do our terms for colors, as is clear to
anyone who has tried to conceive what a “wine-dark sea” actually looked like. In the
Odyssey, Whitmarsh points out, the goddess Athena is said to have restored Odysseus
to godlike good looks in this way: “He became black-skinned again and the hairs
became blue around his chin.” On the Web site Pharos, which was founded, last year, in
part to counter white-supremacist interpretations of the ancient world, a recent essay
notes, “Although there is a persistent, racist preference for lighter skin over darker skin
in the contemporary world, the ancient Greeks considered darker skin” for men to be
“more beautiful and a sign of physical and moral superiority.”

Last year, high-school students participating in a summer program at the

Museum, in Providence, were so fascinated to learn about polychromy in classical
statuary that they made a coloring book allowing gallery visitors to create brightly hued
versions of the objects on display. Christina Alderman, who runs the program, told me,
“The moment they found out that the statues were originally painted, I just lost them
to that idea. They were, like, ‘Wait, are you serious? I’ve played video games set in
ancient times, and all I see are white sculptures. I watch movies and that’s all I see.’ It
was a real human response—they kind of felt they’d been lied to.”

he idealization of white marble is an aesthetic born of a mistake. Over the

T millennia, as sculptures and architecture were subjected to the elements, their
paint wore off. Buried objects retained more color, but often pigments were hidden
beneath accretions of dirt and calcite, and were brushed away in cleanings. In the
eighteen-eighties, Russell Sturgis, an American art critic, visited the Acropolis, in
Athens, and described what happened after objects were unearthed: “The color of all
these soon began to fall and vanish. The beautiful statue rst described lay on a table in
the museum on the Acropolis in May, 1883, and already some of its color had been
shaken off; for as it lay it was surrounded by a little deposit of green, red and black
powder which had fallen from it.” Paint that survived was sometimes concealed in
recesses: between strands of hair, or inside navels, nostrils, and mouths.

In time, though, a fantasy took hold. Scholars argued that Greek and Roman artists
had left their buildings and sculptures bare as a pointed gesture—it both con rmed
their superior rationality and distinguished their aesthetic from non-Western art.
Acceptance of this view was made easier by the fact that ancient Egyptian sculptures
looked very different: they tended to retain brilliant surface color, because the dry
climate and the sand in which they were interred did not result in the same kind of
erosion. But, as Østergaard put it to me, “nobody has a problem hailing Nefertiti as a
spectacular piece of world art, and nobody says that it’s unfortunate that it’s painted.
Because it’s not Western, it’s perfectly O.K. for it to be polychrome. But let’s not have it
in our part of the world, because we’re different, aren’t we?”
Starting in the Renaissance, artists made sculpture and architecture that exalted form
over color, in homage to what they thought Greek and Roman art had looked like. In
the eighteenth century, Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar who is often called
the father of art history, contended that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it
is,” and that “color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty.” When the ancient
Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were rst excavated, in the mid-eighteenth
century, Winckelmann saw some of their artifacts in Naples, and noticed color on
them. But he found a way around that discom ting observation, claiming that a statue
of Artemis with red hair, red sandals, and a red quiver strap must have been not Greek
but Etruscan—the product of an earlier civilization that was considered less
sophisticated. He later concluded, however, that the Artemis probably was Greek. (It is
now thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original.) Østergaard and Brinkmann
believe that Winckelmann’s thinking was evolving, and that he might eventually have
embraced polychromy, had he not died in 1768, at the age of fty, after being stabbed
by a fellow-traveller at an inn in Trieste.

