painted replica of archer A painted replica of a c. 490 B.C. archer.

Stiftung Archäologie, Munich

True Colors

Call them gaudy, call them kitsch, but archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann insists his eye-popping reproductions of ancient Greek sculptures are right on target

  • By Matthew Gurewitsch
  • Smithsonian magazine, July 2008

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    Photo Gallery

    replica of a stele commemorating Aristion

    True Colors

    See more of Brinkmann’s colorful reproductions. Slideshow by Lucinda Moore

    (Page 2 of 5)

    More from Smithsonian.com

    Colored statues? To us, classical antiquity means white marble. Not so to the Greeks, who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were in color, also, like mighty stage sets. Time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. And for centuries people who should have known better pretended that color scarcely mattered.

    White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth. The sculpture of Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons struggling with serpents sent, it is said, by the sea god Poseidon (discovered in 1506 in Rome and now at the Vatican Museums) is one of the greatest early finds. Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color. Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art.

    By the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek and Roman sites was bringing forth great numbers of statues, and there were scholars on hand to document the scattered traces of their multicolored surfaces. Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though much of the remaining color faded, or disappeared entirely, once the statues were again exposed to light and air. Some of the pigment was scrubbed off by restorers whose acts, while well intentioned, were tantamount to vandalism. In the 18th century, the pioneering archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann chose to view the bare stone figures as pure—if you will, Platonic—forms, all the loftier for their austerity. "The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well," he wrote. "Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence." Against growing evidence to the contrary, Winckelmann's view prevailed. For centuries to come, antiquarians who envisioned the statues in color were dismissed as eccentrics, and such challenges as they mounted went ignored.

    No longer; German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann is on a mission. Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.

    Call them gaudy, call them garish, his scrupulous color reconstructions made their debut in 2003 at the Glyptothek museum in Munich, which is devoted to Greek and Roman statuary. Displayed side by side with the placid antiquities of that fabled collection, the replicas shocked and dazzled those who came to see them. As Time magazine summed up the response, "The exhibition forces you to look at ancient sculpture in a totally new way."

    "If people say, ‘What kitsch,' it annoys me," Brinkmann says, "but I'm not surprised." Actually, the public took to his replicas, and invitations to show them elsewhere quickly poured in. In recent years, Brinkmann's slowly growing collection has been more or less constantly on the road—from Munich to Amsterdam, Copenhagen to Rome—jolting viewers at every turn. London's The Guardian reported that the show received an "enthusiastic, if bewildered" reception at the Vatican Museums. "Il Messagero found the exhibition ‘disorientating, shocking, but often splendid.' Corriere della Sera's critic felt that ‘suddenly, a world we had been used to regarding as austere and reflective has been turned on its head to become as jolly as a circus.'" At the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Brinkmann's painted reconstruction of sections of the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus (named not for the king buried in it but for his illustrious friend Alexander the Great, who is depicted in its sculpted frieze) was unveiled beside the breathtaking original; German television and print media spread the news around the globe. In Athens, top officials of the Greek government turned out for the opening when the collection went on view—and this was the ultimate honor—at the National Archaeological Museum.

    Taking advantage of the occasion, Brinkmann set some of his showpieces up for photographers on the Acropolis: a brilliantly colored, exotic-looking archer, kneeling with bow and arrow; a goddess smiling an archaic smile; and, perhaps most startling of all, a warrior's gilded torso in armor that clings to the body like a wet T-shirt. The figures may have looked wrong against the bleached, sun-drenched architecture, but they looked fine under the blazing Mediterranean sky.

    An American showing was overdue. This past fall, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University presented virtually the entire Brinkmann canon in an exhibition called "Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity." Selected replicas were also featured earlier this year in "The Color of Life," at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, which surveyed polychromy from antiquity to the present. Other highlights included El Greco's paired statuettes of Epimetheus and Pandora (long misidentified as Adam and Eve) rendered in painted wood and Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier's exotic Jewish Woman of Algiers of 1862, a portrait bust in onyx-marble, gold, enamel and amethyst.

    To find out what the Greek gods looked like, it would seem reasonable to start in Room 18 of the British Museum. That's the gallery devoted to the Elgin Marbles, grand trophies removed from the Parthenon in Athens between 1801 and 1805 by Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin, the British envoy to Constantinople from 1799 to 1803, when Greece was under Turkish domination. Even at the time, Elgin's action struck some as the rape of a great heritage. Lord Byron's largely autobiographical poem "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" contains this stinging rebuke:

    Dull is the eye that will not weep to see
    Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed
    By British hands, which it had best behov'd
    To guard those relics ne'er to be restored.

    To this day, Greece continues to press claims for restitution.

    The genius behind the Parthenon's sculptures was the architect and artist Phidias, of whom it was said that he alone among mortals had seen the gods as they truly are. At the Parthenon, he set out to render them in action. Fragments from the eastern gable of the temple depict the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus; those from the western gable show the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the patronage of the city. (As the city's name indicates, she won.) The heroically scaled statues were meant to be seen from a distance with ease.

    But that was thousands of years ago. By now, so much of the sculpture is battered beyond recognition, or simply missing, that it takes an advanced degree in archaeology to tease out what many of the figures were up to. Yes, the occasional element—a horse's head, a reclining youth—registers sharp and clear. But for the most part, the sculpture is frozen Beethoven: drapery, volume, mass, sheer energy exploding in stone. Though we seldom think about it, such fragments are overwhelmingly abstract, thus, quintessentially "modern." And for most of us, that's not a problem. We're modern too. We like our antiquities that way.

    But we can guess that Phidias would be brokenhearted to see his sacred relics dragged so far from home, in such a fractured state. More to the point, the bare stone would look ravaged to him, even cadaverous. Listen to Helen of Troy, in the Euripides play that bears her name:

    My life and fortunes are a monstrosity,
    Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty.
    If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
    The way you would wipe color off a statue.

    That last point is so unexpected, one might almost miss it: to strip a statue of its color is actually to disfigure it.

    Colored statues? To us, classical antiquity means white marble. Not so to the Greeks, who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were in color, also, like mighty stage sets. Time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. And for centuries people who should have known better pretended that color scarcely mattered.

    White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth. The sculpture of Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons struggling with serpents sent, it is said, by the sea god Poseidon (discovered in 1506 in Rome and now at the Vatican Museums) is one of the greatest early finds. Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color. Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art.

    By the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek and Roman sites was bringing forth great numbers of statues, and there were scholars on hand to document the scattered traces of their multicolored surfaces. Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though much of the remaining color faded, or disappeared entirely, once the statues were again exposed to light and air. Some of the pigment was scrubbed off by restorers whose acts, while well intentioned, were tantamount to vandalism. In the 18th century, the pioneering archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann chose to view the bare stone figures as pure—if you will, Platonic—forms, all the loftier for their austerity. "The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well," he wrote. "Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence." Against growing evidence to the contrary, Winckelmann's view prevailed. For centuries to come, antiquarians who envisioned the statues in color were dismissed as eccentrics, and such challenges as they mounted went ignored.

    No longer; German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann is on a mission. Armed with high-intensity lamps, ultraviolet light, cameras, plaster casts and jars of costly powdered minerals, he has spent the past quarter century trying to revive the peacock glory that was Greece. He has dramatized his scholarly findings by creating full-scale plaster or marble copies hand-painted in the same mineral and organic pigments used by the ancients: green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow and ocher from arsenic compounds, red from cinnabar, black from burned bone and vine.

    Call them gaudy, call them garish, his scrupulous color reconstructions made their debut in 2003 at the Glyptothek museum in Munich, which is devoted to Greek and Roman statuary. Displayed side by side with the placid antiquities of that fabled collection, the replicas shocked and dazzled those who came to see them. As Time magazine summed up the response, "The exhibition forces you to look at ancient sculpture in a totally new way."

    "If people say, ‘What kitsch,' it annoys me," Brinkmann says, "but I'm not surprised." Actually, the public took to his replicas, and invitations to show them elsewhere quickly poured in. In recent years, Brinkmann's slowly growing collection has been more or less constantly on the road—from Munich to Amsterdam, Copenhagen to Rome—jolting viewers at every turn. London's The Guardian reported that the show received an "enthusiastic, if bewildered" reception at the Vatican Museums. "Il Messagero found the exhibition ‘disorientating, shocking, but often splendid.' Corriere della Sera's critic felt that ‘suddenly, a world we had been used to regarding as austere and reflective has been turned on its head to become as jolly as a circus.'" At the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, Brinkmann's painted reconstruction of sections of the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus (named not for the king buried in it but for his illustrious friend Alexander the Great, who is depicted in its sculpted frieze) was unveiled beside the breathtaking original; German television and print media spread the news around the globe. In Athens, top officials of the Greek government turned out for the opening when the collection went on view—and this was the ultimate honor—at the National Archaeological Museum.

    Taking advantage of the occasion, Brinkmann set some of his showpieces up for photographers on the Acropolis: a brilliantly colored, exotic-looking archer, kneeling with bow and arrow; a goddess smiling an archaic smile; and, perhaps most startling of all, a warrior's gilded torso in armor that clings to the body like a wet T-shirt. The figures may have looked wrong against the bleached, sun-drenched architecture, but they looked fine under the blazing Mediterranean sky.

    An American showing was overdue. This past fall, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University presented virtually the entire Brinkmann canon in an exhibition called "Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity." Selected replicas were also featured earlier this year in "The Color of Life," at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, which surveyed polychromy from antiquity to the present. Other highlights included El Greco's paired statuettes of Epimetheus and Pandora (long misidentified as Adam and Eve) rendered in painted wood and Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier's exotic Jewish Woman of Algiers of 1862, a portrait bust in onyx-marble, gold, enamel and amethyst.

    The palette of these works, however, was not as eye-popping as that of Brinkmann's reproductions. His "Lion From Loutraki" (a copy of an original work dated circa 550 B.C., now in the sculpture collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen) displays a tawny pelt, blue mane, white teeth and red facial markings. That exotic archer (from the original at the Glyptothek in Munich) sports a mustard vest emblazoned with a pattern of red, blue and green beasts of prey. Underneath, he wears a pullover and matching leggings with a psychedelic zigzag design that spreads and tapers as if printed on Lycra. Unlike previously proposed color schemes, which were mostly speculative, Brinkmann's is based on painstaking research.

    My own introduction to Brinkmann's work came about three years ago, when I was traveling in Europe and the image of a reproduction of a Greek tombstone in a German newspaper caught my eye. The deceased, Aristion, was depicted on the stone as a bearded warrior at the height of his prowess. He stood in profile, his skin tanned, his feet bare, decked out in a blue helmet, blue shinguards edged in yellow, and yellow armor over a filmy-looking white chiton with soft pleats, scalloped edges and a leafy-green border. His smiling lips were painted crimson.

    Bemused by the image and intrigued by the text that accompanied it, I e-mailed the Glyptothek in Munich. Brinkmann himself replied promptly with an invitation for a private demonstration of his methodology. We met at the museum soon after.

    Brinkmann led me first to a sculpture of a battle scene from the Temple of Aphaia (c. 490 B.C.) on the island of Aegina, one of the Glyptothek's prime attractions. Within the ensemble was the original sculpture of the kneeling Trojan archer whose colorfully painted replica Brinkmann had set up for the photo shoot on the Acropolis. Unlike most of the other warriors in the scene, the archer is fully dressed; his Scythian cap (a soft, close-fitting headdress with a distinctive, forward-curling crown) and his brightly patterned outfit indicate that he is Eastern. These and other details point to his identification as Paris, the Trojan (hence Eastern) prince whose abduction of Helen launched the Trojan War.

