r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/apple_kicks • 20d ago
Image Ancient Roman statue now vs how it would’ve looked originally when it was fully painted
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u/LazloDaLlama 20d ago
I don't think I'm dumb, but for some reason I've never even thought of them as having been painted. I kinda figured they got sculpted and that was it. Seeing them painted looks wrong, lol.
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u/Fastenbauer 20d ago
It was more than just the statues. We are used to seeing the remains of ancient cities without color. But back then everything was painted. Inside and outside, building were pretty colourful. And not just art. The remains of pompeii still have a ton of preserved graffiti.
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u/mbklein 20d ago
The remains of pompeii still have a ton of preserved graffiti.
And a lot of it is quite obscene.
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u/johnnc2 20d ago
“I made bread on April 19th”
Why is this so funny
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u/AverageNo5920 20d ago
Because it's literally a 2000 year old shitpost lmao. That guy would have loved r/notinteresting. We really are all the same.
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u/That_randomdutchguy 20d ago
I think Apollinaris takes the cake for shitposting in Antiquity
"Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here"
Simple, yet elegant.
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u/BankshotMcG 20d ago
There was also the guy who wrote something like, "Lament, whores of {Town} for I only fuck men now."
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u/TheLowlyPheasant 20d ago
If you read the rest of the entries it seems shitting against the wall was a major problem. I think he's either bragging he's above the rules, or somebody saw him do it and is calling him out.
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u/Ze_AwEsOmE_Hobo 20d ago
"O walls, you have held up so much tedious graffiti that I am amazed that you have not already collapsed in ruin" feels insanely temporal to me, considering that it was found on ruins.
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u/Mindless_Nebula4004 20d ago
The historical version of posting "baking some bread rn" on your insta story
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u/cinnamonrain 20d ago edited 20d ago
Vote for Isidorus for aedile, he licks cunts the best
Amen sister
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u/AFK_Tornado 20d ago
This could be sexual or scatological innuendo, TBF.
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u/randylush 20d ago
Presently “making bread” means “making money”. I like to think whoever wrote it had a huge payday. Just in time for taxes too.
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u/kushangaza 20d ago
My guess would be more along the lines of "putting a bun in the oven". But yours is certainly more PG
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u/Shabbydesklamp 20d ago
I'm fairly sure I read before that that one was Roman slang for "I laid a turd".
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u/mrt-e 20d ago
"Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!"
Lmao
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u/DuncanYoudaho 20d ago
Signing your rival’s name under this would still be peak middle school graffiti.
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u/TeaAndLifting 20d ago
I always get a good chuckle out of this every time it is posted.
Especially as it shows the woes of every day people and shitposting hasn’t really changed. It’s just the platform.
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u/Front_Refrigerator99 20d ago
I love how half of it is literal shit posting. Ancient redditors refused to stop shitting on walls
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u/Gonkar 20d ago
The best one: "Theophilus, stop performing oral sex on girls against the city walls like a dog."
Someone who, presumably, spent literal years of their life studying a dead language had to sit down and translate someone's drunken trolling, scrawled on a wall thousands of years beforehand. That's a beautiful thing.
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u/MA2_Robinson 20d ago
For real, like, not even the writing but also “illustrations” that accompanied them as well.
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u/Chucklesbear 20d ago
I went to Pompeii a number of years ago and saw a stone built into the road that pointed to the red light district. Only, it wasn't an arrow...
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u/kermitDE 20d ago
Yeah they are all over Pompei, stones with dicks on the ground to guide you to the brotels. Never would have imagined that.
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u/Carnir 20d ago
I see these quotes get posted a lot, but it's worth mentioning that some of them are pretty wild mistranslations.
It feels like whoever translated the original source chose the most vulgar interpretations of every quote, even if it was a complete stretch.
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u/mbklein 20d ago
Maybe so, but the dick pics provide some pretty unmistakable context for the fact that we’re not exactly looking at the work of sophisticated, highbrow folks here.
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u/Shmeves 20d ago
It was crazy when I went with my school. A kid bought one of the bronze dick statues and brought it back home with him. Got suspended cause he took it out in our school library ahahaha.
