Many claim that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from theirs.
Here is a Roman statue located in the British Museum:
It depicts the goddess Venus, perhaps originally holding a mirror. Something you will notice about it is that it looks great.
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Below is a Greek sculpture from half a millennium earlier.
One of the treasures recovered from the first-century BC Antikythera shipwreck, this statue is composed of bronze with inlaid stone eyes. It has been variously interpreted as representing Paris, Perseus, or a youthful Heracles. Whatever interpretation is correct, it is a stunning work of art.
Here is a detail from a wall painting in Rome. This has undergone two thousand years of wear and tear, but it is still beautiful to us.
There is a general pattern to these observations. Ancient Greek and Roman art tends to look really good today.
This is not a universal rule. The Greeks weren’t always the masters of naturalism that we know: early Archaic kouroi now seem rather stilted and uneasy. As in all societies, cruder work was produced at the lower end of the market. Art in the peripheral provinces of the Roman Empire was often clearly a clumsy imitation of work at the center. Even so, modern viewers tend to be struck by the excellence of Greek and Roman art. The examples I have given here are far from exceptions. Explore the Naples Archaeological Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum and you will see that they had tons of this stuff. Still more remarkable, in a way, is the abundance of good work discovered in Pompeii, a provincial town of perhaps 15,000 people.
Here is another Roman statue, this time depicting the Emperor Augustus. It is called the Augustus of the Prima Porta after the site where it was discovered. Something interesting about this statue is that traces of paint survive on its surface. This is because, like most though not all ancient statues, it was originally painted.
You were probably already aware of this. The coloring of ancient sculpture has become widely known in recent years as a result of several high profile projects purporting to reconstruct the original appearance of these works – most famously, Vinzenz Brinkmann’s travelling Gods in Color exhibition. This was not news to historians, who have been aware that ancient sculpture was colored (polychromatic) since the 1800s. But it took these striking reconstructions to galvanize public interest.
Here is Brinkmann’s well-known reconstruction of the Augustus of the Prima Porta.
What do you notice about this reconstruction? That’s right, it looks awful. In the eyes of modern viewers, at least, the addition of this matte, heavily saturated color has turned a really good work of art into a really bad one.
Look at this archer, from the pediment of the late archaic temple of Aphaia on Aegina.
I have not said anything novel here. Everybody knows these reconstructions look awful. The difficult and interesting question is why this is so.
The changing taste theory
The explanation usually given is that modern taste differs from that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It follows that, if the reconstructions are accurate, their taste must be very alien to ours. The apparent hideousness of ancient colored sculpture strikes us partly because of what it seems to show about the profoundly changeable character of human taste.
It is usually added that we are the victims, here, of a historical accident. Paints deteriorate much more easily than marble. So, when we rediscovered classical sculpture in the Renaissance, we took the monochrome aesthetic to be intentional. As a result, we internalized a deep-seated attachment to an unblemished white image of Greek and Roman art. We became, to use David Bachelor’s term, chromophobes. It is this accidental association between Greek and Roman art and pristine white marble, we are told, that accounts for the displeasure we feel when we see the statues restored to color.
At least two things about this explanation should strike us as odd. First, there actually exist some contemporary images of statues, showing how they appeared in the ancient world. The resemblance between the statues in these pictures and the modern reconstructions is slight. The statues depicted in the ancient artworks appear to be very delicately painted, often with large portions of the surface left white. A well-known example is the depiction of a statue of Mars at the House of Venus in Pompeii.
The statues depicted on the north wall of the frigidarium in the House of the Cryptoporticus have an even gentler finish:
In other cases the colors are richer. Here too, however, the effect is far from ugly. I have given an example of this below a famous mosaic depicting a statue of a boxer, from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae. Note the subtlety of color recorded by the mosaic, in which the boxer is reddened and sunburned on his shoulders and upper chest, but not his pale upper thighs. There is nothing here to suggest that the statues depicted would have struck a modern viewer as garish.
