This is great. I am glad someone is taking this on seriously! One thing to add: surely one of the biggest problems with these reconstructions is that they are mostly on the wrong surface. That is, they're reconstructed using plaster rather than marble. This is a fatal blow to their claim to a higher truth than the severely damaged originals that are actually beautiful to look at. Use of marble is sometimes done, but it is rare. See https://journals.openedition.org/techne/2656#ftn42 You can tell that the marble reconstruction is a *bit* better: it still looks jarring but it doesn't have that blaring neon effect that the plaster-based reconstructions do.
Plaster is far more opaque than marble, and the reflections are more diffuse. Paint, though, is translucent. Whatever is beneath paint matters. A lot! If you paint over marble, you have a dense surface that will lend itself to subtle shades. Also marble has subsurface scattering, i.e. light passes through it, scatters, and some of the rays come back out again. Exactly like skin. Plaster of paris, on the other hand, is 'dead' to the eye—no subsurface scattering.
Interestingly, videogame artists have noticed the same phenomenon. 3D renders of the 00s made human beings look like they are made of thick rubber. This is because the light simulation just had rays bounce straight off. By contrast, once you start modelling subsurface scattering, you have human beings of warmth and complexity. See a good demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI_QUtgJHH8
To my mind, reconstructions that only pay attention to the paint film on top of the sculpture are just as prejudicial and problematic as the 'cleaned' originals stripped of colour. They only exist to prove a limited point, and they create all sorts of misconceptions along the way.
For this argument to hold true the colours that can now be observed on frescos and mosaics that contain statues should be identical (or a close approximation) to their original coloration, has this been proven?
Do you mean that the colours in frescoes should be identical to the colours on statues? We'll never really know that for sure, but the pigments were very likely the same. In antiquity there was a very limited range of pigments that could be used; pigments only really explode in variety with the revolutions in chemistry in the 19th century.
The problem is that the way you use these pigments can still create a pretty huge range of visual results. Do you layer two different colours, or do you mix them? In what order? How much medium (oil, egg tempera) do you use relative to pigment? And what type of medium? Do you put a layer of varnish over the top of the paint once it's finished, or not?
I'm saying that colours on frescos and mosaics might have changed (dulled) over the years which makes the coloration of statues on frescos and mosaics more naturalistic, do we know for sure that that's not the case?
Oh I see, thanks for clarifying. It's a *bit* the case, but not enough to explain the difference. If you compare the pigments in late antique wall paintings to the raw stuff today, there isn't as much difference as you might guess. The pigments used were very lightfast, typically because they are quite stable mineral-based pigments. Thus ultramarine blue, egyptian blue (a kind of synthetic glass), natural earth browns, iron oxide red, etc etc. These pigments might darken and fade a little bit but they are still fairly riotous. What's more important, probably, is the medium the pigments are bound in (oil or tempera), the mixture of the colours, the layering of the colours, and what they are physically painted onto.
Though there are some exceptions where organic pigments were used in old master and earlier artworks. One of my favourite examples is the weirdly blue grass in works by the Dutch master Aelbert Cuyp, where the grass is... Blue. This is because he used the plant-based pigment weld for the yellow to make a bright green, which has since been obliterated by UV rays and dropped out. The result is grass of the wrong colour! https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/aelbert-cuyp-the-large-dort
Thank you so much for writing this piece — I have tried to explain this concept (that classical statue restorations are likely not accurate to contemporary art styles, which would have likely been more subtle) many times to people, but often to no avail.
I really liked this, and I'm very convinced about the central thesis about classical sculpture. But I wish there was more detail and rigour in the discussion of modern attitudes among academics and restorers: I find the speculation that they're trolling a bit unsatisfying, not knowing enough about the field to decide if it's plausible or not.
There are some tantalising bits in the piece about this already. The rule that you can't restore anything that you don't have specific evidence of seems like it would be very important in why these modern reconstructions look so bad. Where did that rule come from? what is the justification for it? is it something specific about classical sculpture that means the rule led to silly and bad reconstructions, or is it a bad dogma across all contexts?
I, an outsider, would have naively assumed that restoration was more about returning a work to the way it had previously been received, where you have decent evidence of what it previously looked like. Whereas the reception of classical statues has always (in the modern world) been paint-less, and in my head repainting them is less 'restoration' and more of a new creative act; even if you are trying to imagine what they actually historically looked like, that will require more creative imagination about how the Greeks and Romans thought rather than slavish obedience to evidence (cuz we don't have that). I think the author would agree with me, but clearly the academics don't, and I'd be interested to learn more about where they've gotten their ideas and where they went wrong.
Here is my best attempt to summarise both the literature and the unspoken assumptions behind this stuff (from my point of view as an art historian and having worked on conservation too):
Conservation theory in the west was founded on a backlash against "excessively creative" reconstruction. See Ruskin, The Stones of Venice for the OG take "more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan." Basically reconstruction is inherently bad because it is 'inauthentic', because it is creative and involves wilful acts and we must return to the 'original' and 'uncorrupted' data of the real thing.
This attitude was deeply influential for decades and decades. Then it was 'set in stone' as it were in the ICOMOS "Venice charter", which again was deeply against reconstruction especially if it had the slightest hint of speculation to it. This remains a continuing theme with UNESCO, being the reason they deleted Bagrati Cathedral in Georgia from the World Heritage list—too much reconstruction, too creative, too speculative.
"Critical Heritage Studies" has disliked this principle against reconstruction and has critiqued it for many years. One of the most important elements of the critique is the fact that in many cultures it is normal to demolish and rebuild important sites, particularly in cultures that favour woodwork over stone.
As far as I can tell, however, the basic aversion to reconstruction and 'speculation' remains. A 'creative' use of paint surfaces on these reconstructed sculptures would be 'falsifications' in that sense. Doing the painting 'well', with greater subtlety, shading, mixtures of colours, sparing application of paint, or whatever it is, might make the sculptures look better. But the *way* they would look better would be unverifiable and in a sense 'misleading' because they might have looked awesome but in a slightly different way.
The silent rule here is that a reconstruction should look like a *reconstruction*, like a kind of extrapolation of data that we have to prove a particular point, rather than a resurrected artwork. See also "tratteggio" in painting conservation. In areas of total loss of paint, you deliberately make the image a blurred or hatched area to signal the fact that you don't have the necessary data about what the painting looked like.
———
Now here is my opinion. The problem with these reconstructions is that they also falsify an aesthetic experience that is indeed jarring and clashy. The re-discovered sculptures that are 'real' are also 'false' in the sense that they *lack* colour completely. But the aesthetic experience is one of a strange serenity and calm, an 18th century art historian (Winckelmann) called this "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur".
To look at these reconstructions we have to use our imagination to picture some kind of third sculpture that sits between the "quiet grandeur" of the damaged original and the chromatic discord of the reconstruction. In fact the reconstructions are a heuristic, a model, but it is all too tempting (as Maxwell E has pointed out) to treat them as a polemical reality that explodes our assumptions.
The New Yorker article about Roman statue restoration that went viral several years ago interviewed multiple Classical scholars, and each of them seemed to reference the “myth of whiteness” as something they wanted to specifically refute… with strong colors and hyperpigmented restorations.
That is, many scholars involved with restoration are hoping to skewer public perceptions in the most dramatic way possible to prove a point, and accuracy (which would be subtlety in this case) has taken a back seat.
I had suspected that this was the case since I first saw those pictures years ago. I am glad to get confirmation. Really enjoyed reading this article in the print edition.
The comparison to underlayers-only Mona Lisa reconstruction is sharp. What stands out to me is how the Pompeii frescos depicting statues consistently show these subtle gradations - like that sunburnt boxer with pale thighs - which suggests the original artisans had incredibly sophisticated techniques for layering pigment. The trolling hypothesis is funny but I think there's something more structural at play: museum culture emphasizes archaeological rigor over aesthetic plausibility, so you end up with reconstructions that technically follow the evidence but miss the actual craft logic. I've seen similar issues in historical architecture reconstruciton where strict adherence to remaining material creates results that builders from the period would've found absurd.
The evidence gap between underlayers and finished surfaces is huge here. We're basically looking at primer coats and trying to reconstruct final appearance - like guessing the Mona Lisa from a few underpainting traces. The Pompeiian frescoes showing statues are compelling counter-examples since they depict actual contemporary work with intact color schemes. Those painted statues look naturalistic, not garish. The conservation doctrine problem makes sense too - if methodology requires only including features with direct archaeological evidence, you end up with artifically flat reconstructions that exclude everything refined.The trolling hypothesis is darkly funny but probably giving too much credit. More likely its just methodological constraints producing bad outputs that happen to generate publicity becuase they're provocative.