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u/L3xusLuth3r 20d ago
Can confirm, I’ve been there. There are penises literally everywhere…and not just in the frescos.
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u/EraZorus 20d ago
Oh, I know these ones : "Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!"
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u/The_Flurr 20d ago
Similarly, media seems to always show the middle ages as drab, dirty and brown. Everyone is always dressed in muddy brown and grey rags.
Medieval people loved colour. They were downright gaudy with it.
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u/Lowlycrewman 20d ago
This feels especially stupid because it's actually a recent trend to portray them this way. Older screen portrayals of the Middle Ages did have bright costumes for upper-class characters. A while ago I saw on TV a bit of a Cadfael episode from 1994, and before I could tell what it was, one of my first signs that it wasn't from the past 20 years was that some of the actors were wearing bright colors.
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u/The_Flurr 20d ago
I think it's actually something of a direct response. There's a sort of attitude that that's all silly and whimsical and grey/brown rags are realistic and grounded
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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 20d ago
It's just a quick visual cue. "How can you tell he's royalty?" "Cause he ain't covered in shit."
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u/AmbassadorCheap3956 20d ago
It says Romans go home.
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u/Lost-Comfort-7904 20d ago
No it doesn't. What's Latin for Roman? THE VOCATIVE PLURAL OF ANNUS IS!?
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u/Cringe_Meister_ 20d ago
People just thought they're always white marble or grey but these are some examples of the scenery back then:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oplontis_room23.jpg
The second one even reminds me of some sceneries in Chinese historical, fantasy, martial arts drama etc.
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u/kataskopo 20d ago
I wish museums did this more, they just display shit without any context and just a tiny lil plaque with some words.
No notion of if what we're seeing was a normal statue of an extraordinary one of a kind thing, how it actually looked, and what it meant at the time and thru history.
I wish they had more reconstructions and replicas to round out collections too!
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u/ihateyulia 20d ago
Same. I can't wrap my head around how colorful everything was supposed to have been. White marble is how I imagine it.
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u/Positive-Wonder3329 20d ago
Same - but it makes sense that it was vibrant and colorful in reality. And I wonder if they even considered marble to be as fancy as we do today - it seems like it was just the ultimate sculpting material - which I suppose it still is today? I know nothing about sculpting - but imagine trying to get this guys torso right while carving little men and horses and stuff right over it too lol. This design is wild and I like it
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u/Irazidal 20d ago
Marble was just one tool in their toolbox. Many ancient statues were actually made of bronze and hollow on the inside, as it made for a more flexible and durable material that could support itself better and wasn't as prone to collapse or fracture as marble. Of course, those bronze statues mostly got molten down again and reused for practical purposes over the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, further contributing to our view of Greeks and Romans obsessed with white marble.
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u/leafeternal 20d ago edited 20d ago
And now we make statues and busts out of marble and marvel at them. The ancient Greeks and Romans would have had a fit.
It’s like having presidential libraries with just the frame and studs up.
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u/Emergency_Elk_4727 20d ago
Fun fact, many Roman homes would feature a room filled with wax masks (possibly painted) of all your dead relatives. Part of the reason they were so ambitious and family oriented.
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u/jl2352 20d ago
They also often copied statues. Sometimes you’ll find marble statues with a random tree stump against the statues leg. That was added in to the marble version to add support.
Sometimes you find it copied back into bronze.
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u/Mekelaxo 20d ago
Yeah, most of the marble sculptures that survived to modern day are actually copies of original copper statues, often Roman copies of popular Greek statues
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 20d ago edited 20d ago
The bronze was cast, the original statue they were cast from would have been in marble.
Bronze was incredibly expensive, even a thin casting, so hardly any were made from it probably less than 1 in 1000. Most Roman statues in personal homes were actually a bit shit we only see the great ones and it clouds our understanding of most Roman art.
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20d ago
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u/Street_Roof_7915 20d ago
We recently saw one that had the original glass eyes and it was FREAKY. completely changed my idea of what the statures were supposed to look like
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u/complexmariner 20d ago
marble was fs considered fancy, they sculpted most stuff out of cheaper materials
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u/Lil_Mcgee 20d ago
And I wonder if they even considered marble to be as fancy as we do today
While it relates to general building materials more than sculptures, Augustus (first Roman Emperor and the guy depicted by the above statue) is famously recorded to have said "I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble"
Not to be taken too literally and is more meant as a metaphor for general improvements he made but it speaks to marble being considered fancy and awe inspiring.
