The idea of the classical period, the period of ancient Greece and Rome, as an elegantly unified collection of outstanding aesthetic and philosophical cultural features has its own history, much of which comes from the neoclassical era. It took time for the rediscovery of antiquity to reach the level of the 18th century. References to Greek and Latin rhetoric, architecture, and sculpture were inevitable at the time. But since the Renaissance, classics has acquired the status of a cultural doctrine.
One of the tenets of classical idealism is the idea that Roman and Greek statues embody the ideal of purity. This misconception has been perpetuated for hundreds of years by modern sculptors who create busts and statues from polished white marble. But the truth is, as you can see in the Vox video above, both Greek and Roman statues were originally painted brightly in loud colors.
This includes the 1st century AD Augustus of Primaporta, The famous figure of the emperor with one hand raised in triumph. The statue would not have remained pure white marble, but would have had bronze skin, brown hair, and a fire-engine-red toga. “Ancient Greece and Rome were really colorful,” we learn. So how did we come to believe that everyone is different?
That’s partially an honest mistake. After the fall of Rome, ancient sculptures were buried or left out in the open for hundreds of years. By the time the Renaissance began in the 1300s, that painting had disappeared. As a result, artists who excavated or imitated ancient art did not realize how colorful it should originally be.
But without willful ignorance, white marble could never have become the norm. Even though there was plenty of evidence that ancient sculpture was painted, artists, art historians, and the public chose to ignore it. Western culture seemed to collectively accept that white marble was simply more beautiful.
The white statue symbolized a classical ideal that “relies heavily on the greatest possible decontextualization,” he wrote. James I. Porterprofessor of rhetoric and classics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Only in so doing can it be separated from the values it cherishes: simplicity, tranquility, balanced proportions, restraint, purity of form…all these are characteristics that, like the infinitely held breath, emphasize the timeless quality of the highest possible artistic expression.” These ideals became inseparable from the development of racial theory.
Learning to see the past as it really is requires putting aside the historically acquired blinders. This can be very difficult when our ideas about the past come from traditions handed down over hundreds of years, from every era of art history since the time of Michelangelo. However, we must admit that this tradition is fabricated. influential art historian Johann Joachim WinckelmannFor example, he praised the value of classical sculpture because, in his opinion, “the whiter the body, the more beautiful it is.”
Boxes also points out that Winckelmann “went out of his way to ignore the obvious evidence of colored marble, which was abundant.” He rejected frescoes of colored statues found at Pompeii, and judged some painted sculptures found there to be “too primitive” to have been made by ancient Romans. “Evidence was not only ignored, but some of it may have been discarded” to enforce ideals of whiteness. Many of the statues have been worn away by the elements over hundreds of years, but the archaeologists who first discovered Augustus of Prima Porta in the 1860s described his color scheme in detail.
The critique of classical idealism does not originate from the politically correct present. As Porter details in his article,What is “classic” about classical antiquity?”, they date back to at least 19th century philosophers. Ludwig Feuerbachhe called Winckelmann’s ideas about Roman statues “fanciful fantasies.” But these ideas, Porter argues, are “almost always taken for granted rather than questioned.” “Or they hold on for fear of losing a powerful prestige that continues to translate, even in these difficult times, into cultural prestige, authority, elitist complacency, and economic power.”
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on the site in 2019.
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josh jones I’m a writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
