VII. Cave Albam Artes: The Utilization of Technology to Showcase the Polychromy of Ancient Art

When Greek or Roman sculptures are depicted, the image associated is almost always one of stark whiteness. This stark, white image is also what one is most likely to see today in museums around the world. Indeed, the whiteness of these sculptures is what the public largely expects to see and upholds a notion regarding classical standards of beauty. ¹ However, this notion of whiteness is a fictitious representation of how these sculptures would have appeared to their audiences in ancient times. Ancient sculptures were brilliant works in vivid polychromy displaying a myriad of sumptuous colors. Bold colors such as deep blues, bright reds, and vibrant green covered the statues. While many works’ past polychromy is now lost for a variety of reasons including the wear of time or even purposeful removal,² digital technology can be used to investigate and display surviving traces on ancient sculptures in museum collections. This labor is important in both informing visitors and the public on unfamiliar aspects of ancient art and in challenging ideas of white supremacy propagated by the perception of whiteness of ancient sculpture.

Why is it important to challenge this idea of whiteness? For centuries, classical imagery has been used to promote a white nationalist or supremacist ideology. The original Fascists – Hitler and Mussolini – looked back to Ancient Rome for their idea of greatness. Hitler in particular loved Classical sculpture and used it to shape the Nazi visual ideology. Rolf Michael Schneider of Ludwig Maximilian University remarked to BBC, “The perfect Aryan body, the white color [of the marble], the beautiful, ideal white male: to put it very bluntly, it became a kind of image of the Herrenrasse or ‘master race’—that’s what the Nazis called themselves and the Germans.”³

The utter whiteness of the sculptures showcases the false reality that everyone in the Mediterranean was and homogenous and white which is fundamentally untrue.⁴ This belief in the pure white Classical sculpture originates partially from the Renaissance. Prior to this, at least in the Western world, a statue was seen as unfinished if not painted or the client was seen as not being able to afford the costly pigments.⁵ However, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first to believe the use of color in sculpture was “barbaric” and to look down upon sculptors who were unable to achieve lifelike figures without the use of color.⁶ da Vinci and later Michelangelo were inspired by the ancient Greeks and Romans and looked to surviving examples to base their ideas upon. However, the surviving examples that they knew of were continuously exposed to almost all of the agents of deterioration, which led to almost all traces of paint being stripped from their surfaces.⁷ These artists formed their beliefs from an incorrect basis. Therefore, when people from later art movements referred back to the Renaissance artists, the myth of whiteness and its superiority was further embedded into the historical narrative.

Art historians such as Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717-1768) did not help matters when they upheld the white marble statues as the ideal and attributed any color remaining to barbarity.⁸ Winkelmann, while admitting works did include polychromy, wrongly attested many sculptures with polychromy as Etruscan.⁹ This may seem like an honest mistake, but it is a problematic designation as the Etruscans were seen as more primitive than the lauded Greeks and Romans. Similarly, other art historians like Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) outright stated that polychromy was foreign to and went against the classical ideal.¹⁰ Another art historian, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), wrote in his influential work Aesthetics that

The final material for sculpture, the one above all most appropriate to it, is stone which has in itself the objective character of consistency and permanence…[M]arble in its soft purity, whiteness, absence of colour, and the delicacy of its sheen harmonizes in the most direct way with the aim of sculpture…Of course we cannot deny that the pure beauty of ideal sculpture can be executed just as completely in bronze as in marble, but when, as happened in the case of Praxiteles and Scopas, art begins to pass over into softer grace and attractiveness of form, then marble is the most appropriate material.¹¹

These art historians and critics are very clear in what about these ancient sculptures is the most appealing and what the classical ideal was; the pure whiteness of the marble and its “absence of color” is one trademark of the civility of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, whereas only barbarians and lesser artists would besmirch the material with color. This harmful idea associating color with barbarity and whiteness with civility persists to this day.