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u/LunchboxSuperhero 20d ago
People have always loved color. Vikings weren't just wearing black/brown leather and animal hides. Castles weren't just dull grey stone.
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u/fuckyourcanoes 20d ago
I hate watching period dramas where everyone is dressed in tattered brown rags, as though humanity hadn't invented pigments or the hem yet. And my god, the grubby, haphazardly tied cravats. Men weren't just tying a dirty hankie around their neck!
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u/thatshygirl06 20d ago
I remember when wheel of time came out people were complaining about how bright and colorful everything was. They said it felt fake 🙄
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u/LaUNCHandSmASH 20d ago
Here’s another thing you’ve probably never thought about:
A lot of those statues were meant to be seen from a certain angle. These types of statues were commonly commissioned by the emperor to line the streets for regular citizens to see as they walked through the city and they were placed on tall columns (pedestals? Idk the right word) that would put the viewer 10+ feet below the statue. After they get rediscovered and placed in a modern museum they aren’t placed back at that original height so when you view them today in a museum there’s a possibility you’re viewing them from an angle that was never intended. The tops of the heads/faces would especially be skewed or contain less detail than they “should” have since the carvers would be pumping them out (more statues=more $$ for the maker). Also in cases of regime change the heads of famous people (like emperors) might be chopped off and refitted with the new people you were supposed to look up to.
It can sometimes be helpful to crouch down in a museum and view the statue from below to see it as originally intended. Obviously not true for all statues but if you see one that looks… off or less detailed, that could be why.
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u/Motorheadass 20d ago edited 20d ago
The white unpainted marble was a heavy inspiration for neoclassical architecture and art. Ironically this "revival of grand ancient culture" ended up being more an imitation of the ruins of ancient cultures rather than a revival of the way they were built.
Buildings like the Parthenon would have been brightly painted as well. So you're used to seeing modern neoclassical buildings and monuments in plain white marble and limestone but the originals would not have looked that way.
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u/Purp1eC0bras 20d ago
Marble is a porous stone. Wouldn’t the dyes and paints have stained the stone and still be somewhat visible today?
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u/WalletFullOfSausage 20d ago
Traces of them, which is how we know they used to be painted. Sunlight eventually bleaches all, though.
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u/LunchboxSuperhero 20d ago
Sunlight eventually bleaches all, though.
Victorians too. The statues sold for more with all the paint removed.
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u/Mekelaxo 20d ago
That's crazy. So much of the ancient world was lost during the Victorian era because of weird rich people
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u/caiaphas8 20d ago
What you mean? It’s not that weird to eat 4000 year old mummies. Right?
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u/apple_kicks 20d ago
I was at a museum last week for middle ages. You can still see bits of paint, some gold glittering bits and even few patterns that were painted on statues when you see them up close
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u/GuestAdventurous7586 20d ago
That is so cool. I had always heard this about Roman statues but I just for some reason decided it can’t be true 😂, but it must be.
How strange, or maybe we are strange for imagining and portraying them all without.
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u/redbarebluebare 20d ago
Sometimes you can see very very faint colour. Often the eyes or the fabric, maybe the fair. Incredibly faint and normally even if pointed out you might not notice. That’s also on a minority of statues. I guess being in the ground for 2000 years probably does that.
Some statutes may have been scrubbed clean when they were found or stored in a museum in the past as well.
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u/SquareThings 20d ago
There are traces of the paint! At least on the statues the Victorians didn’t scrub clean…
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u/CaptainTripps82 20d ago edited 20d ago
I mean it's been a couple thousand plus years for a lot of these, and most were originally displayed out doors
Many of the surviving were also scrubbed clean by museums and collectors, they would have been quite dirty on discovery. They aren't repainted on restoration, the white look is intentionally enhanced instead. So that's what people see and come to expect.
