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Pretty cool screen shot from a link in Komet's post
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Oct 16, 2012 15:03
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We're born and raised looking at these statues and ruins of temples that I think it's hard to imagine what they looked like painted.
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Oct 16, 2012 15:06
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Yeah, it's still weird even to me to look at Roman sculptures and think that virtually all of them were painted. Usually garishly, too.
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Oct 16, 2012 15:43
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They really do look more impressive without colors, at least in my opinion. Left: World spanning empire, those who came before us, sophistication thousands of years past, civilization Right: Some tacky porcelain statue my grandma bought at a yard sale
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Oct 16, 2012 16:37
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Case in point.
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Oct 16, 2012 16:38
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DarkCrawler posted:They really do look more impressive without colors, at least in my opinion. I think you are bringing your own 2012 assumptions and ideas into the "Left" observation. Is that what someone in 25 CE think?
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Oct 16, 2012 16:40
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euphronius posted:I think you are bringing your own 2012 assumptions and ideas into the "Left" observation. Is that what someone in 25 CE think? No, that's what I think. I'm sure people in 25 CE thought that colors were the poo poo, but all that marble is just so much more...dignified.
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Oct 16, 2012 16:47
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DarkCrawler posted:No, that's what I think. I'm sure people in 25 CE thought that colors were the poo poo, but all that marble is just so much more...dignified. It's dignified specifically because for the longest time we figures that was what the Romans did. Hence all the US government buildings and capitals. Now that we know the Romans painted everything garishly and wrote dick joke graffiti they don't meet the definition of dignity we adopted from their idealized existence. Reality is always the most unrealistic!
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Oct 16, 2012 21:25
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Did the medieval Romans also paint their statues in garish colors and write graffiti everywhere? I really want to know what Byzantine dick jokes were like. Also, what did Romans refer to themselves and their country as in their native language? I guess the answers would be different for the Latin and Greek periods.
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Oct 16, 2012 21:33
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Romani (singular Romanus), Roma, Latina. Greek for "Rome" is Ῥωμὴ ("rho-may"), for "Romans" Ῥωμανοὶ ("Rho-mah-noy"). Can't think if I've ever seen "Latin" written in Greek though it must have been.
Eggplant Wizard fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Oct 16, 2012 |
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Oct 16, 2012 21:54
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My question now is, did the statues really have that particular shade of red or blue or yellow? Did it really look that horrendous to our modern sensibilities? I remember reading somewhere that there was an organised effort back in the 19th century or so to strip the paint off the statues. How true was this? I know Pompeii was painted, did their statues look like that? I suspect that the reason we like minimalism these days is because bright colours and tones are cheap in this modern society. They probably weren't back in those days, and they'd probably want to flaunt it.
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Oct 16, 2012 22:39
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The big difference to me is the unpainted statues let you see the raw stone. That poo poo was carved by hand with basic tools out of a goddamn rock and it looks solid and drat impressive. Covered in paint, it looks like an oversized cheap plastic kids' toy that could have been stamped out by the thousands in a factory somewhere.
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Oct 16, 2012 23:22
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karl fungus posted:Did the medieval Romans also paint their statues in garish colors and write graffiti everywhere? Oh yeah. Eastern Roman decoration is every bit as eye watering. Phobophilia posted:My question now is, did the statues really have that particular shade of red or blue or yellow? Did it really look that horrendous to our modern sensibilities? I remember reading somewhere that there was an organised effort back in the 19th century or so to strip the paint off the statues. How true was this? I know Pompeii was painted, did their statues look like that? The shades are reconstructed from analyzing the bits of paint left on the statue (not visible but with SCIENCE! you can find it) and the dyes available at the time. Those reconstructions are probably accurate. I've never heard of any paint stripping, a lot of Pompeii frescoes were lost but that was because they were exposed to rain and melted away. Painting was standard everywhere. Phobophilia posted:I suspect that the reason we like minimalism these days is because bright colours and tones are cheap in this modern society. They probably weren't back in those days, and they'd probably want to flaunt it. This is a large part of it, yes. They also evidently thought it was good looking. Tastes change. Choadmaster posted:Covered in paint, it looks like an oversized cheap plastic kids' toy that could have been stamped out by the thousands in a factory somewhere. Ah, but many Roman sculptures were stamped out by the thousand in factories. By hand, but still mass produced from template.
