Garish, Gaudy, Goofy: Seeing Double from Metropolitan Museum’s “Chroma” Clones of Ancient Statues

Ever since I learned that ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were originally cloaked in color (not in shades of ivory and beige, as they appear today in their faded state), I’ve been curious to learn more. Disappointingly, the Metropolitan Museum’s new exhibition exploring “polychromy”—the use of color in ancient art—left me longing for less.

The tempting description (below) in the Met’s press release lured me out of my Covid-phobic isolation and induced me to attend the recent press preview of Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color (to Mar. 26):

“Chroma” emphasizes the extensive presence and role of polychromy in ancient Mediterranean sculpture, both broadly and across media, geographies, and time periods, from Cycladic idols of the third millennium B.C. to Imperial Roman portraiture of the second century, as witnessed throughout the Museum’s collection and illustrated with 40 artworks in the permanent galleries on the first floor of the Museum. [Another 22 Met works are examined from the standpoint of polychromy in the Greek and Roman special exhibition gallery on the mezzanine level.]

Fourteen reconstructions of Greek and Roman sculpture by Dr. [Vinzenz] Brinkmann [Head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection in Frankfurt am Main] and his team [including his wife, Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, an archaeologist] highlight advanced scientific techniques used to identify original surface treatments. These full-size physical reconstructions will be juxtaposed with comparable original works of art throughout the Met’s Greek and Roman Art Galleries, provoking visitors to rethink how the Greek and Roman sculptures originally looked in antiquity [emphasis added]. 

I was indeed “provoked,” but not in the way that show’s organizers had hoped: The juxtapositions of the genuine and the “reconstructed” caused me to recoil in dismay and disbelief: I couldn’t accept the claim that these garish, gaudy (sometimes goofy) 21st-century creations approximate how these sculptures had “originally looked in antiquity.”

MORE ON THIS HERE.

Here’s one that I found particularly unconvincing, notwithstanding the detailed descriptions on its label of how its intricate patterns and discordant colors had been scientifically determined:

According to this archer’s label:

The archer from a Greek temple pediment wears trousers with an intricate zigzag design, a long-sleeve pullover with a diamond pattern, and a vest decorated with lions and griffins. The patterns are visible in ultraviolet-induced luminescence and raking light on the original marble sculpture. The color values for the reconstruction were determined through comparative study of the technical photography, the well-preserved color on a statue of a Persian rider from the Athenian Acropolis, and the surviving pigments on other fragments from the same pediment.

The website for the precursor to the Met’s current exhibition—the Brinkmanns’ The Gods in Color, a show that traveled internationally (but was not pegged to the Met’s objects)—is more forthright about the shortcomings of this kind of scientific analysis:

Very few pigments survive on the archer. We cannot always determine the extent to which these may have changed over the course of the centuries. Hence, any color reconstruction is only an approximation of the original appearance.

After taking so many liberties in reconstruction and reinterpretation, couldn’t they at least have restored the hapless archer’s amputated toes?

More importantly: How did the Met get involved in this questionable project?

As it happens, the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection (home to the Brinkmanns’ “reconstructions”), along with the Städel Museum and the Schirn Kunsthalle (all in Frankfurt), was directed for 10 years (until 2016) by the Met’s current director, Max Hollein, who left Germany to become director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and then moved to the Met. “The Gods in Color” was shown at FAMSF from October 2017 to January 2018, under Max’s directorship.

Hollein is now providing a highly prestigious showcase for the work of his former Frankfurt colleagues—Brinkmann and his wife, who have been studying polychromy in ancient sculpture for more than 40 years. Ulrike’s marital connection to Vinzenz isn’t mentioned in the wall text, nor in the press release, for the current show, but is briefly mentioned in the video (embedded at the end of this post), that is looped in the exhibition’s focus gallery. While the show does a significant service to the Brinkmanns and their museum, it does a disservice (in my view) to the Met’s deeply knowledgeable experts and its outstanding collection.

Below are the Brinkmanns, posing at the Met beside their take on what the marble funerary statue of Phrasikleia might have looked like at the time of its creation. (The original, ca. 540 B.C., resides in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.)