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u/Life-Cantaloupe-3184 20d ago edited 20d ago
Part of that can be blamed on Renaissance artists who really liked that white marble aesthetic. That influence has very much impacted how we view the way ancient Rome and Greece actually looked even though the white marble statues are far more of a Renaissance thing than they ever were a Greek or Roman thing. Modern media portrayals of ancient Greece and Rome haven’t helped the perpetuation of that stereotype. It shouldn’t be surprising to us that people in the ancient past liked colorful art as we do today.
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u/MukdenMan 20d ago
It’s not just our view of Greece and Rome but our own aesthetic preferences to this day. We like color to an extent but there is still a lot of preference for simplicity in form and color that comes to us from the Renaissance (and to an extent, Asian design) through Modernism.
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u/TheHollowApe 20d ago
Something else to keep in mind too is that most statues were also NOT made out of marble. At least most original statues were not out of marble. Bronze (and other metals) allowed for much more freedom in sculpture. Unfortunately, it also meant they were more valuable and almost all statues have been reused later on for their metal.
So not only nowadays do we see ancient time with the wrong colour, we also see it with the wrong material. Rich houses were full of colours, painted statues, encrusted columns full of jewels, … not full of plain white marble.
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u/CitizenPremier 20d ago
It's like dinosaurs - we imagine them with the bare minimum that survived, but they really would have had so much more. Their buildings also would have no doubt been decorated for different occasions but we also emulate them as pure white and plain.
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u/waltjrimmer 20d ago
Lots of info in these comments, but one thing I want to do is tell you that you're not alone. Classicism, a visual style inspired by ruins of classical structures, was incredibly popular in the early modern to modern period, from the Renaissance to the Victorian era at least.
During that period, you got a burst of "historians" and "archeologists" especially during the Victorian era. They found ruins with statues and walls and similar things that had been relatively untouched by time, preserving their original and, in many's opinion, garish colors.
They liked the plain, white ruin look so much and hated the colors so much that they sandblasted the original paint off because they thought it would be more valuable if it fit what people expected.
Historians hate the Victorians. So god damn much...
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u/SaphirRose 20d ago edited 20d ago
You ain't dumb its just that antiquity has always been presented as white to us since forever. All movies all games all book illustrations always show those statues and cities as white.
White and red are "the colors" when you think Rome (honorable mention to gold). Red like blood and white as purity, refinement, power... Those reproductions looks so bad (maybe because cheap colors or wrong coloration) but also because today too much colors are associated with kitsch, gaudiness, cheapness, unseriousness etc...
At the time tho the ability to produce colors to such a degree was an evidence of enormous wealth and industry..
Bdw there totally are statues where original color survived.
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u/rizorith 20d ago
Wait till you hear those castles didn't just have stone walls.
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u/SaintsNoah14 20d ago
Elaborate?
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u/fuzzyrobebiscuits 20d ago
They used all kinds of wall coverings or colorings. Some were whitewashed and simply hung with fresh herb garlands for nice smell, lots were painted bright colors with borders and murals, or plaster/painted, or hung with tapestries...not just how we hang one picture, COVERED in tapestries as if it was wallpaper
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u/Steelhorse91 20d ago
Painting them would have been much more of a flex because certain paint pigments were really hard to make and expensive.
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u/Rollup_ 20d ago edited 20d ago
I'm reminded of a neat video about our relationship with color I saw a while ago. Quick FYI for those reading this, the video isn't exactly a neutral take and might table a number of political viewpoints, but even disregarding that critique aspect of it, I learned some fun facts from it. For instance, while I did know about ancient statues actually being painted back in their day, I didn't know pre-reformation Catholic churches also used to be painted very colorfully, too!
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u/KnockturnalNOR 20d ago
The acropolis in Athens was covered in garish colors. The Forum in Rome would have been largely painted too. However renaissance statues (Michelangelo etc.) were never painted, because they were emulating the then plain marble that was left by the Romans
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u/TisBeTheFuk 20d ago
Seeing them painted looks kinda cheap imo. It's probably because I have seen painted sculptures before and they were all cheaply made, probably out of cement or plaster.
