You know those ancient classical statues: Adonis-or-Aphrodite-like ideals of beauty, usually nude figures chiseled out of pasty-white marble. Except, as a university professor of classics explained, they weren’t always so colorless:
Earlier this month, [Sarah] Bond published an article in the online arts publication Hyperallergic saying that research shows ancient Western artifacts were painted in different colors but have, over time, faded to their base light marble color -- giving the false impression that white skin was the classical ideal.
“Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” she wrote. “Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white and brown, among other colors.”
While today’s scholars have accepted this as fact, she said, the general public is another story.
I’m mystified that this would be in any way controversial. Sure, we all know those artifacts as white, but I have no problem imagining that they may have been clad in resplendent colors in their time. But then, I have no problem accepting that many dinosaurs had feathers, either (they’re the ancestors of birds, after all!), so maybe cultural perceptions don’t matter as much to me in general.
There are those to whom those perceptions matter a great deal, however, and Bond raised their ire when she touched on how this false idea of what ancient societies considered ideals of beauty is now used by racists to bolster their beliefs:
