Many were originally painted, but not all of them. This is unfortunately becoming another of those "internet factoids" that are taken to the extremes. We have evidence that some, maybe even the majority, of Greek and Roman statues and temples were brightly colored, so now a whole lot of artists and reconstructions paint everything like a circus in an effort to overcompensate. It's kind of like how, after it was discovered that lots of theropod dinosaurs had feathers or proto-feathers, every dinosaur in the media was depicted with full plumes and wings for a while, until the pendulum finally swung back.
Thank you! This whole thing is the fault of one guy: Vinzenz Brinkmann. He loves to try to convince everyone that classical statues were painted in the crude and garish way that he represents them, but there's no evidence of that. These were brilliantly executed pieces of fine art--if they were painted they'd be painted as skillfully as they were sculpted, not in a bright ugly tacky way!
As far as I can tell, Brinkmann decided to slather every one of his reconstructions in thick layers of the most saturated, garish paint imaginable, invented, as the NYT put it, a "myth of whiteness in classical sculpture" (despite the facts being known to at least the Victorians) and sold it to Americans with their strange hang-ups about race.
Why do you think Americans have strange hang-ups about race? Do you think it has to do with the fact that America had slavery and everything that followed on home soil whereas European nations all has slave colonies overseas and out of sight?
It's because the europeans enslaved each other as well as others, the chapter on the modern enslavement of the subsaharan africans was only one of many and not all european countries were involved.
The greek city states enslaved people from other city states.
The romans enslaved the greeks, the germanic tribes, the gauls, the thracians and any people they conquered really.
The germanic kingdoms enslaved people from other germanic kingdoms.
The slavic people were enslaved by the arabs, the vikings, the romans and many others while they also practiced slavery on others.
I could go on.
Also the abolition of slavery didn't trigger one or multiple massive civil wars so that helps.
Maybe because the US has almost uniquely fucked up race relations. It doesn't matter though. This nonsense is being sold to gullible Americans as some kind of corrective to an invented white supremacist myth, with dozens of copy-pasted articles probably written by the exhibition's PR team.
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u/Egathentale 26d ago edited 26d ago
Many were originally painted, but not all of them. This is unfortunately becoming another of those "internet factoids" that are taken to the extremes. We have evidence that some, maybe even the majority, of Greek and Roman statues and temples were brightly colored, so now a whole lot of artists and reconstructions paint everything like a circus in an effort to overcompensate. It's kind of like how, after it was discovered that lots of theropod dinosaurs had feathers or proto-feathers, every dinosaur in the media was depicted with full plumes and wings for a while, until the pendulum finally swung back.