In order to counteract this narrative, it is important to educate the public on the actual way these sculptures appeared in their time. As briefly mentioned above, polychromy on Ancient Greek and Roman statues is not a new finding. Greek archaeologists knew as early as the 18th century and British archaeologist Charles Newton remarked on the vulgarity of the colors when publishing his findings at the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.¹² These findings were somewhat rare as the surviving paint traces on sculptures which were unearthed long ago or never buried are very small and difficult to understand properly with only the visible light spectrum. Even sculptures with highly visible polychromy can lead to false identification of colors because of the way the paint ages.

It was not until the nineteenth-century that museums and researchers began to set up laboratories and run experiments to start studying many subjects including paint traces on Greco-Roman statues. In the 1970s and 80s, the field began to utilize new technologies to determine the past paint colors.¹³ To due this, researchers used technology such as photography under ultraviolet radiation (UV fluorescence and UV reflectography), raking light, and capturing images on orthochromatic film.

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In addition, researchers took samples and examined them under microscopy.¹⁴ Taking samples is a destructive method, and while still used in a variety of different mediums, should only be done with the consultation of a conservator.

With the turn of the twenty-first century and the development of new technologies, non-destructive techniques such as X-ray fluorescence analysis (XRF) and ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) absorption spectroscopy have become much more commonplace.¹⁵ XFA works by generating and then aiming X-rays at a sample and measuring what is reflected at a detector.¹⁶

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This method allows researchers to measure chemical elements to determine the chemical structure and therefore color of the polychromy on a particular section of a statue, though this mainly works exclusively on inorganic materials.¹⁷ These inorganic compounds are normally metallic components within a material and allow a broad range of materials to be identified without taking samples.¹⁸ UV-Vis is even more analytical and allows identification of organic materials such as pigments and dyes. Light is focused on a specific point of the statue and the amount reflected or absorbed is measured by the UV-Vis spectrometer. Each color has a unique reflection and absorption spectrum so the spectrum can be compared to known pigments and dyes to determine the ancient color used. ¹⁹

A specific example using portable XRF can be seen in the Medusa head shield on the frieze of the Siphnian Treasury at Delos in Greece.

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This is a small section of what remains of the treasury and measures 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters, however since this shield has an exceptionally expressive face and is several meters above where humans would be standing to observe the treasury, it would have most likely still been highlighted with polychromy.²⁰ The XRF machine was positioned approximately 1-3 centimeters from the sample and controlled with a motorized holder with a range of 20 centimeters.²¹

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The XRF machine produces readings that quantify the remnants of past inorganic materials added to the surface. When this information is graphed, researchers can then determine what is the material of the statue itself and then look at other elements present to determine what was used for the paint. Measuring the elements remaining on the surface of the Medusa, the XRF machine found traces of calcium, iron, copper, and lead. These elements correspond to the colors brown (calcium), green (copper), and pink/white (lead). The team were unable to definitively identify what color the iron would take but they hypothesize it would have been red.²²

Even with these new methods, an investigation starts with older methods in order to make initial observations on the pigments themselves, the application method, and overall condition. Then the tried-and-true use of UV and infrared light to produce luminescence, fluorescence, and reflection are used along with raking light.²³ Specific colors can fluorescence in very particular ways such as Egyptian blue which can commonly be found in the eyes of statues. In addition, raking light can give valuable information on how a statue’s surface was prepared along with some fading traces of patterns and motifs.²⁴ Another established step is to compare findings to ancient sources. Many ancient sources described how statues looked in their contemporary time, including the polychromy present. Writers such as Pliny the Elder (23/24-79 CE) and Pausanias (110-180 CE) spoke on many subjects including color theory, biographies of sculptors and painters, and art itself. For example, Pliny discusses the Greek sculptor Praxiteles. When asked which of his own works he liked best, Praxiteles responded he preferred the works painted by Nikias as he gave the figures the finishing touch.²⁵ Even poets such as Vergil would remark on color on occasion as he did in his Ecologues when he writes, “Artemis, young Micon offers you this head of a bristling boar and the branching antlers of a long-lived stag. If this fortune still abides, you shall stand full length in polished marble, your ankles bound high with purple/scarlet buskins.”²⁶ This statue, or at least a similar one, has been identified and part of the reconstruction uses this description as part of the reconstruction.²⁷