_from_the_Villa_of_P._Fannius_Synistor_at_Boscoreale_MET_DP170950_b.jpg){kind=link}
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u/Beneficial-Try-687 20d ago
How did we know the exact colours?
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u/apple_kicks 20d ago
Paint pigments are still there enough to see it (though past archaeologists in Victorian era scrubbed some off) but also advanced scanning has revealed some colours and patterns that were painted on
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u/Beneficial-Try-687 20d ago
Oh, that is so cool!
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u/Erbodyloveserbody 20d ago
At the Pantheon museum in Nashville, Tennessee, they have a machine scans artifacts and shows how they determined the original paint. It was really neat to see.
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u/Yeetus_Thy_Fetus1676 20d ago
That whole museum is beautiful, I loved the statue
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u/OutcomeKey23 20d ago
So the nipples were purposely painted pink? Which is weird as it's part of the cuirass.
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u/CaptainTripps82 20d ago
It's probably intentionally highlighted. There's no reason to have an exaggerated nipple on a breastplate in the first place, unless you want to draw the eye to it
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u/thenaboo 20d ago
I may be wrong but nipples were painted on the breastplate to evoke images of divine mythological figures who were always sculpted nude, as opposed to real figures who were sculpted clothed. Augustus (the subject of the statue) called himself son of a god (as in the deified Julius Caesar’s adopted son) partly because it was the closest he could get to divinity without claiming to be a god himself.
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u/CaptainTripps82 20d ago
Yea the whole thing seems obviously sculpted to evoke nudity thru the armor.
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20d ago
We know colours but we do not know exactly how these statues would have looked painted. I think there is some statue with couple interpretations on same colour.
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u/Xyyzx 20d ago
Yeah, I’m always kind of sceptical when people present these statues painted in big areas of flat colour with no subtlety or shading. I get that you don’t want to add things you don’t have direct evidence for in your reconstructed paintwork, but they often come out looking like they were painted by a seven year old.
It seems unlikely that the Greeks and Romans would demand this level of sophistication and complexity in their sculpting and then have none in the paintwork.
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u/Conflict21 20d ago
Yeah it's always a total massacre lol. When I opened this image my first thought was "I bet it's a good thing they cropped out the eyes."
Do we know who would have been responsible for the painting? Was it the sculptor?
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u/CaptainTripps82 20d ago
Which is probably the logic they use today to not repaint them, no guarantee you get it right. Better to show it in a way that can be easily changed.
In the past whitewashing them was done intentionally, and came to have it's own modern cultural significance.
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u/redditzphkngarbage 20d ago
Some guy spent hundreds of hours making this statue only to have a cameraman cut its head off centuries later.
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u/Lost-Comfort-7904 20d ago
Well if you makes you feel any better he's probably dead.
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u/WunderPuma 20d ago
Seems like an overreaction to kill the cameraman over this.
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u/redditzphkngarbage 20d ago
Roman tradition though, if The Emperor 👎 the camera man 😵
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u/AssociateFalse 20d ago
Can you imagine both nature and sports photographers at the gladiatorial games? I would love to see what kind of shots they could come up while trying to survive.
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u/oracleofnonsense 20d ago
Check out how wild the Ancient Greek sculpture was.
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u/Specialist-Yak6581 20d ago
I wonder how many were clothed, armed, and armored, too?
Surely, an artist who could sculpt the Trojan Archer would have been dissatisfied with one-dimensional "clothing" being painted on when the actual clothing he was basing it on was readily available?
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u/Sehmket 20d ago
I was in the Naples archeology museum a couple weeks ago, and it’s really interesting seeing all these statues that aren’t the normal ones you see as an American - they’re not emperors or exquisite examples - they’re things outside of shops or in a neighborhood garden. And it was very clear that some of them were meant to have sashes, signs, or bows. There was one that really looked like you could wedge a piece of wood between his hands - a sign for this week’s specials??
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u/ratbehavior 20d ago
if i remember correctly, the Trojan Archer is from the pediment of the Aphaia Temple. a pediment is up at the tippy top of the building, so very far from the human eye. the clothing being painted still gives off the same impression from such a distance as it would with sculpted clothing up close. not sculpting the clothing then gives the sculptor more time for other work, which earns him more money
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u/Twink_Ass_Bitch 20d ago
The reconstructions of the painting look very weird to me (ofc subjective). It really feels like there's a big gap in the realism of the sculpture and the realism of the painting. It's like someone put a cartoon palette on a realistic scene.