The cult of unpainted sculpture continued to permeate Europe, buttressing the

equation of whiteness with beauty. In Germany, Goethe declared that “savage nations,
uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors.” He also
noted that “people of re nement avoid vivid colors in their dress and the objects that
are about them.”
A sculpture thought to be Paris, the Trojan prince who killed Achilles, ca. 500 B.C. Courtesy Glyptothek München
A color reconstruction of the sculpture, from the “Gods in Color” exhibition. In this reconstruction, Paris wears
the costume of the Scythians, a tribe in Central Asia.
Courtesy Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung

In the nineteenth century, a series of major excavations should have toppled the
monochrome myth. In Rome, the architect Gottfried Semper used scaffolding to
examine Trajan’s Column, and reported nding myriad traces of color. Victorian
excavations of the Acropolis turned up some painted reliefs, sculptures, and marble
gutters. The Augustus of Prima Porta and the Alexander Sarcophagus retained bold
hues when they were discovered, as contemporaneous paintings of them con rm.

In a catalogue essay for an 1892 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, the classical
scholar Alfred Emerson said of polychromy that “literary testimony and the evidence
of archeology are too strong and uniform to admit of quibble or doubt.” Nevertheless,
Emerson continued, “so strong was the deference for the Antique, learned from the
Italian masters of the Renaissance, that the accidental destruction of the ancient
coloring” had been “exalted into a special merit, and ridiculously associated with the
ideal qualities of the highest art”—from “lofty serenity” to “unsullied purity.”

This ardor for whiteness was so intense that the evidence didn’t stand a chance.
Scholars who continued to discuss polychromy were often dismissed. Auguste Rodin is
supposed to have pounded his chest and said, “I feel it here that they were never
colored.” Sculpture and painting had become increasingly independent disciplines, and
artists who tried to merge the two were met with scorn. In the eighteen- fties, when
the British artist John Gibson, a proponent of polychromy, showed his delicate “Tinted
Venus”—the goddess’s body is mostly white, but she has muted golden hair and
corn ower-blue eyes—a titillated reviewer described the gure as “a naked, impudent
Englishwoman.”

Chromophobia,” at a
As the artist and critic David Batchelor writes in his 2000 book, “Chromophobia
certain point ignorance becomes willful denial—a kind of “negative hallucination” in
which we refuse to see what is before our eyes. Mark Abbe, who has become the
leading American scholar of ancient Greek and Roman polychromy, believes that,
when such a delusion persists, you have to ask yourself, “Cui bono?”—“Who bene ts?”
He told me, “If we weren’t bene tting, we wouldn’t be so invested in it. We bene t from
a whole range of assumptions about cultural, ethnic, and racial superiority. We bene t
in terms of the core identity of Western civilization, that sense of the West as more
rational—the Greek miracle and all that. And I’m not saying there’s no truth to the
idea that something singular happened in Greece and Rome, but we can do better and
see the ancient past on a broader cultural horizon.”

In the twentieth century, appreciation for ancient polychromy and decoration went
further into eclipse—largely on aesthetic, rather than racial, grounds. Modernism
lauded the abstraction of white forms and derided earthy verisimilitude in sculpture. In
a 1920 essay titled “Purism,” the architect Le Corbusier wrote, “Let us leave to the
clothes-dyers the sensory jubilation of the paint tube.” In Italy and Germany, Fascist
artists created white marble statuary of idealized bodies. After the Second World War,
European architects sought a neutral common heritage by promoting the modest
virtues of spare white spaces, such as the parliamentary building in Bonn.

Over the centuries, many art restorers and dealers felt obliged to vigorously scrub
Greek and Roman objects, so as to enhance their marmoreal gleam—and their
collectibility. Mark Bradley, a classicist at the University of Nottingham, believes that in
some cases restorers were merely trying to remove residue left by oil lamps that had lit
galleries before the advent of electricity. But, he noted in an e-mail, many museums
propagated “an enduring Renaissance conspiracy” to “eradicate traces of paint.” In the
nineteen-thirties, restorers at the British Museum polished the Elgin marbles, the most
treasured sculptures from the Acropolis, until they were as white and shiny as pearls.

ne day in July, Abbe was in Bloomington, Indiana, peering at two Roman busts:
O one of the militaristic Emperor Septimius Severus and one of his learned wife,
Julia Domna. The busts belong to Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum, which is
closed for renovation, and Abbe was examining them in a storage facility. The
sculptures, made from a creamy white marble, appeared to have negligible speckles and
stains. But Abbe knew better. He had examined their surfaces with a powerful
microscope and with infrared and UV light, and had discovered rich purples, blues, and
pinks.