Is there any sculpture depicted in ancient Greek and Roman visual art that resembles the modern reconstructions? To the best of my knowledge, the closest example is the red, blue and yellow visage from the Villa Poppaea at Oplontis.
In that case, the treatment really does resemble the approach favored in modern reconstructions. However, the face belongs not to a classical statue but to a theatrical mask, and is grotesque in form as well as in color. It is not strong evidence that a similar approach was taken with normal classical statuary.
Depictions of people in paintings and mosaics also use color very differently to the modern reconstructions of polychrome ancient sculpture. Here are three examples, each of which show a sensitive naturalism that is, if anything, surprisingly close to modern taste. Again, these are not one-offs: countless further examples could be given.
Classical art evolved over the centuries, and some of it looks quite different from these examples. But it is difficult or impossible to find an ancient picture from any period whose coloring resembles the Brinkmann reconstructions. Of course, we cannot be sure that the Romans colored their statues in the same way they colored their pictures. But it is surely suspicious that their use of color in pictures tends to be beautiful and intuitive to us.
Some indirect evidence is also provided by the uses of color in ancient interior design, as seen below. The intensity of red on the Farnesia walls is striking, but these cases rarely seem grotesque in the way that the sculptural reconstructions do, nor do they seem to manifest a radically foreign taste in color. In all these cases, ancient art is enjoyable despite having retained its original color.
Neither, it might be added, do we find it impossible to appreciate the painted statues of cultures beyond ancient Greece and Rome. It is true that polychrome sculpture often verges on an uncanny valley effect, but it seldom looks as bad to us as the classical reconstructions. This is true not only of the polychrome sculpture from post-classic Europe, like that of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Spanish and German Baroque, but of polychrome sculpture from pre-classical and non-Western cultures, like dynastic Egypt or medieval Nepal. Many of these sculptures have an eerie quality. It is perhaps no accident that they were often used in religious rituals, as were the sculptures of antiquity. But they seldom seem distractingly ugly.
We are thus asked to believe not only that the colored sculpture of Greek and Roman antiquity was distinctive among its art forms in seeming consistently ugly to us, but also that it is distinctive among the colored sculptural traditions of the world in doing so. This seems unlikely to be true.
The bad painting theory
We should be doubtful, then, of the idea that modern reconstructions of colored ancient statues seem ugly to us because we do not share Graeco-Roman taste in color. Ancient depictions of statues, other ancient depictions of people, and other ancient uses of color, all suggest that their feeling for color was not so different to ours. It is also suspicious that other cultures have produced colored sculpture that we readily appreciate. Is there a better explanation of what is going on here?
There is a single explanation for the fact that the reconstructions do not resemble the statues depicted in ancient artworks, the fact that their use of color is unlike that in ancient mosaics and frescoes, and the fact that modern viewers find them ugly. It is that the reconstructions are painted very badly. There is no reason to posit that ancient Europeans had tastes radically unlike ours to explain our dislike of the reconstructions. The Greeks and Romans would have disliked them too, because the reconstructed polychromy is no good.
Two objections might be raised to my proposal. They are, however, easily answered.
First, it might be thought that my explanation cannot be right because the experts who produce the reconstructions know that this is what the statues originally looked like. After all, it might be reasoned that their work is based on a scientific analysis of the paint residues left over from the original finish.
This objection should not worry us. Nobody, to my knowledge, seriously claims that the methods used to produce the reconstructions guarantee a high degree of accuracy. And this should come as no surprise. The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?
This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, 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’.
Second, it might be urged that it makes no difference whether the reconstructions are accurate because there is simply no way to paint the statues, consistent with the pigments that have been left behind, that modern viewers will find beautiful.
But this just isn’t true. It is manifestly possible to paint a classical statue in a manner consistent with the evidence that will look incomparably more beautiful to the modern viewer than the typical reconstructions do. The triumphant examples above from Egypt and Nepal above prove this incontrovertibly.
Why make a bad reconstruction?
Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? One factor may be that the specialists who execute them lack the skill of classical artists, who had many years of training in a great tradition.
Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
If that is the explanation, though, reconstruction specialists have been notably unsuccessful in alerting the public to the fact that colored classical sculpture bore no more resemblance to these reconstructions than the Mona Lisa would to a reconstruction that included only its underlayers. Much of the educated public believes that ancient sculpture looked something like these reconstructions, not that these reconstructions are a highly artificial exercise in reconstructing elements of ancient polychromy for which we have direct archaeological evidence.
One wonders if something else is going on here. The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling. In this interpretation, they know perfectly well that ancient sculptures did not look like the reconstructions, and probably included the subtle variation of color tones that ancient paintings did. But they fail to correct the belief that people naturally form given what is placed before them: that the proffered reconstruction of ancient sculpture is roughly what ancient sculpture actually looked like.
It is a further question whether such trolling would be deeply objectionable. Brinkmann has produced a massively successful exhibition, which has more than accomplished its aim of making the fact that ancient statues were painted more widely known. The reconstructions are often very funny and are not all as bad as the best-known examples. There is genuine intellectual value in the project and what could be seen as mean-spirited iconoclasm could equally be embraced as harmless fun.
On the other hand, at a time when trust in the honest intentions of experts is at a low, it may be unwise for experts to troll the public.
Read the original article
Comments
I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer stuck to the statues, and the rest was washed away.
This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.
Painters layer paint, starting with a saturated base color. These archaeologists are simply looking at the paint that was left in the crevices.
By griffzhowl 2025-12-1814:357 reply Yes, this is what tfa says, and it's a good point. But tfa also points out that the archaeologists/reconstructionists know that what they're producing differs from the original. The thing is the discipline of reconstruction means that they only use pigments that they have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers. The problem is this is seldom explained when the reconstructions are presented to the public
Reconstructioniats say that they only show th colours they can prove existed.
The article suggests they obstinately do this because they know it creates a spectacle.
I think there's another explanation - if they use their own judgement to fill in the gaps (making the statues more classically beautiful) then everyone will accuse them of making it all up, even if they were to base it on fairly rigorous study of e.g. the colour pallets used in preserved Roman paintings etc.
By griffzhowl 2025-12-1816:482 reply Yes, the suggestion that they're trolling goes too far.
However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...
But they still don't add anything without direct evidence - where there's evidence in later statues for more subtle colouring, they include that.
I’m reminded of a Reddit thread long ago about a reconstruction of Roman garum by some American scientists. In their paper they conclusively declared that it tasted foul and a Filipino Redditor replied saying “This actually sounds a lot like the fish sauce we use in SE Asia. I wonder if people from a different culinary tradition would find it less off putting or even tasty?” Cue a bunch of Redditors downvoting the poor sap to hell for daring to disagree with the scientists’ assessment of the flavor.
By griffzhowl 2025-12-1822:482 reply There might even be a directish connection, one way or the other, between garum and SE Asian fish sauce, since Roman coins have been found in Vietnam.
Can't find the better source on that specifically now but this is a nice article about the Roman trade with India and mentions the coins found in Vietnam and even Korea about half way down
https://www.thecollector.com/why-was-the-roman-indian-ocean-...
On the other hand, it's not implausible that maritime societies come up with their own fish sauce independently
By eru 2025-12-191:24 I read that what's now 'soy sauce' also started off as a kind of fish sauce originally.
By rrrrrrrrrrrryan 2025-12-195:491 reply Worcestershire sauce is also considered a descendent of the fish sauces from ancient Rome.
By griffzhowl 2025-12-1921:43 That's funny, I thought Worcestershire sauce was based on some Asian fish sauce because it has the colonial ingredients like tamarind etc. I had a look on wiki and seems it's not known where the recipe comes from but it dates from the 19th century
By electroglyph 2025-12-1820:01 love me some red boat fish sauce!
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:25 It is possible for Brinkmann to be guilty of showboating, while other researchers are simply being fastidiously proper in what they communicate.
The problem is that there is no "missing data" color, so that discipline would default to marble white, which is just as made up as the rest.
I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.