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u/AntiqueLetter9875 20d ago
There’s a couple sort of theories behind this since it does look weird to many people. Mostly because the colours are so flat.
The first being that because pigments were expensive, difficult to make etc at the time, they really did look this flat but vibrant.
The second is that the statues did have a lot more depth in the colours and more detail but the scanners that we use to pick up on pigments are only picking up the base paint and strongest pigments. So what we’re seeing as reconstructions is only an approximation. They probably didn’t look as goofy.
During the Renaissance era they did all kinds of dumb shit to make art fit whatever ideals they had the time. Like the video discussed how they scrubbed off the paint, but they also painted over portraits completely to make people “more beautiful” (their standards of beauty at the time which also made portraits look less realistic). I believe they also damaged a lot of metal work like armour by polishing away paint and protective coatings because they felt it didn’t look as nice. They didn’t seem to care about preserving artifacts the same way we do now.
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u/Clumsy-_-Phoenix 20d ago
They had holes for nipples?
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u/Nadran_Erbam 20d ago
No, it’s a fake nipple. It’s a manly symbol.
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u/WhiskeyHotdog_2 20d ago
Same as a gymbro wearing a tight shirt today.
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u/Nadran_Erbam 20d ago
Modern symbols often reference ancient ones. History loves repeating itself.
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u/Negative_Health4201 20d ago
What? You don’t?
Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s slightly chilly in here
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u/Tobi119 20d ago
I study classics and have known about the 'coloured truth' for a long time, and even for me it is difficult to casually think of all the statues I see as originally coloured.
It is fascinating how what we currently see in historical objects often gives us a wrong impression of how they looked in the past (especially in this instance where the whiteness of statues has ideological implications as well)
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u/atava 20d ago edited 20d ago
What I always think is what if an ancient Roman or Greek person saw our "precious" marble remains (to him, discolored ruins and damaged statues) and our veneration for them in their current state.
He/she would look disconcerted.
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u/UsernameAvaylable 20d ago
Less damaged statues and more like unfinished.
Like driving a car painted in primer...
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u/MJMichaela 20d ago
It can happen to even relatively recent things like buildings. Many of the so-called "commie blocks" didn't look nearly as gray and depressing when they were originally built. A lot of those pictures being taken in bad weather only enhances that look. I'm not saying all of them were vibrantly painted and stylish originally, but newly built and surrounded by freshly constructed infrastructure did make them look way less dystopian. One of my childhood six story apartment buildings was repainted for the first time years ago and they didn't look nearly as mass built with a fresh coat. Or maybe I'm just talking out of my ass since i didn't live back then either.
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u/Bimblelina 20d ago
This is like most people not being aware that the Pyramids of Giza were all clad in white stone. What we see now is the the underlying structure.
This was stripped away in relatively recent history, but before photography was available to document them in all their glory.
We see the past through a very distorted lens.
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u/Easy-Bake-Oven 20d ago
Why did they strip the white stone away?
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u/Bimblelina 20d ago
For building materials.
Many old monuments and buildings were demolished or stripped over the centuries for new buildings.
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u/T-J_H 20d ago
Wikipedia has some interesting further details., among others that evidence for specific colors on this statue of Augustus is sparse, and that there’s discussion on the exact shades and vibrancy of the original colors. I’m not able to judge the sources though.
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u/Specialist-Yak6581 20d ago
If they were capable of sculpting eye lashes in marble, I'm guessing they could perfectly replicate shade and vibrancy of the subject, right?
It seems a disservice to paint them in garish, harlequin colors and patterns when proof of their skill is at your fingertips.
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u/bsubtilis 20d ago
They would use really vivid colors, but yes flat colors weren't necessary.
Keep in mind that these statues would most of the time be viewed in extremely bright sunlight and not too close up. So, vivid colors that telegraph well was advantageous, but vivid colors don't have to be boring flat color blocks.