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE

October 29, 2018

The Theatre Birders Dept. Shouts & Murmurs Fiction

Truth vs. Ego in “The Bird-Watching with the All-Purpose Fiction
Lifespan of a Fact” Ravenmaster Nondisclosure Washin
By Alexandra Schwartz By Sarah Larson
Agreement By Bryan
By Paul Rudnick

In 2007, Giovanni Verri, who now teaches conservation at the Courtauld Institute, in
London, gured out how to con rm the presence of an ancient pigment known as
Egyptian blue. It has a remarkable capacity for luminescence under infrared light, and
Verri found that in digital photographs taken under such light it glistened like ice
crystals. Abbe had seen these sparkles on the two Roman busts. Now he was planning
to take samples of the pigments he’d detected, so that they could be chemically
analyzed.
Th Ph ikl i K A h i G kf di h i h BC
The Phrasikleia Kore, an Archaic Greek funerary statue created in the sixth century B.C.
Courtesy Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung
A l i f h Ph ikl i K l di
A color reconstruction of the Phrasikleia Kore, completed in 2010. Courtesy Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung

A conservation scientist from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gregory Dale Smith,
would undertake the extraction of the samples, the largest of which would be the size
of the period at the end of this sentence. He would use an array of fantastical tools,
including an eye surgeon’s scalpel, a tungsten needle with a tip six microns wide, and a
brush with a single bristle, made from the hair of a deer. Smith, who arrived at the
storage facility later that afternoon, told me that he had skipped coffee that day—he
needed to have the steadiest of hands.

Julie Van Voorhis, an art-history professor at Indiana who is researching the busts, had
joined Abbe and me, along with Juliet Graver Istrabadi, the ancient-art curator from
the Eskenazi Museum. For a while, the four of us stood in a polite semicircle and gazed
at the statues, as though we were guests at their party and they were about to give a
toast.

Abbe told me, “From basically 1960 to 2000, people were just, like, ‘Yeah, the color’s
there, but you can’t do anything with it—there’s not enough there, it’s too
fragmentary.’ ” But in recent years it’s become easier to detect many colors, using
noninvasive technologies such as X-ray uorescence analysis (which can identify the
elements in pigments). Ancient organic dyes—such as Tyrian purple, made from the
glands of sea snails—are harder to identify, but scholars have had some success using
surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, which measures molecular vibrations. Armed
with these technologies, curators and conservators are starting to “reëxcavate in our
own museums,” as one scholar put it to me—taking objects that were presumed to be
colorless and looking at them anew.

Abbe, who is forty- ve, tall, and slim, was wearing a dapper dark suit and a narrow
oral tie. He has a springy energy that reminded me of an actor playing a brainy young
inventor. He told me that, when he rst examines a sculpture for signs of polychromy,
he looks at it for hours, aided by a device that involves a magnifying glass and an
L.E.D. light affixed to a headband. He gave me one to put on; it looked like a dorky
version of a miner’s lamp. “I try to convince everyone that they need to buy these for
when they go to museums,” he said. (He advises people who actually do wear the device
in galleries to put their hands behind their backs while peering closely at objects, so
that guards don’t freak out.)
A terra-cotta statue of Eros, from the third century B.C. Traces of blue and purple pigment can be seen on the
wings.
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

As I walked around the busts, he told me, “You can get much closer. Once your eyes are
properly adjusted, you can go in and see details.” I leaned in and looked at the
emperor’s cloak; tiny teardrop shapes, in the deep purplish blue of old ink stains, swam
into view on a white surface.
“So blue and white is the base layer,” Abbe said over my shoulder. “And the white part
seems to be painted with lead white, one of the most opaque whites. And then they’re
washing that over with a paint pigment that seems to have a number of elements—it
seems to have Egyptian blue in it, and it seems to have a mercury-rich red pigment,
probably cinnabar. That’s a good example of how they’re layering.”

Abbe and Van Voorhis are interested in nding out not just which colors the ancients
favored but what techniques they used to apply paint: how sculptors polished stone
surfaces in preparation for pigment, how they added highlights and shading to faces.
Learning more about these methods will help scholars create more nuanced facsimiles,
and will also illuminate how painting and sculpting worked in tandem in the ancient
world. Skeptics of polychromy question why Greek and Roman artists would have
sculpted with such beautiful materials—Parian marble, which was commonly used, has
a prized translucence—and then painted over the surface, or bedazzled it with gilt and
jewels. But if painters and sculptors worked together as partners, with an understanding
of how tactically applied color could enhance a work’s luminosity, polychromy makes
more aesthetic sense.

Abbe said, “We have this wonderful anecdote from Praxiteles, the Greek sculptor from
the fourth century B.C. When he’s asked which of his sculptures he liked the best, he
names those that the premier painter of the day, Nicias, ‘applied his hand to.’ ” He
noted that, in the ancient Roman Empire, statues would not have been sequestered in
art galleries—they would have been on the streets and in people’s homes. Figures that
were deftly painted would have looked eerily lifelike, particularly in low and ickering
light. “There’s a real aesthetic, especially in the Roman period, for the visual trick,” he
said. “When you went into a place, the divide between what was sculpture and what
was actual life was uid, and highly theatrical. You go to a dinner party in Pompeii, and
there are statues of nude homoerotic youths, in the old, noble Greek tradition. And
then there are actual slave boys that look just like those well-tanned bronzes, and at
rst they’re standing still. And then they move, the same way the sculptures seem to
move in the re ections of pools and fountains. So, you know, you’ve had a little bit to
drink, and you’re negotiating this—”

In August, 2014, two thousand years after Augustus’s death, color was projected onto a set of friezes at the Ara
Pacis museum, in Rome.
Photograph by Alberto Pizzoli / AFP / Getty Images
Van Voorhis joined in the reverie: “You’re calling over your slave boy, but it happens to
be a statue. And then the slave boy comes from the other side and re lls your cup.”

At one point, Abbe said, “The modern art gallery, you could say, kills these things—
transforms them into something they’re not.”

ne of the advantages of establishing scienti c methods to prove that classical

O objects were polychrome is that they provide archeologists with a protocol—a
formal way to look for color before cleaning an artifact. Signi cant Greek and Roman
nds are still being made. Abbe noted that a set of Roman historical friezes recently
found in Nicomedia, Turkey, are “awash in purple.”

Abbe and Van Voorhis lamented that, even now, such objects are sometimes mercilessly
cleaned. “Remember how they would hose statues down in the courtyard?” Van Voorhis
asked Abbe, recalling an excavation in Turkey that they’d both worked on.

A bust of a young African boy, sculpted in the rst century B.C. Ancient sculptures of African people were often
made of basalt and painted with reddish-brown layers to create a lifelike effect. Mahogany-colored paint is
still visible on the boy’s face.
Courtesy Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

“Like you’d hose down your wheelbarrow,” Abbe said. At times, he added, the impulse
to clean is less about a dislike of color and more about “the excitement of discovery”:
“You want to see what you’ve got. Archeology is a slow business. Then, imagine, it’s the
last day, and you nally nd something. The rst thing you want to do is make it
legible.” This impulse, he said, must be checked: “You should treat a discovery like a
medical situation. Treat it like triage. What you want to do is stabilize the patient. Less
is more. Take the thing, wrap it up in something like neutral cotton gauze, and put it
on a shelf in a stable place. Then call us, and we will come and do the micro-excavation
of the surface.” This process needs to happen relatively quickly, because, after
extraction, the soil clinging to an object dries, and “the paint layers literally delaminate
with it,” leaving a denuded object and “a painting in reverse” adhering to scattered
akes of soil.

