“Don” Mary Beard
It’s not just because she said such nice things about CultureGrrl for the BBC, or even because her blog’s title includes my husband’s first name.
Anyone who can write such a learned, lively post about the recent exhibition, Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity at Harvard’s Sackler Museum, and then attract no less than 48 incredibly erudite readers’ comments gets my enthusiastic thumbs-up. Those profs sure are interactive!
Mary Beard, the eponymous blogging “don”—a Cambridge professor of classics and the classics editor of the London Times Literary Supplement—writes this of the Sackler’s show of colorized copies (organized by the Stiftung Archäologie and the Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich):
It’s a great, garish multi-colour spectacular. My question is quite how far you believe the details. Does the colouring of ancient statuary really mean this kind of bright, in-your-face, dazzle? Or, to put it another way: If you are not entirely convinced by the gaudy blues and yellows, are you simply guilty of a romantic view of ancient sculpture that wants it all white?
…I may be an old romantic, but I am still a bit suspicious.
I’d very much like to plagiarize Beard’s self-description—“a wickedly subversive commentator.”