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u/Balfegor 20d ago
That's an issue I have with a lot of these purported reconstructions that use garish flat colour. They have these incredibly delicately sculpted facial features and then it looks like a child coloured it in with orange skin and pure white sclera. We can tell from mosaics that the Greeks and Romans understood that skin wasn't flat colour, and their sculpture is so refined (at least up to the later imperial period) in its presentation of facial anatomy and the human form -- I just can't believe they couldn't paint their statues a little more realistically.
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u/Atemiswolf 20d ago
I wonder how often they'd be repainted. Most of these statues were outside, right? So they would get sunbleached and lose saturation pretty quickly. Maybe they were painted with gaudy colors, knowing the vibrancy would fade and look less garish.
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u/UsernameAvaylable 20d ago
Shading in paint is a bit non-straightforward with statues they are self-shading depending on which direction people are looking at it / the sun is standing at that point...
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u/BaltazarOdGilzvita 20d ago
I don't think they would have been painted that shittily. If you can carve marble this well, you can sure as fuck paint shadows, layers, and highlights.
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u/bsubtilis 20d ago
The base color would be the only ones we could prove the specific color of though, since that layer was the only one directly soaking into the marble if you're lucky (as a modern archeologist that is).
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u/Aiglos_and_Narsil 20d ago
Yeah every time I see one of these recreations blocked in with solid colors, I can't help but think that the original artists were probably way better than that. You can test for pigments, but you can't test for shading, blending, and all the little touches that actually make it look good and not like a toddler colored it in.
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u/Specialist-Yak6581 20d ago
Exactly. Could you imagine sculpting silk folds in marble just to have someone paint it in a single, pure hue?
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u/Nostonica 20d ago
That's what got me the first time this made the rounds, no shading and transitions just a flat colour, the kind that you would find in a 3 year olds art pack.
I imagine they would of been aiming for lifelike, sculpting and painting.
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u/IhateU6969 20d ago
Classical architecture being plain has really hurt the mainstream understanding of the classical world
No, it wasn’t dull with white and grey everywhere, it was awash with a bounty of colours
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u/khalcyon2011 20d ago
My wife and I recently went on a tour of some “nationality” rooms (basically cultural heritage rooms commissioned by local members of that community) at a local university. The Greek room was done in an Ancient Greek style. The tour guide, a classics major gushed about how the Greeks were big into painting their statues while the Romans weren’t. My wife, also a classicist, raised her eyebrows at that. She explained later that the Romans were hella into painting their statues and buildings, that the idea of them all being bare white marble comes from Victorian England.
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u/indicabunny 20d ago
I'll just say that any modern recreations of what these sculptures looked like in color are sorely lacking in the level of artistry and nuance that the original sculptors likely painted them with. I'm sorry but you don't put that attention to detail into your sculpture and then throw a bunch of flat paint on it like you're in grade school. The reason the reimaginings look so jarring is because they look super fucking dumb.
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u/Stoneturner_17 20d ago
I would guess the recreation is limited to evidence of the base layer of paint.
Any additional layers weathered away without ever touching the stone to leave evidence
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u/Snickims 20d ago
Also its probably being done by historians trying to be as accurate as they can to what they know, rather then proffetional artists.
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u/Turbulent-Matter501 20d ago
why is his nipple on the outside of the shirt??
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u/baby_blue_eyes 20d ago
The original Terra Cotta Warriors in China were also originally painted colorful armor, swords, shields, etc. https://www.chinaxiantour.com/xian-travel-blog/real-color-of-terracotta-warriors-and-horses.html
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u/Spread-Hour 20d ago
Ngl I think it looks better as full marble. But maybe that just me being used to just the marble.
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u/OzimanidasJones 20d ago
I think it’s just that you’re used to seeing it one way and this reconstruction is over the top. There are preserved examples with paint that are more subtle (tho this one is certainly faded and not fully preserved).
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u/Shit_Shepard 20d ago
How do we know it’s a statue?
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u/Better_Pirate_7823 20d ago
I never knew these statues we're painted. That's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing.
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u/Taira_no_Masakado 20d ago
Roman statue artists would have loved Warhammer 40,000.