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Oct 16, 2012 23:25
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Phobophilia posted:My question now is, did the statues really have that particular shade of red or blue or yellow? Did it really look that horrendous to our modern sensibilities? I remember reading somewhere that there was an organised effort back in the 19th century or so to strip the paint off the statues. How true was this? I know Pompeii was painted, did their statues look like that? "Organized effort" might be overstating the case a little bit, but archaeologists did tend to assume that the things weren't supposed to be painted, and so they tried to remove the paint. But I'd venture that thousands of years of the elements (and industrial pollution, in modern times) contributed more to the fading than any archaeologist. Things that fell into museum curators' hands tended to get the worst of the human treatment, since in the field all a meddling archaeologist could really do is get a rag and some water and scrub, but in the confines of a museum they could break out things like steel wool or chisels to scrape it off. In defense of painting statues and buildings, it really does help make the details more apparent, especially when there's intricate carvings in a place nobody would ever see up close. (For example, the pediments and metopes on the Parthenon.) The ancients didn't really have mood lighting, so they used what they had.
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Oct 16, 2012 23:44
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Also, I imagine coloring them was a display of wealth: fancy colors were poo poo expensive and drowning those bad boys in paint served the same purpose as bling.
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Oct 16, 2012 23:48
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I hope Agesilaus has an apoplectic fit every time he sees the retouched statues!
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Oct 17, 2012 04:57
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Grand Fromage posted:Ah, but many Roman sculptures were stamped out by the thousand in factories. By hand, but still mass produced from template. Interesting! What was the quality of this stuff like? Was it mostly small stuff or were life-size sculptures reproduced in large numbers too?
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Oct 17, 2012 05:30
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Choadmaster posted:Interesting! What was the quality of this stuff like? Was it mostly small stuff or were life-size sculptures reproduced in large numbers too? Everything. Many/most of the sculptures we have are copies from these mass production shops. Some were more common than others--this is why we have like a thousand copies of the Diskobolus of Myron, it was evidently very popular. A lot of things like sarcophagi were made from template books. They'd customize it but you'll find ten that are almost identical except the central figure is whoever died. Same with other types of statue, the face will be changed or whatever.
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Oct 17, 2012 05:34
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This is actually a practice that has continued to this day. Popular school mascot statues (for example my high school had a generic Spartan Warrior statue out front). It's most noticeable if you go to Civil War cemeteries - the bodies/horses of the statues are all the same template, while the head is sculpted specifically.
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Oct 17, 2012 05:52
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Just how do you sculpt from a template? A reference, I can understand, but an actual template? You need someone to physically chisel away every bit of stone. It's not like casting, where you can have a master and cast from that. Still, being a sculptor or an artisan was probably a sweet gig back in those days.
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Oct 17, 2012 06:07
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They had drawings and instructions. I think for some reliefs you could probably trace it onto the stone and carve that way, I don't know all the specifics though. At the least you'd be copying an image. I always kind of picture them as ancient Ikea directions.
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Oct 17, 2012 06:10
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Grand Fromage posted:I always kind of picture them as ancient Ikea directions. The kit is always missing at least one tiny but vitally important part. And thus you solve the mystery of the frequently missing penis.
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Oct 17, 2012 07:43
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Choadmaster posted:The kit is always missing at least one tiny but vitally important part. And thus you solve the mystery of the frequently missing penis. Wasn't that because of the Counter-Reformation? 
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Oct 17, 2012 07:46
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Things that stick out tend to break off. But yeah a lot were chipped off by church authorities who didn't want dicks around. They also stuck on the fig leaves, those weren't a classical thing.
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Oct 17, 2012 08:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Things that stick out tend to break off. Obligatory. And for some content: Since mass production of stuff was apparently common, had anyone figured out standardized/interchangeable parts? And/or assembly lines? (If so these concepts were something that were obviously forgotten somewhere along the way.)
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Oct 17, 2012 09:57
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I'm not sure. They did have primitive factories, some making foodstuffs and some that churned out military equipment. They might've had something along the same lines but I doubt it was advanced, if it existed at all.
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Oct 17, 2012 10:12
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There were standardized sizes of pottery and gigantic pottery factories that probably incorporated some elements of what we consider assembly line production.
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Oct 17, 2012 13:39
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re: paint. Bear in mind that the reconstructions of what a painted statue would look like are what they'd look like on day 1. Ancient dyes would come from minerals and plants, not chemicals, and I imagine that within a very short period of time they'd fade to colors somewhat less garish by our standards.