Another bit of Brinkmannship—a newly created, tarted-up version of an Archaic Greek sculpture of a sphinx from the Met’s collection—has now become the museum’s (temporary) signature image:

Below is the Brinkmanns’ 21st-century re-do of the Met collection’s original (ca. 530 B.C.), which is now having its first public showing at the Met:

And here’s the original sculpture (much less flashy, but more seriously engrossing), as installed near its 21st-century descendant. At the show’s press preview, this sphinx was described by Seán Hemingway, the Met’s long-time curator in charge of Greek and Roman art, as “one of the Met’s great masterpieces from our collection of the Archaic Period.” (The black rectangle, seen on the left, below the sphinx’s tail, is an object label.)

A detailed label text describing the process of this sculpture’s “reconstruction” gives some sense of the heroic efforts made to come up with a credible approximation of the original appearance of this ancient mythical creature:

While almost all the original colors have been preserved on the sphinx [albeit in tiny fragments], the gilding was chosen for the reconstruction based on the complete lack of pigment in those areas, signs of mounting (a small groove), and the study of numerous comparative objects. To create the reconstruction, the original was digitally captured and printed in polymethyl methacrylate. The pigments and binders used, which render the ancient color hues, were applied to a fine layer of marble stucco. The color areas in the diadem and the wings, painted with golden yellow ocher and vermilion, were polished with an agate stone.

Fair enough. But visitors are led to believe, by implication, that these “reconstructions”—scattered among authentic ancient Greek and Roman objects in the Met’s permanent collection galleries—represent “what these statues ACTUALLY looked like,” as described by Jennifer Vanasco, an editor on the NPR‘s Culture Desk, in her segment about the Met’s show. “They’re painted in garish colors with multiple patterns.”

“Garish” they certainly are. But we can only hope that this is not “what these statues ACTUALLY looked like.” I know it’s “wrong” to think of classical sculpture as being all-white, as they have come down to us. But are the Brinkmann colorizations “right”?

In conversation with me at the press preview, Hemingway, the Met curator, acknowledged that “there’s something about a reproduction of a masterpiece that doesn’t quite meet expectations when you’ve seen the original. When you’ve experienced the original, and then you see a reproduction like that [a “reconstructed” version], it’s [struggles to find the right word]…it’s jarring!”

At the press preview, I confided my misgivings about the modern enhancements of ancient sculptures to Federico Carǒ, the Met’s research scientist, and Elena Basso, its associate research scientist, both of whom worked on the “Chroma” show.

Below is my Q&A with them (edited for clarity and brevity):

Rosenbaum: How do you decide what these things really looked like, after they have faded and come into the open air after being buried? How do you make that judgment call?

Carǒ: That’s a tough one. What we do is provide information about what kinds of pigments or mixture of pigments are there, but we can’t really say how it originally really looked like. We know some things tend to degrade and fade with time, but still, it’s really difficult, from what is mapped now, to fully understand how they were. As scientists, we provide objective information and then it’s a cooperation with art historians and archeologists to come up with a possible interpretation.

Rosenbaum: It’s all very speculative?

Carǒ: Yes.

Basso: Other factors include the mixture of the pigment with a binder, and we don’t know what that binder was. So we cannot say what the original color looked like. We have just a rough idea. It’s an interpretation of what the actual color could be.

Carǒ: We know that certain pigments were there. And we know what those pigments look like when they are freshly ground. But there are a lot of nuances that would affect the final rendering: how much pigment was there, how it’s mixed, how much binder they mixed it with.

Speaking of uncertainties, here’s an implausible guess (on the object label) of who that archer actually is:

“He may represent the mythical Trojan prince Paris, who abducted Helen and thus caused the Trojan War.”

Really?!? (Where’s Menelaus when we really need him?)

Enough (for now) of my skepticism about the Brinkmanns’ reconstructions and the narratives that they’ve attached to them. For the official view, let’s go to the trailer for the exhibition. Since this is a Met production, I would have liked to have heard some of the museum’s own experts weighing in on this show, its findings and its scholarship. (Speaking of which: There’s no catalogue.)

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