If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.
>The problem is that there is no "missing data" color
they should use "green screen green" and give you viewing glasses that fill in the colors to your own historical preference (e.g. rose colored? blood-soaked?). then if you point a finger with your "anhistorical" complaints, there will be 3 fingers pointing back at you!
By xeonmc 2025-12-2017:10 How about “missing texture magenta”?
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:27 Architectural restoration often solves this by using an inoffense, but still visibly detectable, "new material color". Some British castles have been rebuilt this way.
By dddgghhbbfblk 2025-12-1819:541 reply They're making it up no matter what they do, since we don't know how these things were originally painted and have no way of knowing. They should just present the reconstructions as interpretations and actually try to do a good job painting them. I agree with the article that what they're doing now is harmful to the public understanding.
By 20k 2025-12-1820:23 I mean, we kind of do though? We could assume that the surviving images of statues showing how they were painted are accurate. If you know the colour of the underlayer, this actually lets you determine exactly what the colouration of the paint on top of that is despite it not being present whatsoever
This gives you a general trend of how brightly underlayed statues tended to be painted afterwards to finish them, and lets you infer how other statues without surviving coloured pictures of them would have appeared based on the likely prevailing style at the time
By resize2996 2025-12-1815:494 reply That is how scholarship works. It’s like a math proof: they’re interested in proving the base case. If someone else wants to do more speculative work to theorize what a well-painted version would look like, that would be super cool, but it wouldn’t be scholarship.
And that's a fine standard to maintain when you're writing an academic paper.
When you are instead putting together a museum exhibition intended for the general public, and you observe over and over again that they will interpret your work as representing what the statues actually looked like, it is irresponsible to keep giving them that impression.
It's not an either/or question. They could do some of the statues with just the pure archaeological approach of only using the paints they found in the crevices, and do others in a layered approach that is more speculative but probably closer to how they actually looked. If they did that, this article would not be necessary.
By throwthrowuknow 2025-12-1818:241 reply Imagine if we refused to publish any material or exhibit recreations of dinosaurs because the only evidence we have are fossilized skeletons and a few skin texture impressions.
By philistine 2025-12-1818:541 reply You've highlighted a very cogent comparison!
Dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park were fairly well represented considering what we knew in the late 80s. But our knowledge of dinosaurs has grown, with feathers being the most emblematic change. Yet the Jurassic Park movies steadfastly refuse to put feathers on their 3D monsters in the current movies, because viewers do not expect feathers on the T-Rex.
We might be at that point with repainted statues. Museum visitors are now starting to expect the ugly garish colours.
I've not seen the latest Jurassic Park movie, but I've seen a clip with velociraptor's with feathers, and maybe quetzlcoatalus too? Along with colourful skin on eg compsagnathus.
They seem to have moved on a bit, they're balancing audience expectations with latest research, I expect.
This guy had feathers and they made him the right size https://jurassicpark.fandom.com/wiki/Oviraptor
By philistine 2025-12-1917:261 reply They didn't revisit any of the previously featured dinosaurs. The T-Rex in the latest film looks like the best science can ascertain ... in 1990.
By pbhjpbhj 2025-12-2114:31 My knowledge of dinosaurs is a few decades old really - any good sources for a summary of T-rex developments in particular or dinosaurs more generally?
I could imagine there's some great videos out there? I'd be keen to have scientific basis given rather than speculative artwork.
By shermantanktop 2025-12-1815:551 reply “The reason I’m totally misleading you with a speculative example is because of scholarship.”
No way. When they engage the public, they are not longer exclusively scholars. They responsible for conveying the best truth they can to non-experts.
A journal paper can be misunderstood when the reader lacks the context to interpret it. Out in the public square, that is not the reader’s fault anymore.
By vkou 2025-12-1817:39 Give the scholars full editorial control of the newspaper the public is getting their news from, and you might get better public understanding of their scholarship.
You generally can't hold someone responsible for what someone else says about them.