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Oct 17, 2012 13:43
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Choadmaster posted:And for some content: Since mass production of stuff was apparently common, had anyone figured out standardized/interchangeable parts? And/or assembly lines? (If so these concepts were something that were obviously forgotten somewhere along the way.) Oh yes, they did. This is actually quite a new discovery, where new things in the classics are defined as anything we didn't know a hundred years ago. I've got the dates and specifics somewhere, but in general here's the story: The First Punic War was a primarily naval war. The Romans, having decided to fight Carthage at sea, needed to build a fleet. Now an ancient source bragged that Rome had assembled a fleet in so short a time, using Carthaginians methods, that historians always assumed it was nonsense. It was assumed that no one could have built a fleet so quickly, especially people with little experience in sailing. A couple decades ago, someone lucked on to a discovery of two Carthaginian craft off the coast of Sicily (?). The wreckage showed something astonishing: that the keel and ribs of the craft were individually marked with letters and numbers, in places where they were joined together. The conclusion is now that the Carthaginians were running an assembly line. Raw materials were cut and marked, shipped, and assembled elsewhere, all according to written specifics. Mass production using semi-educated labor, the exact system we have used to mass produce our own vehicles of high technical specification, but really needing only a handful of designers to understand how they work. The Roman boast of having constructed so great a fleet now became plausible. This is all incredibly general on my part, I'll try to find the exact information if anyone cares. But the general trend now is to acknowledge that Romans grasped the economy of scale and mass production concepts nearly two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution. And that they learned it from Carthage.
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Oct 17, 2012 13:58
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Oh yeah, I suppose that would qualify. A lot of things were standardized--most military equipment post-Marius, pots as mentioned, ship parts--and produced in large quantities. Legionary field camps were probably the first prefab structures, the major parts were built and transported with the army so the whole structure could be thrown up so rapidly the army camped in a fort every night. Some siege equipment was prefabricated too. When the Romans started building ships they did just take a wrecked Carthaginian one and copy it a thousand times. Romans didn't mechanize it (except for mills) but they definitely had mass production.
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Oct 17, 2012 14:06
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Carthage.  Man, I wonder what the world would be like today if they had won. We'd speak some wierd-rear end languages, that's for sure.
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Oct 17, 2012 15:38
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I assume they painted the big stone buildings too, right?
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Oct 17, 2012 15:47
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Retarded Pimp posted:Some guys think they found where Caesar was stabbed. I thought it's been known for years and years the exact place where he was stabbed. What makes this story so newsworthy?
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Oct 17, 2012 16:46
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bean_shadow posted:I thought it's been known for years and years the exact place where he was stabbed. What makes this story so newsworthy? I didn't know, so I'd thought I'd post it to see if anyone knew anything about it.
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Oct 18, 2012 11:03
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We knew it was on the theater steps but not an exact location. Buildings were usually painted, yes. Sometimes they even built columns with bricks and covered with plaster, then painted them to look like marble.
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Oct 18, 2012 11:06
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Phobophilia posted:My question now is, did the statues really have that particular shade of red or blue or yellow? Did it really look that horrendous to our modern sensibilities? I remember reading somewhere that there was an organised effort back in the 19th century or so to strip the paint off the statues. How true was this? I know Pompeii was painted, did their statues look like that? I'm not sure if you're getting this confused with the restoration efforts of the old masters that went on in the 19th century. Basically the Victorians managed to figure out they could restore renaissance and earlier paintings to their original glory and discovered that the staid, venerable old Masters had actually used ridiculously bright and garish pigments. The Victorians not being ones for bright gaiety took a society wide vow to never speak of this again as accepting that all these venerated people had like colourful things would result in the collapse of civil society 
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Oct 18, 2012 12:55
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A daily trivia email I subscribe to published this today. About the multicolored statues in Ancient Greece and Rome.
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Oct 18, 2012 18:52
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Can anybody talk about the decline of Latin in the Eastern Roman Empire? I mean, I know the broad strokes of it (Greek was always spoken throughout the entire Roman Empire even though Latin was the language of administration and government, Justinian was the last native Latin speaker to reign as Emperor, etc.) but I'd still like to know more. Were there still native Latin-speaking populations after Justinian? Was Latin still used in some contexts like it was in medieval Western Europe? What about the Exarchate of Ravenna?
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Oct 19, 2012 23:07
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From what I know, it was just a natural thing. As you said, Latin was never the common language of the east. After the Latin speaking part of the empire had been lost, eventually the upper classes just got realistic and stopped maintaining this useless language instead of speaking Greek all the time. As for how it was continued to be used, I don't know. Speculation: There were Latin speakers who moved east, but they would've assimilated and switched to Greek. Latin was still the language of many written materials and served as an international language (of the educated) through the Middle Ages, so the educated class would've continued learning both. Sort of the reverse of the old situation with Latin as your main language but educated people also knowing Greek--I'd bet most scholars continued to learn Latin, but they just didn't use it in everyday life. Ravenna probably spoke some proto-Italian branch of Latin.
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Oct 20, 2012 09:15
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DarkCrawler posted:They really do look more impressive without colors, at least in my opinion. Nah you're putting the cart before the horse. The statue on the left is sophisticated and grandiose because it's Roman, and that's what we associate with Rome. If we had found those statues painted in the first place we'd probably think the same things about them. Also the national mall in Washington DC would be a lot more colourful.
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Oct 20, 2012 10:17
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