If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Accustomed as we are to seeing the statues of ancient Greece and Rome in gleaming white, we understand them better if we remember their original colours. And perhaps the debate which had divided the art world for 100 years by the time Alma-Tadema was painting his version of the Parthenon can finally be set aside. The white marble statues or columns we have built in homage to the ancients say more about us – and the way we choose to imagine the ancient world – than they do about the people who lived 2,000 years ago or more. Aside from anything else, it reminds us how distant the Romans and the Greeks were from us, even though they often feel so familiar. The global audience for Brinkmann’s Gods in Colour exhibition has surely proved that there is an appetite for modern recreations of the brightness of ancient statuary. The front of the Amazon’s face had been destroyed, but her red hair, curling out from a centre parting (as Roman girls would have worn their own hair) was clearly visible. In 2009, a team of scientists in Southampton began the digital recreation of a painted statue of a wounded Amazon warrior which had been found at Herculaneum. The Acropolis Museum itself makes a bright option available too: they encourage visitors to their website to decorate their own versions of the peplos (dress), allow you to investigate archaic colours and see which colours were available to painters in the ancient world. She has also acquired a pair of feet, lost from the original marble version, and a new left arm. The dress of the Cambridge copy is painted bright red, with blue borders, and blue, green and white decorations. The original (now white) Peplos Kore – a statue of a young girl, wearing a long dress belted at the waist – stands in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge has also tried to bring some colour into its plaster reproductions of ancient statues. The archer is one of the stand-out pieces in Brinkmann’s Gods in Colour exhibition, which has toured the world for the past 15 years.Īnd Brinkmann is not alone in his attempts to reintroduce colour to ancient sculpture. The bow is painted red and gold, and even the arrows are decorated red. His quiver is decorated in a similar colour-palate, with a slightly different design, almost like scales. This archer is one of his most spectacular: an intricate design of blue, red, yellow and green diamonds interlock, to give the archer ornate leggings and sleeves. Brinkmann has spent years recreating the brightly-coloured decoration on copies of the statues which the Ancient Greeks would have seen all around them. On his arms and legs, we can see traces of a diamond pattern. The bronze eyelashes are particularly delightful, if a little disconcerting.įurther along, bending into the lower part of the slanted roof, was the figure of an archer (perhaps Paris, son of Priam of Troy). There is a magnificent pair of Greek eyes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, made of bronze, marble, quartz and obsidian. The eye sockets of ancient statues are often empty, because the eyes were made separately, and they have been lost over time. Hair would have been painted dark and the flesh might well have been painted too. What we see as a uniform greenish-brown head would once have been gleaming bright, almost golden. There is a modern-day replica of the statue in Nashville, by the sculptor Alan LeQuire, which surely captures something of the glittering original.Įven bronze statues would have been much brighter than their dark brown appearance suggests today: bronze acquires a patina over time. He tells us the statue was chryselephantine: covered in gold and ivory. Although the statue is long since destroyed, we have a description of it in the writings of the ancient historian, Pausanias. Phidias – the most celebrated sculptor of his day – also created a huge statue of Athena Parthenos to stand inside the Parthenon (it takes its name from the description of the goddess: parthenos means ‘maiden’). Yet ancient art would have been a riot of colour and glitzy decoration.
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