The equation of white marble with beauty
Earlier this month, Bond published an article in the online arts publication Hyperallergic saying that research shows ancient Western artifacts were painted in different colors but have, over time, faded to their base light marble color — giving the false impression that white skin was the classical ideal.
Uh oh. We know where this is going.
“Modern technology has revealed an irrefutable, if unpopular, truth: many of the statues, reliefs and sarcophagi created in the ancient Western world were in fact painted,” she wrote. “Marble was a precious material for Greco-Roman artisans, but it was considered a canvas, not the finished product for sculpture. It was carefully selected and then often painted in gold, red, green, black, white and brown, among other colors.”
While today’s scholars have accepted this as fact, she said, the general public is another story. Part of the problem is that most museums and art history textbooks continue to contain “a predominantly neon white display of skin tone when it comes to classical statues and sarcophagi.”
The “assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region,” she continued. “The Romans, in fact, did not define people as ‘white’; where, then, did this notion of race come from? … The equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe.”
Bond suggests this misunderstanding has perpetuated or been used to support racism over time, saying that “how it continues to influence white supremacist ideas today [is] often ignored.” Groups such as Identity Europa, for example, use classical statuary “as a symbol of white male superiority,” she added. “It may have taken just one classical statue to influence the false construction of race, but it will take many of us to tear it down.”
Unpossible. There’s no such thing. What we see and hear has no influence whatsoever on what we think. Our thoughts come directly from God, or from the energy of the cosmos if that’s what you prefer to call it – but in no case do they come from what we experience in our environment. Our sacred free will and original thinking depend on this well-established fact, and I defy any mere classics scholar who would attempt to challenge it.
We make up our own thoughts out of our own heads; we do we do we do! We’re miraculous that way. We have souls, and internal essences, and Identities, and those are where our ideas come from – not from what we read or see or hear said.
Conservative sites like National Review and Campus Reform were on the case.
Campus Reform included some lengthy quotes from Bond’s piece and contacted her for comment. She complied, saying that “Greeks and Romans actually added color to their art and thus white marble was often the canvas rather than the finished product.” The “exalting of white (and unpainted) marble was then an 18th century construct of beauty rather than representative of the classical view,” she added in an email to the website. But the coverage there and elsewhere, plus an additional mention by conservative talk radio host Joe Pags, was enough to prompt online threats of violence and calls for her termination, she says. There was additional heckling and harassment, including anti-Semitic references (Bond is of Jewish descent).
“What they want to believe is that there is a liberal professor that is so sensitive to race issues that she will make race issues out of anything,” Bond told ArtForum. “They want to make me an example of the hyperliberalization of the academy.”
They’re making America great again.
I hadn’t realized that they were painted, but of course they were… should’ve occurred to me after hearing about the multi-coloured pyramids.
Yeah, very brightly from what I’ve read. It boggles the mind to picture the Parthenon lit up like a rave threw up over Times Square, but something like that may have been more accurate than the images of it we’ve had after the colors faded away.
I do like white marble: much the same way I’d like the same designs in onyx, for instance. There’s a simplicity – yes, a classicism – to monochrome, and it suits the aesthetic we’re familiar with for these pieces. But if we’re not clutching at ignorance, we’re going to be perfectly content to recognize what we see now isn’t what the creators intended, and if we’re not clutching at weapons-grade nastiness, we’re not going to picture Greeks and their art as reveling in egg-shell people.
Just went looking for some idea of the Roman color ideas; it occurred to me that Pompeii would have some pieces preserved decently well. Google can nab plenty for any of you, but one to share is at http://melissaomarkham.com/blog/archives/2007/11/november-28th-a-history-of-art.php
First – the colors for the people at least are likely to be as realistic as practically could be – they at least weren’t using pigments to splash some acid trip on a wall. But second, it’s a marvelous and apt instance of just how much ethnic diversity was to be had in first century Italy. That gentleman would be black by a lot of standards, or at least some variety of brown that (pleugh) “thoughtful” racists will strictly distinguish from white and British.
A former colleague from Belize strives to be a Christian–we got on fine because as boys we read some of the same books, because I recognized racism and because of mutual respect at work (he out-degrees me) even though he knew I didn’t share his religious sensibilities–and mentioned that some Christian communities venerate a black Jesus. This makes perfect sense.