This is great. I am glad someone is taking this on seriously! One thing to add: surely one of the biggest problems with these reconstructions is that they are mostly on the wrong surface. That is, they're reconstructed using plaster rather than marble. This is a fatal blow to their claim to a higher truth than the severely damaged originals that are actually beautiful to look at. Use of marble is sometimes done, but it is rare. See https://journals.openedition.org/techne/2656#ftn42 You can tell that the marble reconstruction is a *bit* better: it still looks jarring but it doesn't have that blaring neon effect that the plaster-based reconstructions do.
Plaster is far more opaque than marble, and the reflections are more diffuse. Paint, though, is translucent. Whatever is beneath paint matters. A lot! If you paint over marble, you have a dense surface that will lend itself to subtle shades. Also marble has subsurface scattering, i.e. light passes through it, scatters, and some of the rays come back out again. Exactly like skin. Plaster of paris, on the other hand, is 'dead' to the eye—no subsurface scattering.
Interestingly, videogame artists have noticed the same phenomenon. 3D renders of the 00s made human beings look like they are made of thick rubber. This is because the light simulation just had rays bounce straight off. By contrast, once you start modelling subsurface scattering, you have human beings of warmth and complexity. See a good demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI_QUtgJHH8
To my mind, reconstructions that only pay attention to the paint film on top of the sculpture are just as prejudicial and problematic as the 'cleaned' originals stripped of colour. They only exist to prove a limited point, and they create all sorts of misconceptions along the way.
For this argument to hold true the colours that can now be observed on frescos and mosaics that contain statues should be identical (or a close approximation) to their original coloration, has this been proven?
Do you mean that the colours in frescoes should be identical to the colours on statues? We'll never really know that for sure, but the pigments were very likely the same. In antiquity there was a very limited range of pigments that could be used; pigments only really explode in variety with the revolutions in chemistry in the 19th century.
The problem is that the way you use these pigments can still create a pretty huge range of visual results. Do you layer two different colours, or do you mix them? In what order? How much medium (oil, egg tempera) do you use relative to pigment? And what type of medium? Do you put a layer of varnish over the top of the paint once it's finished, or not?
I'm saying that colours on frescos and mosaics might have changed (dulled) over the years which makes the coloration of statues on frescos and mosaics more naturalistic, do we know for sure that that's not the case?
Oh I see, thanks for clarifying. It's a *bit* the case, but not enough to explain the difference. If you compare the pigments in late antique wall paintings to the raw stuff today, there isn't as much difference as you might guess. The pigments used were very lightfast, typically because they are quite stable mineral-based pigments. Thus ultramarine blue, egyptian blue (a kind of synthetic glass), natural earth browns, iron oxide red, etc etc. These pigments might darken and fade a little bit but they are still fairly riotous. What's more important, probably, is the medium the pigments are bound in (oil or tempera), the mixture of the colours, the layering of the colours, and what they are physically painted onto.
Makes sense, nice contrarian take Alfie, much appreciated!
A real pleasure. It's rare that this niche topic comes up, but when it does, I will be at the keyboard for a while....!
Though there are some exceptions where organic pigments were used in old master and earlier artworks. One of my favourite examples is the weirdly blue grass in works by the Dutch master Aelbert Cuyp, where the grass is... Blue. This is because he used the plant-based pigment weld for the yellow to make a bright green, which has since been obliterated by UV rays and dropped out. The result is grass of the wrong colour! https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/aelbert-cuyp-the-large-dort
Thank you so much for writing this piece — I have tried to explain this concept (that classical statue restorations are likely not accurate to contemporary art styles, which would have likely been more subtle) many times to people, but often to no avail.
I really liked this, and I'm very convinced about the central thesis about classical sculpture. But I wish there was more detail and rigour in the discussion of modern attitudes among academics and restorers: I find the speculation that they're trolling a bit unsatisfying, not knowing enough about the field to decide if it's plausible or not.
There are some tantalising bits in the piece about this already. The rule that you can't restore anything that you don't have specific evidence of seems like it would be very important in why these modern reconstructions look so bad. Where did that rule come from? what is the justification for it? is it something specific about classical sculpture that means the rule led to silly and bad reconstructions, or is it a bad dogma across all contexts?
I, an outsider, would have naively assumed that restoration was more about returning a work to the way it had previously been received, where you have decent evidence of what it previously looked like. Whereas the reception of classical statues has always (in the modern world) been paint-less, and in my head repainting them is less 'restoration' and more of a new creative act; even if you are trying to imagine what they actually historically looked like, that will require more creative imagination about how the Greeks and Romans thought rather than slavish obedience to evidence (cuz we don't have that). I think the author would agree with me, but clearly the academics don't, and I'd be interested to learn more about where they've gotten their ideas and where they went wrong.
