This past spring,
Sarah Bond found herself at the center of an unexpected controversy.
Sarah is a classicist—
a profession that doesn’t really attract conflict,
especially about race.
This particular controversy, weirdly enough,
was about an article she wrote
on ancient statues and something called “polychromy.”
— White marble statues are what you normally see when you go into any museum today.
They’re really what is mostly presented to the public,
either in movies or in video games or in museums.
But we know, particularly from a lot of digital technology,
that polychromy was something that was quite common.
— “Polychromy” is an academic term that just means “lots of paint.”
Over the past 30 or so years,
scientific and imaging advances have made it possible to know that this archer,
sculpted around 500 BCE,
actually looked like this.
Sarah’s argument was about skin color.
Paintings from ancient Rome and Greece
show a wide variety of skintones that reflected multi-ethnic society.
So why are these statues always presented in bare marble?
— The belief that Romans are white people is something that’s widespread.
Julius Caesar often gets depicted as a pretty white guy,
when in fact he probably had a much darker, Mediterranean skintone.
— The image of these ancient societies as mostly white
can be traced back to an 18th-century scholar named Johann Winckelmann,
who was fixated on the purity of white marble.
— There is no monolithic skintone or the entirety of the Mediterranean.
You have people that are from North Africa,
people from what is modern day Nigeria and Ethiopia,
that are intermixed.
— For centuries, nobody questioned any of this.
And now, the work of figuring out what these statues actually looked like
fall to people like Rachel Sabino,
a conservator at the Art Institute of Chicago.
— This pigment in here we analyzed,
and it is red lead so we know certainly
that this whole sweep of drapery was more than likely a maroon-y color.
As for the skintones,
that’s always the question because those are some of the more fugitive types of pigments.
They don’t last the longest.
We’re not always sure if they were meant to be somewhat ephemeral-looking,
or if they were meant to be these flat monochromes.
— To Sarah,
the paint on these statues challenges the belief
that the Western world was built by white emperors, white scribes,
and white artisans who created white statues.
— What you’re describing is this normalization of white marble.
What effect do you think that’s had
in terms of building out standards of beauty in the Western world?
— So I think that Western civilization is itself a cultural construction,
something that has been reused
to argue for the superiority of Europeans and for Western civilization,
and thus to connect the U.S. to Europe in this cultural heritage.
— Sarah and a growing number of classicists believe
that polychrome statues should come with some cards, displays or even overlaid projection
that would show how they originally looked.
— There’s resistance to any sort of alteration,
and something that’s been perceived as an art historical standard—
even in the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
So there are gonna be people who are attached to the idea that these things were white.
— It’s something that was transmitted to us because paint gets rubbed away.
But at the same time,
it’s not something that is a reality.
It’s a fiction that we really like telling ourselves.