Paint and be Damned

It's a curious fact that many of the ancient Roman and Greek statues we see in modern museum exhibition look nothing like they did when they were created. We are so used to the plain white marble or naked wood that we forget that they were once brightly painted. 

Ignorance of this fact is being labelled as 'the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art' by experts. Academics have proven this fact by using a variety of ultra-high resolution imagery. Alt-right groups have used white sculptures in ancient civilisations as 'proof' of white supremacy, which researchers argue has created a 'blindness' to the possibility that these sculptures were originally colourful. This is reinforced by the historical popularity in the art world of neoclassic pieces, rising to prominence in the 18th and 19th Century, which also assumed ancient to works to be devoid of colour.

This isn't just a Western story. The figures that make up China's famous terracotta army were also painted and a few still bear traces of pigmentation.

But what I hadn't realised until recently is that many ecclisiastical building that are now plain stone were also once brightly painted. Exeter Cathedral is a good case in point. Today, its famous image screen looks like this:

But, if we were to travel back to the end of the medieval period, it would have looked quite different. Here's a reconstruction of the screen circa 1380 (based on microscopic particles of mediaeval paint discovered during restoration work in the 1980s). It looks strangely garish doesn't it?

Thanks to the Demolition Exeter blog for some of this content and images.

And here's another image taken from a Country Life article by Simon Jenkins. It shows a reconstruction of the image screen as it would have looked in 1480. Illustration by Stephen Conlin.

And, from the same article, here's Amiens Cathedral, France, coloured with lasers to show how it once looked.

It seems that antiquity was a far more colourful place than we might have thought.