Even with the technological and literary sources available, it may be somewhat surprising that these ideas, while relatively well known in the Classics and some Art History academic circles, are not as well known to the public. While academics and students may read articles and research papers on this topic, such research is inaccessible to most of the public, both due to the technical language used and the ability to find these articles without a subscription to the journals where they are published. A further breaking point in the availability of this knowledge can be attributed to the world wars. After the outbreak the First World War, many prominent researchers could no longer access original objects to conduct analytical research. The separation from original objects continued through the end of World War II, so any new understandings were stalled. However, for the public’s knowledge on the subject, a new aesthetic arose where the focus was on simplicity rather than the sumptuousness and ornamentation associated with the past regimes which allowed such human cruelty to occur.²⁸ One can think of the rise of art movements such as abstraction in this idea of a paired down aesthetic. This is seen primarily in Europe and especially in Germany, and as most of the research on polychromy was done in Europe there was a definite sentiment urging against this kind of research. The aesthetic and social turn was so extreme in Germany, it resulted in the destruction of many ornate buildings or the stripping of buildings of their ornamentation.²⁹ An attempt to reintroduce color when there would be so much public backlash was not possible and the ramifications are still felt today.

One way this information could be made more accessible to the public is by being featured more predominantly in museums. There have been a few small exhibits featuring polychromy in in major European and American cities such as Boston and Chicago in the late nineteenth-century ancient art at museums like the Glypothek in Copenhagen and the Getty Villa in California in contemporary times.³⁰ In the 2000s on, there has only been one large and traveling exhibition dedicated to the subject entitled Gods in Color which toured the world from 2003-2015.³¹ The exhibition featured the scholarship primarily by Vinzenz Brinkmann, Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, and Renèe Dreyfus.³² Within the museum space, there were some ancient sculptures and other ancient or eighteenth- and nineteenth-century paintings of Greco-Roman ruins, but the majority of the exhibition featured painted reconstructions of ancient sculptures. Most of these were essentially plaster casts of the originals with the patterns and colors applied with egg tempura.

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The curators and researchers for this exhibition conducted extremely thorough research and updated the exhibition as it toured if new findings were discovered, however there has to be a more space-conscious way to display this information. In addition, this information is so intrinsically linked to the objects that it is only right that it is incorporated in a permanent way, not just in a temporary exhibition.

There are some museums which have models of what their sculpture looked like with paint, but this information is not usually featured and is more of a sidenote. A museum that actually features this information more predominantly is the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome.

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Both the exhibition and museums heavily utilized plaster casts and physical models of the objects to showcase the polychromy. With the continued evolution of technology, there has to be a better way to show polychromy in exhibits rather than creating physical models as this can take up quite a bit of space in an exhibit.

Two ways in which technology can be utilized in order to better interpret and showcase the polychromy of ancient art is through projection and touch screens in the exhibit space. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), projection mapping (also known as spatial augmented reality) was used in relation to the Temple of Dendur in their Department of Egyptian Art. Projection mapping utilizes a combination of physical object sand projected light in order to enhance the audiences experience with the objects. Much like other areas of the Mediterranean, Egyptian temples were once vividly colored. After investigating the temple to find its original coloring, the Met’s team created a digital version of the art on the temple they could edit in Adobe Illustrator. After this step they mapped the illustrations to their place on the physical temple using the software MadMapper.³³ Using these various technologies and software, the Met was able to enhance the visitor’s experience and showcase a crucial aspect of the temple’s history. Reading some comments on this article show that while many were interested in this project, they were not as satisfied with the results. The main complaint was about how the temple was only illuminated some evenings and the projection was only based on one part of the temple. While attempting to project the past polychromy onto such a large structure as the Temple of Dendur, doing this on individual sculptures may be much more manageable and would be a good method to explore in a gallery space.

An alternative to utilizing projectors is installing touchscreens within the gallery. Most visitors will approach and interact with a touch screen when confronted with one in a gallery.³⁴ Images and information on polychromy of multiple sculptures, the process of discovering the polychromy, and even their respective histories and mythological tales could easily be included on the touch screens. I can even imagine an interactive component allowing visitors to guess the correct colors or color their own version of the statues. A study done at the National Museum in Malaysia showed that most people thought the touchscreens within this museum enhanced their overall museum visit.³⁵ Incorporating touchscreens into a gallery space can inform the public on crucial information on the Greco-Roman sculptures and provide visitors with a meaningful and memorable interactive component to their visit.