By WorldMaker 2025-12-1816:19 "Dance your PhD" exists for several reasons, but one of them is to point out that the divorce between scholarship and art in some academic fields isn't "required" but an accident of how we separated colleges and how hard it can be to do multi-disciplinary work.
You can do both: prove the base case and reach across the aisle to the art college next door to see if someone is interested in the follow up "creative exercise". You can present both "here's what we can prove" and "here's an extrapolation by a skilled artist of what additional layering/contouring might have done".
By marcus_holmes 2025-12-194:37 I would agree with you, but archeologists often classify finds as "for ritual purposes" without any proof or evidence that it was used in a ritual, without specifying what ritual is involved, or how the find would be used in the ritual.
Likewise archeologists will classify finds as tools when they don't have nearly enough knowledge about the craft in question to be able to do this properly (see the extensive mis-classification of weaving swords/beaters as weapons [0], but there are many other cases).
So I'm a little reluctant to cut them some slack and say "this is how scholarship" works when they get all petulant about including colours that we know the ancients had, in ways we know they used them, for this kind of reconstruction.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/67863215/Weapon_or_Weaving_Swords_a...
By underlipton 2025-12-191:301 reply This is crucial. From the article:
>As a result, we internalized a deep-seated attachment to an unblemished white image of Greek and Roman art. We became, to use David Bachelor’s term, chromophobes. It is this accidental association between Greek and Roman art and pristine white marble, we are told, that accounts for the displeasure we feel when we see the statues restored to color.
And there's indeed been quite a bit of push-back since the story first broke. Unspoken is the reason. Primacy bias is probably a part of it, but what really accounts for the intensity of the attachment to the idea of white marble finishes? I'm sure you can imagine.
>Bond told me that she’d been moved to write her essays when a racist group, Identity Evropa, started putting up posters on college campuses, including Iowa’s, that presented classical white marble statues as emblems of white nationalism. After the publication of her essays, she received a stream of hate messages online. She is not the only classicist who has been targeted by the so-called alt-right. Some white supremacists have been drawn to classical studies out of a desire to affirm what they imagine to be an unblemished lineage of white Western culture extending back to ancient Greece. When they are told that their understanding of classical history is flawed, they often get testy.
https://archive.is/qTreQ#selection-1695.0-1695.693
So, yes, it was important to categorically falsify the notion that the statues, frescoes, etc., were unpainted. Anything that left it open would have been something for the worst sorts of people to latch onto. Now that that's out of the way, possibly even more accurate explanations can be given the time of day, instead of being stuck having to hash out, "Oh, but were they even colored at all?"
By sdiupIGPWEfh 2025-12-203:441 reply Maybe it's just me, but this "We have to fudge the truth because nuance would support the alt-right" business just seems to drive a bigger wedge into the political divide than would just being reasonable. Folks closer to center see it as controlling the narrative, lies, and conspiracy when the full truth comes out. I'd prefer not driving more people into the fringes.
By underlipton 2025-12-2022:54 They didn't fudge the truth. They reported exactly what the scientifically-supportable findings at the time were. Even if they had a notion that they were only looking at underpainting that was covered by more intricate work, they couldn't prove it. And, at the point, when they were trying to draw a distinction between objective fact and subjective sentiment, it was paramount that they come down solidly on the side of objective fact. Which they did. They proved that there was originally a weathered-away chroma layer above the base marble on these statues.
>Folks closer to center see it as controlling the narrative, lies, and conspiracy when the full truth comes out.
And this, I reject. The people who think this way aren't in the center, and they were never interested in the truth. Their aim has always been promoting the primacy of Western classical art (often as part of larger notions of white supremacy). They fought hard for the debunked no-chroma interpretation until another angle presented itself: that the chroma scientists were trying to purposely make the statues seem ugly, in order to devalue Western classical art, or to dictate its value outside of their control and terms. It's the same tack as right-wing gamers claiming that female characters are being made purposely "ugly" in order to alienate male heterosexual gamers.
And while the reason for changes in female representation in games are less objective and more complicated than the scientific inquiry that produced the knowledge of painted statues, most of the people driven to the fringes by the evolution of these topics, as knowledge and circumstances develop, are people who share their fringe (and incorrect) ideas. Implicit there is that there's no "full truth coming out", just a developing collective understanding.
If you want narrative control, lies, and conspiracy, look at Wall Street.
By nobodywillobsrv 2025-12-198:53 I would be curious to know if the treatment of statues in terms of "making them ugly and ridiculous to the point of being insulting" is roughly uniform across the different historical cultures being treated to this "reconstruction" procedure.
i.e. is there evidence that there is comfort in trolling using Roman or Greek vs Assyrian, Nubian etc. Or do they just like to make everything bright and blocky.
This practice of defining a reconstruction so pedantically as to be wholly unlike real life is just so dumb to me, as a layperson. This would be like “recreating” the experience of using a Commodore 64 but we can’t find any intact copies of the software at all so we provide a fake “OS” that requires the user to write code in ASM only, and say “Ladies and gentlemen, behold our reconstruction! This is what it was like!”
By wang_li 2025-12-1821:38 All of those CRT simulators? Largely bullshit, and we still have them around to look at!
By nextaccountic 2025-12-1821:061 reply The alternative is no reconstruction at all on one hand, and adding fake detail on another hand
And if one wants to add fake detail, why should archeologists be involved? Just have AI generate them
By mistercheph 2025-12-1822:45 The archeologists are already adding fake detail, just at a different level of abstraction. Did they constrain themselves to only painting in the places where they find remnants of pigment? No, otherwise there would be gaps, cracks, and random interruptions of other colors in the painted figures. And there's the guesswork involved in going from spectral analysis (+ other tools) of a pigment sample to an actual paint that could have been plausibly available to the artist.
Reconstruction, (similar to translation) is an art that combines carefuly study of evidence and craftfully filling in gaps and adding in detail where necessary (or leaving details unfilled and ambiguous to communicate the impossibility of total translation or reconstruction!) to present some communicable form of the original that gives the viewer some closer but imperfect access to it.
By mkehrt 2025-12-1819:02 A while back the Met in New York had an exhibit of painted reconstructed statues where they let artists make reasonable guesses about what the statues would have looked like. It was pretty fantastic.
Here's an article with one picture I could find, along with a few of the more saturated ones (NSFW artistic nudity): https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/14/visit-the-exhibi...
> have direct evidence of, and this is just the saturated underlayers
Why do they even bother with the "reconstructions" if they know that they are inherently inaccurate, though
Bare marble and garish underlayer reconstructions could be seen as two extreme ends.
The article points out that the garish underlayer reconstructions have (maybe accidentally) been successful at correcting the widely held misperception of bare marble.
There’s also something in… the bare marble reconstruction maps somehow to our idea of sophisticated. Garish underplayed reconstruction, our idea of silly, frivolous, or childish. There were a lot of Greeks, they didn’t all live on one end of that spectrum.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-12-1820:471 reply Borderline deception is a bad way to correct inaccurate knowledge.
And frankly, if I wanted to ridicule the ancients and flatter my own age, I could think of no better way than to make the old stuff look bad.
I would much rather have an exhibit that showed the bare marble, then a conservative reconstruction based on what direct evidence merits (to the degree possible, noting that it is not a complete reconstruction), then more liberal but reasonable reconstructions based on indirect evidence.
I think it is hard to say to what extent there actually is even borderline deception. The internet amplifies random and funny things. In this article (which, we should note, is even-handed but leaning skeptical toward the garish reconstructions), it is noted that the images that have spread are the ugliest of the exhibit. If the exhibit tells the full story, and the internet just amplified the silt bits, that’s not deception on the part of the exhibit.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-12-1918:30 That's true, but IIRC, the official "marketing" material is guilty of the same thing. I may be misremembering, though.
By Sharlin 2025-12-1817:38 Because exhibitions make money, apparently.
By michaelbuckbee 2025-12-1815:521 reply The "garish" statues are more akin to a false color image of mars that shows topography or something. That they're a visual representation of a particular portion of the pigments found and are not supposed to be an accurate recreation of how the statue looked at the time it was created.
