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Course: Ancient Mediterranean + Europe > Unit 9
Lesson 1: A beginner's guide to ancient Rome- Introduction to ancient Rome
- Introduction to ancient Roman art
- City of Rome overview—origins to the archaic period
- Visualizing Imperial Rome
- Ostia, an introduction
- Rome's history in four faces at The Met
- Damnatio memoriae—Roman sanctions against memory
- Roman funeral rituals and social status: the Amiternum tomb and the tomb of the Haterii
- The Modern Invention of Ancient White Marble
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The Modern Invention of Ancient White Marble
Archaeologists Vinzenz and Ulrike Koch Brinkmann have spent the last 40 years dedicated to the study of polychromy—or “many colors” in Greek—in ancient sculpture. Once a fringe area of study, their research combats the misconception of white purity in ancient Greece and Rome. They reflect on the marble bust of Caligula and how the reconstruction of its former color can help us better understand history. © 2022 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Created by Smarthistory.
Video transcript
All of us have a specific expectation towards Greek and Roman marble sculpture. It is white. It is a intellectual beauty and it's not a beauty which derives from gaudy, happy colors and ornaments. And this DNA is difficult to overcome. And this is still true today. The question is, who
produced this DNA in us? If ever a person from antiquity
would enter a modern museum, a collection of ancient
sculpture, marble sculpture, he would feel like
entering a world of ghosts. "Polychromy" is a strange expression. It is a Greek term. "Poly" means multi and "chrome"
is color, multicolored. It's a scientific
term, a scholarly term. But it simply means that
sculpture had been painted, covered with paint. So the ancient marble sculpture and even the ancient bronze sculpture had been fully colored. We started to produce
reconstructions 30 years ago. We had a classicist
education, a classicist DNA and we felt reluctant to create a colorful image of
those beautiful marbles. Eventually, we understood that the process of the reconstruction is the only way to do a proper research on an object. This is the one goal. The other goal is to inform
the people, to educate. You need the full third dimension in order to understand
the interconnections, the intertwining in
between color and form. Color is fragile. It easily chips off, while
marble or bronze is very stable. So there is a competition
in between the materials. But as a matter of fact,
there are a lot of traces visible under normal conditions. We enhance the capability of the human eye by using modified light conditions like multi-spectral photography. And next to it there
are all those physical, chemical, analytical methods
enhanced by digital aspects, which enable you to measure
a certain hue of color. And then we double-check it. So we produce test charts
with the neighboring hues and get back to the
object and measure again. Caligula was a emperor in the first century A.D. in Rome, and he was ruling just for very few years. He was quite young when
he started, he was 25. The Metropolitan Caligula
is a very beautiful piece. The surface of the
marble is well-preserved. We did research on
another Caligula portrait from the collections in Copenhagen where the polychromy is
quite well-preserved. And so I can transport
it into this white piece. Meanwhile, after 40 years
I start to have a problem. To see a complete white sculpture, it is, for me, a void. The concept of the white
Greek and Roman marble is a Renaissance concept. We don't know exactly why and how, since even in Renaissance times they found sculpture
with remnants of color. And even in Renaissance times they could read the ancient authors who repeatedly referred to the fact that sculpture had been painted. But nevertheless, the European Renaissance invented the visual code
of white antique marble, which maybe is a visual code which has something to do
with political aspects, with supremacy aspects and so forth. This concept had been maintained to the very moment in the 18th century when people started to dig in Pompeii and the marble sculpture in Pompeii due to the lava and volcano, the polychromy on those
statues had been preserved. And so people slowly,
gradually changed their mind. In the 19th century, the
issue of polychromy, of color, was an open discussion. It was just received by the public. And there is a sudden
change in the beginning of the 20th century and the
whole issue of polychromy, of color on ancient Greek marble
is some sort of suppressed. And I would like to believe
that there is some connection to ideological tendencies
of the 20th century, totalitarian mindsets and so forth. But as archeologists, we are
not specialists on this issue. We believe that the reconstruction is the most powerful educational
tool in order to transport even the state of knowledge to the public. And this is very important because to keep the audience
in the belief of white purity, which is such a misconception,
is almost dangerous. Our research process is a
process of approximation. We never will find the full truth. We have no time machine. It is simply a process in order to be as correct as possible.