    At Brinkmann's suggestion, I had come to the museum late in the day, when the light was low. His main piece of equipment was far from high tech: a hand-held spotlight. Under "extreme raking light" (the technical term for light that falls on a surface from the side at a very low angle), I could see faint incisions that are otherwise difficult or impossible to detect with the naked eye. On the vest of the archer, the spotlight revealed a geometric border that Brinkmann had reproduced in color. Elsewhere on the vest, he pointed out a diminutive beast of prey, scarcely an inch in length, endowed with the body of a jungle cat and a majestic set of wings. "Yes!" he said with delight. "A griffin!"

    The surface of the sculpture was once covered in brilliant colors, but time has erased them. Oxidation and dirt have obscured or darkened any traces of pigment that still remain. Physical and chemical analyses, however, have helped Brinkmann establish the original colors with a high degree of confidence, even where the naked eye can pick out nothing distinct.

    Next, Brinkman shone an ultraviolet light on the archer's divine protectress, Athena, revealing so-called "color shadows" of pigments that had long since worn away. Some pigments wear off more quickly than others, so that the underlying stone is exposed to wind and weather at different rates and thus also erodes at different rates. The seemingly blank surface lit up in a pattern of neatly overlapping scales, each decorated with a little dart—astonishing details given that only birds nesting behind the sculpture would have seen them.

    A few weeks later, I visited the Brinkmann home, a short train ride from Munich. There I learned that new methods have greatly improved the making of sculptural reproductions. In the past, the process required packing a statue in plaster to create a mold, from which a copy could then be cast. But the direct application of plaster can damage precious color traces. Now, 3-D laser scanning can produce a copy without contact with the original. As it happened, Brinkmann's wife, archaeologist Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, was just then applying color to a laser reproduction of a sculpted head of the Roman emperor Caligula.

    I was immediately taken by how lifelike Caligula looked, with healthy skin tone—no easy thing to reproduce. Koch-Brinkmann's immediate concern that day was the emperor's hair, carved in close-cropped curls, which she was painting a chocolaty brown over black underpainting (for volume) with lighter color accents (to suggest movement and texture). The brown irises of the emperor's eyes were darkest at the rim, and the inky black of each pupil was made lustrous by a pinprick of white.

    Such realistic detail is a far cry from the rendering of Paris the archer. In circa 490 B.C., when it was sculpted, statues were decorated in flat colors, which were applied in a paint-by-numbers fashion. But as time passed, artists taught themselves to enhance effects of light and shadow, much as Koch-Brinkmann was doing with Caligula, created some five centuries after the archer. The Brinkmanns had also discovered evidence of shading and hatching on the "Alexander Sarcophagus" (created c. 320 B.C.)—a cause for considerable excitement. "It's a revolution in painting comparable to Giotto's in the frescoes of Padua," says Brinkmann.

    Brinkmann has never proposed taking a paintbrush to an original antiquity. "No," he stresses, "I don't advocate that. We're too far away. The originals are broken into too many fragments. What's preserved isn't preserved well enough." Besides, modern taste is happy with fragments and torsos. We've come a long way since the end of the 18th century, when factories would take Roman fragments and piece them together, replacing whatever was missing. Viewers at the time felt the need of a coherent image, even if it meant fusing ancient pieces that belonged to different originals. "If it were a question of retouching, that would be defensible," Brinkmann says, "but as archaeological objects, ancient statues are sacrosanct."

    A turning point in conservation came in 1815 when Lord Elgin approached Antonio Canova, the foremost neo-Classical sculptor, about restoring the Parthenon statues. "They were the work of the ablest artist the world has even seen," Canova replied. "It would be sacrilege for me, or any man, to touch them with a chisel." Canova's stance lent prestige to the aesthetic of the found object; one more reason to let the question of color slide.