By lokar 2025-12-1816:49 AIUI, false color images of the cosmos are hand tuned to look pretty / interesting / impressive.
The people who produce dinosaur illustrations don't seem to have as much of a problem with adding all sorts of details (extravagant plumage, wacky colors/patterns, starry eyes and acrobatic postures) that are neither directly supported nor contradicted by available evidence.
By griffzhowl 2025-12-1817:061 reply They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though.
Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases.
And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
> Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours
This is no longer true! Starting with Sinosauropteryx in 2010, paleontologists have identified what they believe to be fossilized melanin-containing organelles. These organelles, called melanosomes, have different shapes depending on which color they produce, and those shapes are preserved well enough to be visible under an electron microscope.
By griffzhowl 2025-12-1915:12 Amazing, thanks for pointing it out. In the meantime, there's been some rejigging of the classification so it's this related genus where they've found the melanosomes
By sdiupIGPWEfh 2025-12-203:52 Isn't a rather good deal of color from feathers a result of "structural color", rather than pigmentation? I'd be curious if fossilized feathers could ever, in theory, preserve enough microscopic detail to guess at that.
By RajT88 2025-12-1815:41 We are not dinosaurs, so have rather less skin in the game when it comes to accuracy.
Is there someone who tries to achieve beauty similar to what the original might've looked like?
Would be interesting to see a painted statue that's actually pleasant to look at, rather than these "let's smear this one pigment we found in the armpit all over the face"-style "reconstructions"
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:33 See mkehrt's link ITT.
By justinator 2025-12-1823:323 reply I have a degree in fine art painting and drawing and that's not correct for oil painting. We would first put on a layer of earth tones, and work from the shadows to the mid tones. Once you got the form correct, you would work on things like adding color, details, and highlights.
In no way would you start with saturated colors. One, they're very expensive, so why would you apply them, just for most to be painted over? Secondly, the more saturated (strong) a color is, the harder it is to paint over. Try painting over a wall painted bright red with literally anything. Paint it over in blue and your blue turns brown. Paint it in yellow and you'll just get red again. That's why we (still) employ a very opaque, white paint to the canvas. Oil paint also becomes more transparent over time, so getting the form right with the earth tone underpainting is crucial for the painting to last hundreds of years.
Perhaps you're thinking of fresco painting? Then, the pigments are added to the medium (plaster) initially, and only very subtle highlights are added afterwards (if at all). This is a very, very difficult technique, and illusions like highlight and shadow are hard to pull off. But the painting over was frowned upon, because it doesn't last nearly as long as the embedded pigment in the plaster (and certainly not after cleaning/restoration). But adding highlight/shadow to a sculpture seems like not the play, as the 3D-ness of a sculpture would imply it brings its own to the table.
Makes more sense just to paint the sculptures the color you wanted them painted, like the (in comparison very contemporary) bust of Nefertiti in the article, which looks excellent. No need for highlight/shadow. I could only see that needed in the face, which would look and act much like makeup.
friendly knuckle cracking I wouldn't normally do this, but I did say I'd die on this hill. I'm a tenured professor of art at a major research university. Firstly, maybe I shouldn't have said "saturated," but then again, you wouldn't argue that your earth tones, for example Yellow Ochre or Burnt Sienna aren't saturated in color?
I have a particular expertise in historical scenic painting, (granted, largely for theatrical and ceremonial practice, but that's where we have the oldest examples of painting a fake thing to look real, see trompe l'oeil https://www.britannica.com/art/trompe-loeil )
In these examples, it's clear that the painters started with relatively saturated midtones, and used washes to take the shadows down and clay filled light colors (think gouache) for the highlights: https://masonicheritagecenter.org/backdrops-gallery/
As to the expense of saturated colors, it's the scholars claiming saturated colors, so the expense was made, obviously. But was yellow the final color, when it is the perfect base coat for a two part skin tone using first yellow, and then pink? In the first image in the article, you can see that half of the face is yellow, but that the other half is light colored skin. This exact theatrical layering practice has been used, first yellow, and then pink.