I just don’t understand why people assume white marbele / plaster implies white skin. Running with that logic, doesn’t that also imply white hair, clothing, jewelry? What about things the statue-people are holding, are they also taken to be white? Oh and what about statues of different colour, does obsidian imply black people with black heair, clothes etc?
Strange, they seem to be applying their logic inconsistently.
“The equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe.””
It could, however, just be a common aesthetic preference among human beings generally, like, say, the color blue is. And this preference might have a biological basis as well as a cultural one.
I had to learn Latin at school in the 60’s, which would have been deadly boring had the Latin master not had a talent for conjuring up images of what life must have been like in ancient Rome. I can remember him saying that if you go to Rome or Greece you can easily get the wrong impression of what these places were like in Classical times as marble statues and other artefacts would have been painted; so it hardly counts as a new discovery. Mosaics, which retain much of their original colouring, give a totally different impression.
Bernard, I was also lucky to be taught Latin with lots of little treks into art, social history, politics. A pity they hardly do it any more!
The earliest depictions of Jesus, in the Byzantine mosaic tradition, had him with brown skin and almost-Afro hair. This popped up in a BBC art history programme in the last few years. I just wish I could remember which one.
While it is true that marble statues fade to white, even when they were originally painted, the same is not true for bronze statues, pots, frescos, mosaics or ceramic figure. Black figure pottery shows people with black skin, that doesn’t mean we all think Classical Greeks were all black. Ceramic figures fade to reddish brown even when they were painted and museums often try to show images of how things might have looked.
I very much doubt that white supremacy is caused by marble statues. Most people know perfectly well that people in the Mediterranean are not, on average, as pale as northern Europeans. White supremacists might like those statues as symbols but if they didn’t exist they would just pick another symbol.
Incidentally, the ancient civilisations had pretty clear ideas about racial superiority they just drew the lines differently. Classical Athenians certainly didn’t feel kinship with barbaric northern Europeans.
… and those ideas of “racial superiority” were based more on religious practice, tribal loyalty, willingness to be subservient than they ever were on skin colour.
That’s why the old “civus Romanus sum” thing matters so much. Once you were a citizen you were one of the “racially superior” people – whatever you looked like, wherever you were born.
Our current model of racial superiority dates back not much further than the eighteenth century. Black people, always a minority in Western Europe, might well be seen as exotic but not necessarily inferior. Dr Johnson, remember, left his entire estate to Frances Barber, originally a servant, and his descendants can still be found in England today.
Re 9 and 10 – When it’s not about inherited characteristics (or the appearance of them), is it racial superiority at all as opposed to cultural superiority? “Barbarian”, for instance, from those classical Greeks, goes back to the speech of non-Greeks, making it out as baby talk or gibberish.
Not that there weren’t ethnic stereotypes that were all entirely about learned characteristics; it just seems that Greco-Roman prejudices ran predominantly on the learned characteristics (language and what we could call national stereotypes) and only marginally on inborn ones. We’ve reversed that spread in the last couple centuries.
The assumption that bare stone is somehow ‘pure’ and classical, shows up as much in architecture as in any claims about race. Think of all the ‘Greco-Roman’ public buildings in the West and how they would look if they were painted the way the actual originals were.
I can’t think of many iconic Greek statues (or rather Roman marble copies of Greek statues) that have sub-saharan features. The racist paranoia against Bond, and anyone else who talks about how gaudy the original were, really DOES demonstrate how white-supremacy can be set off by practically anything.
On the other hand, the Pyramids of Giza were once white…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujX9MEnYzU4
That’s an interesting point. I’ve known that classical statues were painted since my latin lessons as a teenager – so this certainly isn’t news. (Apparently a lot of the statues of female goddesses and empresses had removal hairdoes too, so that as fashions changed they could have new hairpieces sculpted.) I’ve never considered that the whiteness might make us think the statues were all white-skinned. It makes a lot of sense. After all, by British racism standards, Mediterranean isn’t completely “white” enough to really be white. Only North European Nordic types get that “accolade”.
Andrew B.
August 5, 2017 at 7:08 pm
“The equation of white marble with beauty is not an inherent truth of the universe.””
It could, however, just be a common aesthetic preference among human beings generally, like, say, the color blue is. And this preference might have a biological basis as well as a cultural one.
Except, of course, for the fact that the humans who had the best opportunity to opt for white marble statues (ie, the people who were making them in the first place) chose NOT to do so, instead painting them up for the pleasure of the masses. This would suggest that the aesthetic argument is almost entirely cultural.