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I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer

• johndhi 10mo ago
  Makes sense. This is basically how skilled painters of miniatures (Warhammer) do it.
  • orthoxerox 10mo ago
    Yeah, these reconstructions look like tournament-grade paintjobs.
• fsloth 10mo ago
  "many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject." Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades. I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts. A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand. Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
  • the_af 10mo ago
    > I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts. Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
    • fsloth 10mo ago
      With the horrible version of the statues? They just look ... bad. While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though. So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project. But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest. So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction. You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this. You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
      • the_af 10mo ago
        I'm not sure whether they look "bad" is enough justification. The author dismisses the possible explanation "maybe they didn't consider this bad style back then" without any real argument other than "there are other works of art with different styles". I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence? Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing. > You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
        • 10mo ago
• marginalia_nu 10mo ago
  Yeah, I've likewise always figured the reason these reconstructions ended up looking so awful is because paint is generally applied in layers (even to this day), so what they're likely reconstructing is the primer layer. Like we know from Roman frescoes[1] and mosaics[2] that they were pretty skilled painters and solving the problem of how to paint something to have more hues than a King's Quest 3 sprite is unlikely to be an unsolvable aesthetic problem. [edit] Changed from Secret of Monkey Island since that game has too many versions and remakes. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Chiron_instructs_young_Achilles_-_Ancient_Roman_fresco.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Chiron_i... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Academy_mosaic#/media/File:MANNapoli_124545_plato's_academy_mosaic.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Academy_mosaic#/medi...
• empath75 10mo ago
  Even a middling warhammer miniatures painter would have done a better job of painting these statues than the reconstructions.
  • mikkupikku 10mo ago
    Makes me wonder if they ever used the same sort of gimmicky paint, like paint with mica flakes to make something look metallic.
    • kijin 10mo ago
      They probably used whatever paint was closest in chemical composition to the residue they found on the statue.
      • mikkupikku 10mo ago
        You mean the primer? Why would they use their fancy paint for that?
    • hibikir 10mo ago
      They couldn't use the same paint, if just because for miniature painting we are almost always running acrylics, so it's all plastic binding the pigments. Even a modern oil paint is quite a bit more advanced than what they could do then. They also had a significant disadvantage in pigment availability. Chances are that there's a whole lot of modern, synthetic pigments among the colors you use regularly. Pyrrole Red is from 1974, for example. We know that painters were well aware of things like how many good, natural pigments get different outcomes when diluted (go see what happens as you thin ultramarine), so it's not as if they had no technoology. But something like mica vs aluminum vs just gold leaf is a budgetary issue, both today and back then. You will find that good metallics are more expensive and avoid mica. But for an important statue, I suspect they'd take fewer cost cutting shortcuts, just like we can tell in renaissance and medieval art that got to us in relatively good shape. This is the kind of thing some people spend their lives studying.
• ActivePattern 10mo ago
  I assume you didn't read the article, since that's their exact point... "Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence."
  • boxed 10mo ago
    Maybe it's the author of the article? :P
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• griffzhowl 10mo ago
  Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to the public
  • kijin 10mo ago
    The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.
    • RajT88 10mo ago
      We are not dinosaurs, so have rather less skin in the game when it comes to accuracy.
    • griffzhowl 10mo ago
      They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though. Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases. And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
      • bdr 10mo ago
        > Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.
• pantalaimon 10mo ago
  That's what TFA is saying > Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
• metalman 10mo ago
  looking at it from the absolute simplest of perspectives, money/time/effort, then the notion of a base, or primer layer that seals a surface and provides a non absorbant layer for the much more expensive coulor coat. primer bieng applied by aprentices and the finnish coat applied by specialists who would be very likely be useing ALL of the tricks of the trade to bring a statue to life, but then wejump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary, with everything from vegas type full primary coulors put on with a mop, and others that were master paintings done on 3d canvases, and still others who believd in.the purity of the "raw" sculpture
  • kijin 10mo ago
    > then we jump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary Most Greek and Roman statues had lost their paint long before the Renaissance. Early modern artists held up those paintless statues as the ideal form, which is why nobody from Michaelangelo to Bernini even tried to paint their sculptures. Instead, Bernini learned how to make marble itself interact with light to look alive. For centuries afterward, the purity of raw marble became the one true ideology. Diversity in this area collapsed, and took a long time to recover. Even today, most people who are used to Western classical art will probably agree that marble statues look better without paint. We've been conditioned for generations to believe so. The ugly reproductions of painted statues aren't helping, either.
