Thread by @medievalpoc

"Whitewashing Ancient Statues: Whiteness, Racism And Color In The Ancient World" by @SarahEBond
Most of of the ancient statues we admire today were originally painted in bright shades of blue, red, yellow, brown, and many other hues
forbes.com/sites/drsarahb…

So, a lot of people don't realize that those "pure, white" statues we're all accustomed to seeing as window dressing in anything taking place in "Roman times", were originally painted in a very bright and eye-catching way. I've definitely heard people describe it as "garish".

This kind of cultural chromophobia has its historical roots in both colonialism and Enlightenment-era aesthetic revisionism and racism: apartmenttherapy.com/color-chromoph…

These statues were painted using the same technique as that used to create the Fayoum mummy portraits: encaustic. That means the "paint" used was pigmented melted wax! Very few images of art being created from that time survive... metmuseum.org/toah/hd/prms/h…

But this vase depicts the painting of a statue of Herakles, with his club, bow, and lion-skin. The apprentice melting the wax in a brazier for painting is of African descent. Seeing the process going on here is pretty darn cool: metmuseum.org/art/collection…

The unrelieved white marble of the statue is slowly becoming the reddish color of the rest of the presumably "naturally" hued people, starting with the lion-skin as paint is applied. By being painted, the statue is becoming MORE ideal by gaining color.

The idea that the whitened, stripped, and colorless statue was more ideal was a post-colonial construct, and this is interestingly illustrated by Sir Joshua Reynolds' portrait, "George Clive and his Family with an Indian Maid" c. 1765:

The idea of looking like a stripped antique statue was actually considered an ideal sort of European appearance in the 1700s. Many people have commented on how not-alive this guy looks whenever I post this painting, esp. contrasted with the Indian woman's natural appearance

But that's the issue...the original statues were *brightly* colored. They didn't really look like the Europeans thought they should have. And when the statues refused to cooperate with this colorless aesthetic, they SCOURED THEM WITH SULFURIC ACID: britishmuseum.org/about_us/news_…

Something I've talked about with Medievalists here and elsewhere is that a similar thing happened in Europe in regard to spices and food. Medieval European food was heavily spiced, sometimes in ways we'd consider downright riotous. European food became bland after the Enlightment

In order to subjugate, you have to create a separation. Europeans invented and constructed whiteness, and used this idea to separate themselves from color, flavor, and other things they wanted to associate with those they were murdering, enslaving, and stealing from.

I could trot out the same overtly bigoted quotes from Hume and Kant, but in this context I really think the whole body of work on this mistaken concept of whiteness as aesthetic perfection projected backwards onto antiquity by racists can just be thrown out.

If you're curious to see more of what the original brightly colored statues may have looked like, there's an exhibit called Gods In Color that showcases color schemes based in analysis of paint traces and other sciencey stuff: buntegoetter.liebieghaus.de/en

But keep in mind that every process, including that of research, recreation, and restoration, are the product of human hands and human minds.

And remember that all of these works do not pass into or out of our hands untouched, and that they bear the traces of the ages they have passed *through* as well as that in which they were made: metmuseum.org/toah/hd/anti/h… (Classical Antiquity in the Middle Ages)

If you enjoyed this thread and/or would like to support my research, you can do so here:
patreon.com/medievalpoc
Or just buy me a ko-fi:
ko-fi.com/medievalpoc
Thanks so much for reading! <3