    In the introduction to the catalog of the Harvard show, Brinkmann confesses that even he is a relatively recent convert to the idea that the painting of statues actually constituted an art form. "What that means," he elaborates, "is that my perspective has been molded by 20th-century classicism. You can't shake that off. It stays with you all your life. Ask a psychiatrist. You have to work very hard to adjust to a new way of seeing. But I'm talking about personal feelings here, not about scholarly conviction."

    Past attempts to colorize, notably by Victorian artists, were based mostly on fantasy and personal taste. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's painting Pheidias and the Frieze of the Parthenon (1868-69) shows the Greek artist giving Pericles and other privileged Athenians a private tour of the Parthenon sculptures, which are rendered in thick, creamy colors. John Gibson's life-size statue Tinted Venus (1851-56) has honey hair and rose lips. One 19th-century reviewer dismissed it as "a naked impudent English woman"—a judgment viewers today are unlikely to share, given the discreet, low-key tints Gibson applied to the marble. In the United States, C. Paul Jennewein's king-size allegorical frieze of sacred and profane love on a pediment of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, unveiled in 1933, is more lavish in its use of color. The figures, representing Zeus, Demeter and other Greek divinities, are executed in showy glazed terra cotta. To contemporary eyes, the effect appears Art Deco, and rather camp.

    While viewers today may regard Brinkmann's reconstructions in the same light, his sculptures are intended as sober study objects. Areas where he has found no evidence of original coloration are generally left white. Where specific color choices are speculative, contrasting color re-creations of the same statue are made to illustrate the existing evidence and how it has been interpreted. For example, in one version of the so-called Cuirass-Torso from the Acropolis in Athens (the one in which the armor appears to cling like a wet T-shirt, above), the armor is gold; in another it is yellow. Both are based on well-founded guesses. "Vitality is what the Greeks were after," Brinkmann says, "that, and the charge of the erotic. They always found ways to emphasize the power and beauty of the naked body. Dressing this torso and giving it color was a way to make the body sexier."

    But the question remains: How close can science come to reproducing the art of a vanished age? There is no definitive answer. Years ago, a first generation of inquisitive musicians started experimenting with early instruments, playing at low tunings on gut strings or natural horns, hoping to restore the true sound of the Baroque. Whatever the curiosity or informational value of the performances, there were discriminating listeners who thought them mere exercises in pedantry. When the next generation came along, period practice was becoming second nature. Musicians used their imagination as well as the rule books and began making music.

    Brinkmann ponders the implications. "We're working very hard," he says. "Our first obligation is to get everything right. What do you think? Do you think some day we can start making music?"

    An essayist and cultural critic based in New York City, author Matthew Gurewitsch is a frequent contributor to these pages.


    1 2 3 4 5



    Additional Sources

    Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity (exhibition catalogue), edited by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Raimünd Wunsche, Stiftung Archäologie, Glypotothek Munich, 2007

    The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present (exhibition catalogue), edited by Roberta Panzanelli with Eike D. Schmidt and Kenneth Lapatin, The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2008

     
    Comments

    As a kid I always wondered about those lifeless eyes in ancient sculptures. Now I know--they were not! Every now and then something comes along and smacks you upside the head and makes you just say "far out!" Now what if Michaelangelo? What if Bernini? What if Rodin? Simon Schama, please take note.

    Posted by Terry Franklin on June 25,2008 | 07:34AM

    gaaudy,not aaat all. i think they are magnificent.

    Posted by herbertjmiller on June 25,2008 | 12:11PM

    Nice article, interesting subject - but like so many essays, articles and books about art, too many of the works mentioned in the article are not illustrated with a photo, robbing the story of its fullest value for artists and art lovers. If a work is worth mentioning in the text, it is worth a photo as well, particularly in case like this where finding photo's of the unillustrated pieces will be difficult or impossible.

    Posted by DESandberg on June 25,2008 | 06:19PM

    Terrific article. Kitch lives in style. :)

    Posted by remoran on June 25,2008 | 08:53PM

    Now I have a better idea of where the interior decoration styles of Eastern Orthodox churches originated as well a much Latin American Colonial Era Catholic church decorations. Also, perhaps, the interiors of the house on Long Island shared by Alec Baldwin and Michelle Pfeiffer in the film "Married to the Mob..."

    Posted by George Alexander on June 25,2008 | 11:06PM

    Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but your description of the "repainted" classical sculptures contains an error. On the caption for the grave stele of a warrior, your refer to his yellow "leather or bronze" armor. Actually, at this time (5th century BCE)Greek armor was predominantly made of many layers of linen of linen glued together -- a sort of ancient kelvar. On vase painting of warriors arming, the shoulder guards are sometimes depicted as standing on end until lashed down, which affords clear evidence of the mode of construction. Modern students of ancient armor have taken to calling cuirasses of this kind "linothoraxs."

    Posted by Eduard Mark on June 27,2008 | 07:09PM

    I've occasionally wondered why early Greek statues weren't painted as much as the Egyptian statues their shapes so clearly resemble, and now Herr Brinkman's careful observation shows that they were! Thanks for the great photos.

    Posted by Sarah Gill on June 27,2008 | 08:02PM

    Wow, Loved the article, loved the slide show even more. Maybe I still prefer the Renaissance white marbles, but it is great to have a clearer view of what these Greek artists intended.

    Posted by Darrah Hopper on June 28,2008 | 06:17PM

    Perhaps the vivid painting of statues led the way to the painting of sacred icons in the Greek Christian world.

    Posted by Augustine Serafini on June 29,2008 | 06:03AM

    It's reasonable to assume that the painting on the figures was at least as sophisticated as the figures themselves. By the time of the Alexander Sarcophagus the subtlety of the sculpture has far outstripped the colors identified and applied by Brinkmann. This does not mean that Brinkmann has left the path of accurate reconstruction; it may mean that his ultimate goal is impossibly distant. The colors he has identified on later pieces are clearly just underpainting for a far more realistic final finish. This was the process used in Renaissance oil paintings of equivalent visual sophistication. The assumption that the painting was as sophisticated as the figures is an extremely conservative one. The artistic and manual skills required for realistic sculpting are far greater than those required for life-like painting of a finished figure. And the painting task was a relaxed one, far more amenable to messing around until the artist got it right. So painting was easier, less risky and, because of weathering, constantly in demand. It is reasonable to conclude that until sculpting reached its zenith, painting of figures was substantially more sophisticated than the figures themselves. With luck, Brinkmann will eventually find a piece with all the layers intact.

    Posted by Gregory Meeker on June 29,2008 | 07:22AM

    I have a UC Berkeley undergrad degree in Near Eastern History and Archaeology. Having studied the culture and art of the ancient world, I have to say that it's about time we see what the ancients saw in true living color. We can now more closely relive the reconstructed past. This enriches us just like discovering long lost scrolls and gives our present cultures continuity with our roots. As romantically beautiful stark white marble sculptures are, the truth of what they were meant to portray tells the real story. What we largely see today is merely a shadow of what was. We are looking at scaffolding which is supposed to support living color and the real face of the ancient world. True archaeology seeks to uncover the truth otherwise it's not a legitimate science, but a biased opinion that erases, disfigures and obfuscates the past. I was surprised when people complained that the Sistine Chapel restorations were gaudy. Imagine covering current murals with grime or scraping much of the paint off. They would look wrong and sculptures without their paint look wrong now. They are inaccurate. I would like to see all ancient marbles restored to their true colors as much as possible. What should be avoided is guessing what the colors might have been. Why make something up? Maybe spectral analysis might discover minute traces of true pigments embedded in the marbles. That's real science.

    Posted by Bill Hernandez on June 29,2008 | 11:43AM

    Thank you for putting more photos online. I did not remember from college art history classes that these sculptures were orginally coloured. Your magazine is terrific; I really enjoyed this article and the entire issue! So thanks!

    Posted by Alison Swann on July 5,2008 | 08:26PM

    The article cites other cultures and time periods who polychromed their sculptures, but neglects to mention the remarkable, painted sculpture being made in the Bavaria-Franconia Region of Germany in the early 16th century, at the same time as the unpainted sculptures of the High Italian Renaissance. Tilman Remienshneider, Veit Stoss, Nicholos Gerhardt, Hans Leinberger, and Master H.L., to name a few, were Early 16th Century German Sculptors from Bavaria who painted their work. Munich the Brinkmanns' home town has a lot of this sculpture in their museums. I cannot help but wonder if their research has been heavily influenced--inspired--by these marvelous sculptures in their own backyard.

    Posted by Michael Ananian on July 7,2008 | 06:53AM

    As a professional Artist/Sculptor, I am asked sometimes to scale down a classic sculpture. I usually request a simple stone finish to complete the project. This article sheds new light on what could have been. As a young art student, I remember touring the British Museum and viewing the Elgin Marbles. I seem to recall seeing the slightest hint of paint and pointed this out to my teacher who rebuked my observations outright. It always made sense to me if ancient cultures like the Egyptian and and the Chinese adorned their temples and public buildings with jewels and paint why not other great empires. Cheers! Liam

    Posted by Liam Manchester on July 13,2008 | 07:09AM

    Was ultraviolet photography used for this research? The article is unclear; it suggests that a UV source makes the original etchings visible to the naked eye. But I presume that a much more detailed record would be needed, hence the need for photographic documentation.

    Posted by Lloyd Chambers on July 13,2008 | 08:17AM

    Reading this article, I could dream about walking through the bright colors in Classical Antiquity.

    Posted by Laura Dalrymple on September 17,2008 | 08:26AM

    I just finished reading the July issue of Smithsonian Magazine and am VERY curious about the colorful depiction of leggings, especially, that appear to represent knitted patterns - from an era long before I thought that 'knitting' was believed to have existed. I am sure that textile experts have commented on the representations - perhaps Koch-Brinkman is one herself? On page 67 the archer's arms and legs have pattern and form-fitting characteristics of multi-color knitting such as in a Fair Isle sweater. On page 71, the lower left figure has tights that look like a knitted lace pattern. Please, is there a way to learn more of the Brinkman research regarding the textile depictions? Sincerely, Kati Meek, Northern Michigan handweaver and textile history buff

    Posted by Kati Meek on November 23,2008 | 10:53AM

    40-odd years ago at University of California at Davis, Dr. Howard taught us that the Greek statues were polychromed. I had always wondered how they must have appeared. What joy to see some examples. How striking and beautiful! I do wish that all works mentioned in the article had been illustrated.

    Posted by Katie Harris on March 9,2009 | 11:00AM

    How do we know that the paints were applied at the time the statues were made? Maybe the paints were applied at a later date by idiots who thought that white marble was too boring. Perhaps there was a "realism craze" in ancient Greece where everybody started to paint all the statues. Some of the statues would have been skillfully painted by professionals. Others would have been painted by do-it-yourselfers, which would explain the ugly creations being discovered by Dr. Brinkmann. Honestly, we know that Greeks were skilled artists; they were reportedly master painters also. How do we explain such crudely colored sculpture?

    Posted by Karl Young on April 10,2009 | 08:39PM

    Then, dear Karl, how do you explain all these color traces in the kores found in Acropole in 1886....? Do you think that someone unearthed them, painted them and then buried them again!?

    Posted by Tasos Kakamanoudis on May 31,2009 | 05:26AM

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    Smithsonian magazine presents

    6th Annual Smithsonian Photo Contest Winners

    Out of more than 17,000 entries contributed from around the world, Smithsonian and its readers select the year's best