Me too. I think when we think about times before 100 AD, we think of unpainted marble, columns, and those ancient red-and-black Greek vases. We don't really consider that their painters also knew about, y'know, realistic portraits and shading and that sort of thing, but they absolutely knew how to do those things: https://joyofmuseums.com/museums/europe/italy-museums/naples...
That really is incredible. Looks like a 1700s decorative item.
We often think that art was truly awoken during the renaissance and people started to understand the human form and realism then, but ancient art shows people have been doing it since the dawn of history.
What’s weird to me is how, for a period between the decline of Rome and the 1400s, Europeans seemed to forget how to realistically depict people in art.
I think Ancient art - visual and otherwise - was steeped in formulaic motifs. It's hard to judge the "passion" of the artist's hand with such low quality images, not to mention the damage wrought over thousands of years.
I think it's worthwhile to be careful not to judge ancient art with a modern eye. They had different values. It's quite possible if not likely that frescoes were viewed as temporary, to be plaster-painted over every so often. We can see multiple layers of painted plaster in other parts of Pompeii, so it's not unlikely private homes would do the same. If then they viewed this art as fleeting, why should they pay for the best details when the overall effect is more important?
Anyone who walked into this hall would have been familiar with the Trojan cycle. So as long as the characters were recognizable - hence the name labels - that was sufficient.
I personally find these bright, full-bodied figures against a stark black background reminiscent of the chiaroscuro effect mastered by Caravaggio some 1500 years later using oil
Speaking of painting sculptures, I wonder why they never try to re-paint Greek and Roman sculptures. I've read some articles that show what the statues would have looked like back in the day and paint makes them look spectacular.
Last year I had a chance to go to the archaeological museums in both Athens and Istanbul and was surprised to see how many classical statues and fragments still have pigment left on them. Here's one particularly well-preserved example - from a museum in Berlin, but pretty close to the examples I saw in Athens:
It makes me wonder if part of the myth about Greco-Roman sculptures being pristine and unpainted came not just from the pigment wearing away over the centuries, but from the fact that 18th and 19th century printed texts tended only to feature black and white engravings. In person it's strikingly apparent that many were brightly painted.
On a related note, most people today associated ancient Roman art with their statues. In fact painting and portraiture was a widely practiced art; it's just that statues stand the test of time better.
Curiously enough, people now think ancient Greek statues and architecture were painted in (if reconstructions are to be believed) rather vivid colours.
Agreed :-)
But see the comment down thread about under painting - what we see here is fairly child like poster colours painting - all that can be justified from the scarce evidence. But it is hard to imaging the sophistacted sculptors leaving the painting to less subtle hands. So the reconstruction we could prove today is probably a laughable copy of the reality - after all they would have all the colours of the Greek landscape to inspire them!
The interesting thing about old paintings is that they are not “photorealistic”. They don’t replicate photos, as they weren’t invented yet. They paint reality, as seen by the naked eye.
When seeing some of the portraits of the great masters in a museum, at real scale, with your own eyes, the effect is profound, as you perceive that it works in a very different way than a photography.
Reminds me of how recent scholarship shows that Greek statues weren't the blank-eyed white marble figures that influenced Western Art but were often brightly painted with additional features added.
The AP article is from 2013. I question the surprise in the original article though -- we've known that Greek and Roman buildings and statues were painted.
could be even close to the original ( considering that the Romans generally managed to somehow get skin tones more or less right in the few paintings that survived)
Incredible! I would love to see some more paintings I recognize. Only the first two were familiar enough to remember where the real painting ends, And I'm a big art history person.
Found a comment by Gregory Meeker about "underpainting", which used to be on the Smithsonian article [1] [2]:
"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."
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