Regardless of how, informing the public about the correct interpretation of Greco-Roman sculpture is vital, not just for better understanding the object but for also correcting false racial stereotypes and white supremist beliefs regarding Greco-Roman art. As a museum studies emerging professional and a classicist, I can look at the future of this topic through two lenses. On the classics side, this information needs to be better incorporated into classes and textbooks. Many art history overview classes and their respective textbooks do not mention polychromy of ancient Greek and Roman statues and indeed only showcase the commonly seen stark white images.³⁶ Mark Abbe, a professor of mine at the University of Georgia, remarked on polychromy in a New Yorker article stating, “…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.”³⁷ Even if someone does not like the aesthetics of the colored statues, the vividness of the colors is memorable. It may not be profound or immediate as a change, but allowing students to at least see what the statues would have looked like in ancient times is a step in the right direction. On the museum side, incorporation into the galleries and collections information should be the goal moving forwards. Time and effort are needed to research a museum’s specific collection, but it is a worthwhile venture. The statues are not represented in the correct way without their polychromy and visitors’ understanding of the pieces is skewed without them seeing such an intrinsic aspect of these works.

Notes

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1. Sarah Bond, “Why we Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color” (Hyperallergic, 2017) http://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ ↩︎

2. Hannelore Hägele, Colour in Sculpture: A Survey from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Present (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 77. ↩︎

3. Ben Davis, “White Nationalism’s New Love of Art History, Decoded” (Artnet News, 2017) ↩︎

4. Bond, “Why we Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color” http://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ ↩︎

5. Vinzenz Brinkmann, Renée Dreyfus, and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann. Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World. (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Legion of Honor, 2017), 13. ↩︎

6. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 13. ↩︎

7. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 13. ↩︎

8. Bond, “Why we Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color” http://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ ↩︎

9. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 72-75. ↩︎

10. Hägele. Colour in Sculpture, 2. ↩︎

11. A.A. Donohue. Greek Sculpture and the Problem of Description (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 66-67. ↩︎

12. Nigel Jonathan Spivey, Understanding Greek sculpture: Ancient meaning, modern readings. (Thames and Hudson: 1996), 76. ↩︎

13. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 20-21. ↩︎

14. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 20. ↩︎

15. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 21. ↩︎

16. Hitachi High-Tech GlobalTV, “What is X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF)?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAKcOyrt5Vc ↩︎

17. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 89. ↩︎

18. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 89. ↩︎

19. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 89. ↩︎

20. Matthias Alfeld, Maud Mulliez, Philippe Martinez, Kevin Cain, Philippe Jockey, and Philippe Walter. “The Eye of the Medusa: XRF Imaging Reveals Unknown Traces of Antique Polychromy.” (Analytical Chemistry 89, no. 3 02-07, 2017), 1495. ↩︎

21. Alfeld, “The Eye of the Medusa”, 1495. ↩︎

22. Alfeld, “The Eye of the Medusa”, 1497-1499. ↩︎

23. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 87. ↩︎

24. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 87-88. ↩︎

25. Hägele. Colour in Sculpture, 66. ↩︎

26. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 76. ↩︎

27. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 70-75. ↩︎

28. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 19. ↩︎

29. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 19-20. ↩︎

30. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 19. ↩︎

31. Bond, “Why we Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color” http://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ ↩︎

32. Brinkmann, Gods in Color, 6. ↩︎

33. “Color the Temple: Using Projected Light to Restore Color.” https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/digital-underground/2015/color-the-temple ↩︎

34. Katharine Ting Zhen Ling, “Design Preferences for Touch Screens in Museum Galleries”. (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2015), 5. ↩︎

35. Ting, “Design Preferences for Touch Screens in Museum Galleries”, 74. ↩︎

36. Bond, “Why we Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color” http://hyperallergic.com/383776/why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ ↩︎

37. Margaret Talbot. “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture (2018).” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture ↩︎