Posted on 08/20/2010 12:31:24 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
Original Greek statues were brightly painted, but after thousands of years, those paints have worn away. Find out how shining a light on the statues can be that's required to see them the way they were thousands of years ago.
Although it seems impossible to think that anything could be left to discover after thousands of years of wind, sun, sand, and art students, finding the long lost patterns on a piece of ancient Greek sculpture can be as easy as shining a lamp on it. A technique called ‘raking light' has been used to analyze art for a long time. A lamp is positioned carefully enough that the path of the light is almost parallel to the surface of the object. When used on paintings, this makes brushstrokes, grit, and dust obvious. On statues, the effect is more subtle. Brush-strokes are impossible to see, but because different paints wear off at different rates, the stone is raised in some places – protected from erosion by its cap of paint – and lowered in others. Elaborate patterns become visible.
Ultraviolet is also used to discern patterns. UV light makes many organic compounds fluoresce. Art dealers use UV lights to check if art has been touched up, since older paints have a lot of organic compounds and modern paints have relatively little. On ancient Greek statues, tiny fragments of pigment still left on the surface glow bright, illuminating more detailed patterns.
Once the pattern is mapped, there is still the problem of figuring out which paint colors to use. A series of dark blues will create a very different effect than gold and pink. Even if enough pigment is left over so that the naked eye can make out a color, a few thousand years can really change a statue's complexion. There's no reason to think that color seen today would be anything like the hues the statues were originally painted.
There is a way around this dilemma. The colors may fade over time, but the original materials – plant and animal-derived pigments, crushed stones or shells – still look the same today as they did thousands of years ago. This can also be discovered using light.
Infrared and X-ray spectroscopy can help researches understand what the paints are made of, and how they looked all that time ago. Spectroscopy relies on the fact that atoms are picky when it comes to what kind of incoming energy they absorb. Certain materials will only accept certain wavelengths of light. Everything else they reflect. Spectroscopes send out a variety of wavelengths, like scouts into a foreign land. Inevitably, a few of these scouts do not come back. By noting which wavelengths are absorbed, scientists can determine what materials the substance is made of. Infrared helps determine organic compounds. X-rays, because of their higher energy level, don't stop for anything less than the heavier elements, like rocks and minerals. Together, researchers can determine approximately what color a millennia-old statue was painted.
The color? Always something tacky.
Via Harvard, Colour Lovers, Tate, The Smithsonian, Colorado University, and Carleton.
Top two images are reconstructions created by Vinzenz Brinkmann.
The British were at times destructive, for sure, Civ. When they found the upper relieving chambers in the Great Pyramid they wrote graffiti on the walls to commemorate themselves.
gnip
They added to it anyway. :’) There’s an ancient painted graffito in one of those relieving chambers (come to think of it, we’re probably lucky no one relieved themselves in those) — “how mighty is the great white crown of Khufu (work) gang”.
Awesome flick. Harryhuasen!!!
Freegards
LOLLLLLLLLLL
And without the eyes colored in. It makes them seem mysterious and timeless, above those looking at them.
I agree, the painted ones look like cheap plastic figures.
Excellent post. I was reading other information about this recently. Thanks. BTTT.
Regardless, it is a :must see" while in Los Angeles:
Actually, no!
Blue was the color of the sea and the sky and purple was something quite apart from that.
Purple was a very important color to ancient Greeks. Very expensive...so much so it was affordable only to royalty and the very wealthy!
The very fact that the color purple signifies royalty today is due to its importance in ancient Greece.
Tyrian purple, mentioned in texts dating about 1600 BC, produced from the mucus of the hypobranchial gland of various species of marine molluscs, notably Murex, was literally worth its weight in silver.
Durable dyes for clothing were not abundant.
Dyes were most likely poor and not extremely durable.
Archaeologists have concluded that brilliant color was, because of the difficulty of its achievement, an element of status and wealth.
Color was quite important in ancient Greece and the language of the time, like any language of a complex people, was in no way crude and was clearly expressive of what was felt and sensed.
As important as color was and a descriptive as the language was, there are still some curious points of difference in the way the ancient Greeks perceived color.
Here is a link to a site sponsor by Bryn Mawr College on this subject...Ancient Greek Color Vision.
Here is an interest quote from that site (note that the comment on linguistic relativity--to come back to your mention of language--indicates that language is limited to what one is conscious of perceiving and experiencing) [emphasis added]...
This correlation between Homer and other Ancient Greeks on the subject of color vision suggests some questions about Ancient Greek color vision leading to ideas inquiring into the ability of the Ancient Greek eye to perceive color at all.It is possible, in light of evolutionary theory, that the retina of the Ancient Greek was not evolved to the point of full color perception. Different mammals have varying degrees of color vision and eyes are especially prone to mutation. But besides this evolutionary question there is the question of consciousness, the question of the brain and language in relation to color perception.
This color vision particularity could have been caused by a lack of visual consciousness that would lead to the creation of new words that were needed to explain a visual phenomenon. This inability to perceive something because of linguistic restriction is called linguistic relativity (7).
Because the Ancient Greeks were not really conscious of seeing, and did not have the words to describe what they unconsciously saw, they simply did not see the full spectrum of color, they were limited by linguistic relativity.
Julian Jaynes (Princeton psychologist/lecturer/scientist, died 1997) concluded from an extensive study of ancient texts (including the works of Homer, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Bible) that ancient man was not conscious the way modern man is.
Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind posits that man wasn't conscious at all until about 3,000 years ago and that the development of human consciousness can be traced quite clearly in ancient literature/texts/codices. [Also see the Julian Jaynes Society site for more discussion of this matter].
Here's a review of Jaynes work (there are many others at the Jaynes Society site)...
"Neuroimaging techniques of today have illuminated and confirmed the importance of Jaynes' hypothesis." − Robert Olin, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus in Preventive Medicine [Karolinska Institute, Sweden], in Lancet.
Here is the authr’s name (it is hard to find): Esther Inglis-Arkell
That sounds cool.
A bunch of wagon loads of straw will hide that slate roof, ala Jane Austen's house.
To be true 1500 though, you'll probably need to dump at least one layer of straw on your floors and introduce a few mice and rats into that straw.
I remember that graffito. Hawass cites that in support of his theory that the workers were not slaves.
I’m pretty sure that a brightly colored clown shooting an arrow would be tacky no matter your background.
I read somewhere that the wealthy Saudi princes who moved into the Beverly Hills mansions scandalized the neighbors by painting the garden statuary in flesh tones. Perhaps they were just being historically accurate and we didn't know it yet.
The Egyptian funerary portraits (painted in encaustic) are also very colorful.
Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits in Roman Egypt
This lady is wearing a beautiful shawl in a color a modern artist might describe as cobalt violet (was murex shell originally used?).
I saw that movie
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