• jerf 10mo ago
  This would be a great time to use AI, because it is very good at style transfer. Feed it a lot of contemporary painted art, feed it the base-coat version of the sculpture, and ask it to style-transfer the paintings on to the sculpture. You'd likely get something very close, and for once we can use "The computer said it, I'm not responsible for it!" for the power of good, by making it so no human is responsible for the heinous crime of assuming something without historical evidence (no matter how sensible the assumption is). (And lest someone be inclined to downvote because I'm suggesting an AI, the real sarcastic core of my message is about our faith in computers still being alive and well even after we all have decades of personal experience of them not being omniscient infalliable machines.)
• aylons 10mo ago
  The archaeologists know that and say as much in TFA: "The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas. How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original? This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’."
  • Jakob 10mo ago
    Contemporary historic preservation sees itself as the guardian of historical substance. The content of a monument is bound to the preservation of the inherited material. Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated. It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair. Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/ https://askastaffengineer.com/.
    • golemotron 10mo ago
      I'm in the conserving camp. It's more truthful than the narrativization that accompanies attempts to restore. We should remember that we all had a reptilian vision of dinosaurs for decades (centuries?) before the latest feathered view. We would have been better with neither. Just display the bones: what we have. Everything else burdens the public with guesses.
  • pqtyw 10mo ago
    > that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked Meaning that these "reconstructions" are a pretty pointless and have no real purpose.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• hibikir 10mo ago
  Not all painters, and not in all cases: See, for instance, grisalle painting. One can then sketch the highlights and shadows first, and then come in with pretty translucent pigments. When the pigment is what is expensive, it can be more economical. We know for sure many a renaissance painting and fresco was done this way, and some of us do it today. Now, was it possible that, given the pigments available, they were better off just going with the most saturated thing they could possibly have, and then work from there? Absolutely. But the right argument here isn't that "Painters layer paint this way", but that, as the article indicates, they are unlikely to be unsophisticated artists that don't believe shadows and highlights. So the highlighting and the shading must be in the place where we can't see, because we assume they must exist.
• BurningFrog 10mo ago
  Are there really no statues with surviving full paint remnants?
  • adgjlsfhk1 10mo ago
    No. 2000 years is a long time.
    • IAmBroom 10mo ago
      But you'd think at least some would be unearthed in Pompeii.
      • BurningFrog 10mo ago
        Most of Pompeii remains unexcavated, so there is still hope. Latest excavation: https://www.pbs.org/video/episode-1-eyvf5d/ https://www.pbs.org/video/episode-1-eyvf5d/ (Also on Apple TV)
  • bsder 10mo ago
    There aren't even that many of the original statues remaining. A lot of what survived are copies of the originals. So, we are extrapolating from a very, very, very spotty data set.
• philistine 10mo ago
  I will die on an adjacent hill: when the details had washed away with time leaving behind merely the sturdier and ugly base, people removed the garish base coat cause that thing is uuugggo! Our ancestors were thinking what we're thinking: It looks better white than with only a base.
  • IAmBroom 10mo ago
    Like spraypainting over graffitti with a drab color that doesn't match the original stone perfectly.
• twelvechairs 10mo ago
  The other side is lack of colourfast pigments back then. Underlayers would be cheap and colourfast. Top layers would usually be more expensive and deteriorate much more quickly.
  • IAmBroom 10mo ago
    Most colourfast pigments are minerals, and many of them are found in the natural world (purple hues being notoriously absent). Ultramarine, cadmium red, and lead white have been known since ancient times.