As we examined the bust of Julia, Van Voorhis pointed out a tendril of hair peeking out
from under her wig. This made it clear that she was wearing the wig for fashion, not to
cover up baldness. Her face was so carefully modelled that you could see where her
cheek was beginning to sag slightly. She had horizontal creases encircling her neck—
Venus rings, I learned they were called—and a delightful unibrow, both of which
connoted desirability. All this humanizing detail had been conveyed purely through
form. I wondered if Abbe ever regretted having to see such sculptures, in his mind’s eye,
saturated in the bright colors that many people nd kitschy.

The rst time I saw a statue that had been painted to approximate ancient polychromy,
I was in Nashville, of all places. In 1897, a full-scale replica of the Parthenon was
erected in a city park there, and inside it is an enormous statue of Athena. To my eye,
the gure, which was painted and gilded in the two-thousands, looked awful: her
golden robes had a blinding shimmer, her eyes were a doll-like blue, and her lips could
have beckoned from a lipstick ad. It reminded me of a Jeff Koons piece that revels in its
tackiness. Yet Abbe assured me that the colorized Athena was consistent with the
aesthetics of the lost original, from the fth century B.C.

Some of the painted replicas that I saw subsequently seemed more subtle and
persuasive. Nevertheless, as much as I thought that it was important to acknowledge
polychromy, I still sometimes preferred the ghostly elegance of white marble.

A marble head of a deity wearing a Dionysiac llet, from the rst century A.D. Traces of red pigment remain
on the lips, eyes, and llet. Marco Leona, who runs the scienti c-research department at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, said the fact that ancient statues were once painted is “like the best-kept secret that’s not even
a secret.”
Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art

When I shared this feeling with Abbe, he said, “We can have our cake and eat it, too.
We can still look at these things and admire them as monochromatic, neoclassical
works. We can also recover the ancient aesthetics and correct an untruth.” He promised
that not even the most fervent champion of polychromy was going to start slathering
contemporary paint on ancient objects.

o how should we represent the colors of the classical world in museums? The
S reality-television, big-reveal style of the “Gods in Color” exhibition is certainly
effective at upending our preconceptions. As Østergaard said, “A physical object right
next to an original gives the public a real ‘Aha!’ moment. It’s spectacularly successful as
a means of communication.”
But Abbe, like many scholars I talked to, wasn’t crazy about the reconstructions in
“Gods in Color.” He found the hues too at and opaque, and noted that plaster, which
most of the replicas are made from, absorbs paint in a way that marble does not. He
was also bothered by the fact that the statues “all look fundamentally the same, whereas
styles would have differed enormously.”

The Brinkmanns have made several replicas in synthetic and real marble—an expensive
undertaking—and these do re ect light somewhat better than the plaster models.
Cecilie Brøns, who currently heads a project at the Glyptotek called Tracking Colour,
which is investigating all the museum’s ancient pieces for traces of color, admires the
Brinkmanns’ reconstructions but said she worries that museumgoers accept them too
literally. The replicas were best appreciated as interpretations, she said, adding,
“Reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public—that these are not exact
copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked.”

Giovanni Verri, of the Courtauld Institute, told me, “Knowing the particular pigments
and the painting materials is useful, but it’s not the sum of the painting. There is the
technique component—the style, the sensibility.” To paint exactly as an ancient painter
did would require a psychic form of time travel. “We have so much knowledge that
those painters would not have had,” he said. “We have experienced two thousand years
of history, and art history, that would be extremely difficult to forget.”

Verri, like Abbe and others in the eld, believes that digital reproductions—computer
animations and the like—can offer advantages that physical ones do not. They can be
revised as new information becomes available, and they can also show multiple
possibilities of how an object might have looked. Verri created such a digital
reproduction a few years ago, after he spent time investigating the traces of polychromy
on the Treu Head—an idealized female gure, sculpted in the second century A.D.,
that is in the collection of the British Museum. Verri performed what he called “a
digital face transplant.” He identi ed pigments that had originally covered the
sculpture: Egyptian blue mixed into pinkish skin tones and the whites of the eyes;
yellow and red ochre in the hair; rose-colored madder lake for the lips. He also studied
and mimicked the sophisticated painting techniques used in the Fayum portraits. The
result is re ned and naturalistic.
When the Eskenazi Museum reopens, in a year or two, it will host a special exhibition
featuring the busts of Severus and Julia. To show the original polychromy, Abbe and
Van Voorhis have considered projecting colored light on the statues for part of the day.
(A set of friezes at the Ara Pacis museum, in Rome, have been presented this way, to
pleasing effect.) Another idea is to present a video animation in which the color
gradually appears on the two Roman busts, suggesting how successive layers of paint
might have been applied.

Abbe and Van Voorhis will have to engage in some speculation, particularly when it
comes to hair color and skin tone. They have no reason to believe that there wasn’t
pigment on the skin or hair of the busts, but they have not found any traces of it. “The
absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” Abbe wrote to me, in an e-mail.
“Classic neoclassical assumption!”

Later, in another e-mail, Abbe pointed out that much of the Roman élite “came from
diverse-looking stock—Berber, Arab, Transylvanian, Danubian, Spanish, etc.” He also
noted that sculptures of African people from the ancient world were sometimes carved
from black stones, such as basalt, and then painted with reddish-brown pigments to
create a lifelike effect. One such example, at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, in
Hamburg, is the head of a young boy, from the rst century B.C.; patches of
mahogany-colored paint can still be seen on the nose and the cheeks.

Severus and Julia were Romans, but neither was of Italic descent. Severus was of Berber
origin, from an élite family in Libya. Julia came from a priestly family in Emesa, Syria.
A panel painting of the couple, known as the Berlin Tondo, has survived: Severus has a
chestnut-brown complexion and a grizzled gray beard; Julia is paler, with dark hair and
eyes. The Tondo will help guide Abbe and Van Voorhis in their work on the busts, just
as the Fayum portraits aided Verri.

The easiest, and cheapest, way for museums to address the fact of polychromy is to say
more about it in their labelling. One day in July, Gina Borromeo, the curator of ancient
art at the Museum, walked me through the Greek and Roman galleries, and
pointed out a label that she’d written in 2009: “The surviving traces of reddish
pigment, still visible in the hair of this gure, re ect the fact that most ancient statues
were originally quite vividly painted.” But Borromeo believes that nothing can match
the power of displaying a polychrome work that has retained its original hues. In 2016,
she successfully lobbied to acquire an Etruscan urn that still has much of its original
color.

Vinzenz Brinkmann, who now heads the antiquities department of the Liebieghaus
sculpture collection, in Frankfurt, told me that viewing classical sculptures in color does
far more than expand your notion of what such objects originally looked like; it helps
you understand that “everything that seems to be so clearly and rmly set is not always
so clearly and rmly set.” In other words, he said, seeing these colors affects people’s
understanding of themselves. With a small chuckle, he added, “And, for us, this is
beautiful.” ♦

October 29,
This article appears in the print edition of the October 29, 2018
2018, issue, with the headline
“Color Blind.”

Margaret Talbot is a staff writer and the author of “ The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My
Father’s Twentieth Century .” Read more »

Read something that means something. Try The New Yorker and get a free tote. Cancel anytime.
Subscribe now. »

Video
Undiscovered
A mysterious creature works hard to make new friends and get a decent forest sel e in Sara Litzenberger’s
lively animation.

© 2019 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site
constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie
Statement (updated 5/25/18). Your California Privacy Rights. The material on this site may not be
reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written
permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that
are purchased through links on our site as part of our a iliate partnerships with retailers. Ad Choices