Here is my best attempt to summarise both the literature and the unspoken assumptions behind this stuff (from my point of view as an art historian and having worked on conservation too):
Conservation theory in the west was founded on a backlash against "excessively creative" reconstruction. See Ruskin, The Stones of Venice for the OG take "more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan." Basically reconstruction is inherently bad because it is 'inauthentic', because it is creative and involves wilful acts and we must return to the 'original' and 'uncorrupted' data of the real thing.
This attitude was deeply influential for decades and decades. Then it was 'set in stone' as it were in the ICOMOS "Venice charter", which again was deeply against reconstruction especially if it had the slightest hint of speculation to it. This remains a continuing theme with UNESCO, being the reason they deleted Bagrati Cathedral in Georgia from the World Heritage list—too much reconstruction, too creative, too speculative.
"Critical Heritage Studies" has disliked this principle against reconstruction and has critiqued it for many years. One of the most important elements of the critique is the fact that in many cultures it is normal to demolish and rebuild important sites, particularly in cultures that favour woodwork over stone.
As far as I can tell, however, the basic aversion to reconstruction and 'speculation' remains. A 'creative' use of paint surfaces on these reconstructed sculptures would be 'falsifications' in that sense. Doing the painting 'well', with greater subtlety, shading, mixtures of colours, sparing application of paint, or whatever it is, might make the sculptures look better. But the *way* they would look better would be unverifiable and in a sense 'misleading' because they might have looked awesome but in a slightly different way.
The silent rule here is that a reconstruction should look like a *reconstruction*, like a kind of extrapolation of data that we have to prove a particular point, rather than a resurrected artwork. See also "tratteggio" in painting conservation. In areas of total loss of paint, you deliberately make the image a blurred or hatched area to signal the fact that you don't have the necessary data about what the painting looked like.
———
Now here is my opinion. The problem with these reconstructions is that they also falsify an aesthetic experience that is indeed jarring and clashy. The re-discovered sculptures that are 'real' are also 'false' in the sense that they *lack* colour completely. But the aesthetic experience is one of a strange serenity and calm, an 18th century art historian (Winckelmann) called this "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur".
To look at these reconstructions we have to use our imagination to picture some kind of third sculpture that sits between the "quiet grandeur" of the damaged original and the chromatic discord of the reconstruction. In fact the reconstructions are a heuristic, a model, but it is all too tempting (as Maxwell E has pointed out) to treat them as a polemical reality that explodes our assumptions.
The New Yorker article about Roman statue restoration that went viral several years ago interviewed multiple Classical scholars, and each of them seemed to reference the “myth of whiteness” as something they wanted to specifically refute… with strong colors and hyperpigmented restorations.
That is, many scholars involved with restoration are hoping to skewer public perceptions in the most dramatic way possible to prove a point, and accuracy (which would be subtlety in this case) has taken a back seat.
I had suspected that this was the case since I first saw those pictures years ago. I am glad to get confirmation. Really enjoyed reading this article in the print edition.
The comparison to underlayers-only Mona Lisa reconstruction is sharp. What stands out to me is how the Pompeii frescos depicting statues consistently show these subtle gradations - like that sunburnt boxer with pale thighs - which suggests the original artisans had incredibly sophisticated techniques for layering pigment. The trolling hypothesis is funny but I think there's something more structural at play: museum culture emphasizes archaeological rigor over aesthetic plausibility, so you end up with reconstructions that technically follow the evidence but miss the actual craft logic. I've seen similar issues in historical architecture reconstruciton where strict adherence to remaining material creates results that builders from the period would've found absurd.
The evidence gap between underlayers and finished surfaces is huge here. We're basically looking at primer coats and trying to reconstruct final appearance - like guessing the Mona Lisa from a few underpainting traces. The Pompeiian frescoes showing statues are compelling counter-examples since they depict actual contemporary work with intact color schemes. Those painted statues look naturalistic, not garish. The conservation doctrine problem makes sense too - if methodology requires only including features with direct archaeological evidence, you end up with artifically flat reconstructions that exclude everything refined.The trolling hypothesis is darkly funny but probably giving too much credit. More likely its just methodological constraints producing bad outputs that happen to generate publicity becuase they're provocative.