• alterom 10mo ago
  >This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject. The point the author made in the article is that the reconstructors are well aware of this, and are, in a way, trolling the masses to raise awareness and attract attention to the classical art and museums. Keeping history alive generally isn't a profitable enterprise.
• rayiner 10mo ago
  Thank you. I know nothing about painting, but I bought the original story about the statutes being painted these garish colors.
• justinator 10mo ago
  I have a degree in fine art painting and drawing and that's not correct for oil painting. We would first put on a layer of earth tones, and work from the shadows to the mid tones. Once you got the form correct, you would work on things like adding color, details, and highlights. In no way would you start with saturated colors. One, they're very expensive, so why would you apply them, just for most to be painted over? Secondly, the more saturated (strong) a color is, the harder it is to paint over. Try painting over a wall painted bright red with literally anything. Paint it over in blue and your blue turns brown. Paint it in yellow and you'll just get red again. That's why we (still) employ a very opaque, white paint to the canvas. Oil paint also becomes more transparent over time, so getting the form right with the earth tone underpainting is crucial for the painting to last hundreds of years. Perhaps you're thinking of fresco painting? Then, the pigments are added to the medium (plaster) initially, and only very subtle highlights are added afterwards (if at all). This is a very, very difficult technique, and illusions like highlight and shadow are hard to pull off. But the painting over was frowned upon, because it doesn't last nearly as long as the embedded pigment in the plaster (and certainly not after cleaning/restoration). But adding highlight/shadow to a sculpture seems like not the play, as the 3D-ness of a sculpture would imply it brings its own to the table. Makes more sense just to paint the sculptures the color you wanted them painted, like the (in comparison very contemporary) bust of Nefertiti in the article, which looks excellent. No need for highlight/shadow. I could only see that needed in the face, which would look and act much like makeup.
  • bethekidyouwant 10mo ago
    Romans didn’t have oil paints
    • IAmBroom 10mo ago
      That wasn't claimed.
  • felipeerias 10mo ago
    As the article points out, the more of the original color scheme that has survived, the better the reconstructions look. Example: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/New-Phototastic-Collage-1024x1024-1.webp https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/... The author suggests that this minimizes the opportunity for mischief, but tbqh it's likely that the ancients were simply much better artists than the people carrying out these reconstructions today. I'd love to see a modern artist attempt one of these reconstructions using original materials but with greater artistic freedom.
• Daub 10mo ago
  That is certainly how oil painters paint. But painting on absorbent stone is likely very different - more akin to fresco, and would probably not support a very layered approach.
• IAmBroom 10mo ago
  Agreed. Armor historians from the 1960s, all the way back to Victorian age, sat in their offices smoking pipes and imagining what purpose the armor served, and and what constraints molded it. Then the SCA and Renaissance Faires sprang up, and it was no longer purely theoretical. Recreationist research became a thing. And historical analysis became practical. The most glaring example are the rectangular epaulets on funereal brasses and sarcophagi. Historian used to claim they were used to deflect blows from the shoulder. Nothing is flat after a blow. All real armor is built on pressure-spreading arches, often first two-dimensionally, but ultimately in three dimensions (the armor over a 16th-century knight's legs are never conic sections, but more fluid curves). So, those rectangles? Not defensive metal, but purely decorative, and probably leather or paper-mache. (None survive, and in fact there's some argument they exist only in art.) Any historian who tried to make one and use it would learn this in a short exercise. But the fallacy survived for decades, because the people were operating outside of their area of expertise, while falsely claiming otherwise with no criticism. Another example is the still-pervasive myth that medieval people used spice to mask the flavor of spoiled meat; I've heard it used by academics a couple decades ago at a conference presentation. Ever eaten spoiled meat? Ever think to yourself, this bellyache wouldn't be so bad if I didn't taste the source of my poisoning? That myth was tracked back to a singular author in the 1950s, IIRC, and copied without any rational criticism ever since.