A Cultural History of Color in Antiquity by David Wharton

Author:David Wharton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER EIGHT

Art

MARK B. ABBE

Art in the ancient Mediterranean was defined by a wide range of colorful paintings and multiple polychrome materials. Although the importance of color on Egyptian and (to a lesser extent) Near Eastern art has long been manifest and accepted, the vivid, nuanced, and often lifelike colors and sumptuous materials of Greek and Roman art continue to astonish our common inherited notions of a “classical” art as allegedly defined by pure marble-white sculpture, and a subdued earth-toned palette of painting as predominately evident in painted pottery.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the importance of color in Greek and Roman art and visual culture has rapidly emerged in both archaeological study and historical interpretation.1 New forms of examination conducted at the microscopic level, technical imaging, and scientific analysis now regularly reveal and characterize previously hidden remains of color and allow us to see beneath the surfaces of artworks to intimately glimpse the ancient processes of painting, gilding, and other forms of coloration. Significant evidence of color continues to be discovered both in objects in old museum collections and on new archaeological finds. Many challenges remain, most often due to the fragmentary and deteriorated condition of many forms of ancient coloration. We currently have only a limited understanding of the diverse range of binding media artfully employed in painting, the many ways in which bronze sculpture was patinated, and of the varnishes, waxes, and other protective coatings that were central to the final visual appearances of much polychromy. An acute challenge in current research is thus how to bridge the often microscopic scale and deteriorated condition of the evidence to postulate accurately the original appearance produced by such coloration in antiquity at the visual (macro) scale.

Color remains something of a missing visual language in our histories of classical art. At present, there is no general synthetic history of color in Greek and Roman art or visual culture. The emerging picture from recent research is one of increasing diversity of color that significantly expands our traditional art historical narratives (while reframing some of their familiar assumptions). We should not seek to impose a single or fundamentally unified history for color across antiquity. The richness and variety of coloration in different forms of ancient art is better understood as displaying multiple highly flexible and fluid languages of color that were often materially informed and contextually employed across a wide range of different historical and cultural environments. In an individual work, many of the specific aesthetic, economic, and cultural meanings of color were defined by the immediate context of its display and in turn framed the work’s cultural reception.

This essay, arranged chronologically and necessarily selective, aims to highlight key and broad chromatic shifts in the arts of painting and sculpture during classical antiquity. It also seeks to highlight how the history of these two art forms—frequently privileged in ancient Greek and Roman notions of visual culture—were often intimately interrelated, despite being often separated (if not viewed as conflicting) in histories of ancient art since the sixteenth century.

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