"many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject."
Exactly. I takes years of really hard work to get good at this stuff. Decades.
I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
A good example where this was executed really well was the Notre Dame reconstruction (I _guess_). Craftsmen and academic diligence hand in hand.
Not everyones archeological reproduction has such a budget unfortunately.
> I do realize research budgets are not that awesome, but when claims are of aesthetic in nature (explicitly and implicitly) and deal with human craftmanship there should definetly be collaboration with also craftsmen subject experts.
Do we know for a fact this didn't happen in this case?
With the horrible version of the statues?
They just look ... bad.
While photography destroyed academic art almost to extinction, thank heavens it's still trained and you can find practicing artists. Finding good ones might be a bit hard though.
So you could find a _bad_ artist to help you in your reconstruction project.
But finding an incompetent accomplice probably is not in anyones best interest.
So while hiring _anyone who claims to be an artist_ might be procedurally and managerially an approved method, it really is not the outcome anyone actually woudl want to have. So whatever happened here ... it does not count as professional reconstruction.
You don't need to be an art historian or an artist to recognize this.
You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing. And once you do this, there is a fair chance you will recognize the "good" art feels like an order of magnitude more appealing to you, even if you don't have the training to recognize the exact features that cause this appeal.
An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon.
I'm sure you're right that reconstructions of painted statues are inaccurate. But I'm not sure that a good-looking reconstruction would be any more authentic. Cultural tastes vary a lot. I suspect that if we ever do get enough data for a valid reconstruction, I won't like it any better.
> An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me. I'm not just talking about the easily-mocked contemporary art. I mean things like Medieval paintings with Jesus painted as a baby-sized adult man. Everything before the development of perspective looks like a grade-school cartoon.
Perspective wasn't developed! The Greeks and Romans used it just fine, for example.
What was lost was artistic training because there wasn't sufficient economic market for it. As soon as you got sufficient economic incentive, art magically improves again. This is stunningly obvious if you look at Athens and then Pompeii and then Rome and then the Vatican (with the attendant backslide until the Renaissance as you note).
Interesting parallel to modern--will AI cause a huge backslip in art since the economic market for artists is being destroyed?
"since the economic market for artists is being destroyed"
I don't see it being destroyed. I mean the market for art. That's a market for tangible things made by specific humans, pieces that are unique.
Very hard to see how AI will affect that since the market is dominated to large extent by the need by the art salespeople, art institutions, and art collectors to sustain prestige and investment value.
If it just about volume, China would have destroyed it decades ago. Clearly adding even more volume will hardly put a dent to it.
> An awful lot of the things hanging in museums look "bad" to me
Sure. But if have a chance to visit Pompeii, the author’s argument will land. The Romans made beautiful art. It seems odd that they made beauty everywhere we can find except in the statues we’ve reconstructed.
As a reference point to paintings in antique - these portraits from Roman Egypt are quite nice - from around 0 AD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fayum_mummy_portraits
I'm not sure whether they look "bad" is enough justification. The author dismisses the possible explanation "maybe they didn't consider this bad style back then" without any real argument other than "there are other works of art with different styles".
I agree that I, personally, do not consider them painted in a way that is pleasing to me. But is that what the reconstruction project is meant to achieve, i.e. a painting style that is pleasing to current audiences? Or is it about reconstructing the bare minimum that can be asserted with some degree of reliability that is actually supported by the physical evidence?
Again I must ask: do we know decent artists weren't involved in the reconstruction project? Remember, the goal is to use their artistry to achieve scientific results, not just do whatever they find pleasing.
> You just need to compare them to other art from the period and the frescoes, and consider which one you find more appealing
I get this is the most compelling part of the argument TFA is making, but to be honest I don't find it all that compelling. Surely the people involved in the reconstruction considered this, and there's a reason why they still produced these reconstructions, and I don't believe that reason is "they are incompetent or trolling".
I believe it is basically irresponsible to present the statues with their base layers only. Either extrapolate the aesthetic top layers that might have been there, or just report that the statues were painted without a visual example. Presenting them as poorly as they do contributes to demoralization and a sense of alienation from one's own cultural roots.
I believe researchers are under pressure not to extrapolate too wildly, unless they can find strong evidence for their extrapolations. In TFA itself they are quoted (very briefly) saying this is not a representation of what the statues actually looked like, it's just the pigments they guaranteed were there.
> Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
Consider that had they gone wild with creativity, they would have been criticized for it. Apparently the current overcautious trend is an (over)reaction to previous careless attitudes in archeology.
This is my uninformed take, anyway. I think TFA's author should have engaged more directly with researchers instead of speculating about their motives; the article -- while making some interesting points -- reads a bit snarky/condescending to me. Why not go straight to the source and ask them?
"This is almost certainly not what it looked like at all, and it's hideous, but I am going to make sure this image is disseminated across the literature and the news (which will make everyone think it was actually hideous but oh well)" is just more irresponsible in my mind than any alternative.
The article makes very explicit proofs, in showing paintings of painted sculptures, where the sculptures are painted with very appealing, naturalistic hues.
Perhaps... it's just that they collaborated with experts on publishing coloring books for five year olds due to some reason.