The fourth and eighth images in the article looks extremely similar to the scenic backdrops I've linked above, but one is from the same time period as these statues, and the other is from hundreds of years later. There is a clear similarity in the final work. I believe it's obvious that both painters used dry pigment mixed down to a thin consistency, and used a series of 5 to 7 quick layers to achieve fast, one session results.
This practice doesn't have anything to do with what we call oil painting today, which can be quite laborious and is normally achieved over multiple sessions. These artists would have wanted to knock out a work and get down off the ladder.
Happy to discuss further, all the best.
> Firstly, maybe I shouldn't have said "saturated," but then again, you wouldn't argue that your earth tones, for example Yellow Ochre or Burnt Sienna aren't saturated in color?
I think you are confusing a definition of saturation meaning "unable to absorb more" with the visual perception definition.
Optical Engineer here, but AFAIK artists use the term the same way: "saturation" refers to how the color is free of both white- and black-shading, "degree of non-grayness" if you will.
The outer ring of this image is fully saturated; you'll see that "muddy" colors like ochre and sienna don't occur there.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...
By Geonode 2025-12-1921:58 The difference here could be because we're in different fields. We would call what you're referring to as "chroma." In historical palettes, almost no colors had that intensity of color at the top of your image. In pigment, a color can be extremely saturated and very dark. I submit this random video I found: https://www.tiktok.com/@color.nerd/video/7215966155071163691...
By wileydragonfly 2025-12-192:091 reply How much of that major research is related to art?
By Geonode 2025-12-192:13 Well my team brought in several million dollars this year, but your point is still valid. :)
By felipeerias 2025-12-191:23 As the article points out, the more of the original color scheme that has survived, the better the reconstructions look.
Example: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/...
The author suggests that this minimizes the opportunity for mischief, but tbqh it's likely that the ancients were simply much better artists than the people carrying out these reconstructions today.
I'd love to see a modern artist attempt one of these reconstructions using original materials but with greater artistic freedom.
By bethekidyouwant 2025-12-191:101 reply Romans didn’t have oil paints
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:43 That wasn't claimed.
The archaeologists know that and say as much in TFA:
"The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?
This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, 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’."
Contemporary historic preservation sees itself as the guardian of historical substance. The content of a monument is bound to the preservation of the inherited material.
Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated.
It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair.
Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/.
By golemotron 2025-12-1819:07 I'm in the conserving camp. It's more truthful than the narrativization that accompanies attempts to restore. We should remember that we all had a reptilian vision of dinosaurs for decades (centuries?) before the latest feathered view. We would have been better with neither. Just display the bones: what we have. Everything else burdens the public with guesses.
> that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked
Meaning that these "reconstructions" are a pretty pointless and have no real purpose.
By alistairSH 2025-12-1816:30 Idealy, for me as a layperson who is only going to see these in a museum, I'd love to see a series of pieces...
First, the original, untouched (preserved but not restored?) sculpture.
Second, the reproductions highlighted in the article. With appropriate notations about "these are the base layers, not complete, etc"
And third, a best-guess at what the original could have looked like, based on the first two. Yes, this might be wrong and need to change over time.
By JoeAltmaier 2025-12-1815:461 reply They show us what the base layers were, and what pigments of the day looked like.
It may be an academic point. But they are academics.
Well they might as well show the texture of unprocessed marble as well. This is not particularly different.
By notahacker 2025-12-1816:251 reply I mean, showing the texture of the underlying stone is how the vast majority of statues from classical antiquity are displayed, and indeed how most pastiches are created.
(and half the objection to the paint jobs comes from the fact we've come to incorrectly associate decorative elements from the classical period with the colours of bare stone)
By pqtyw 2025-12-2011:00 Associating them with garishly and almost certainly inaccurately (based on pretty much all the indirect evidence we have) painted sculptures doesn't seem like much of an improvement, though?
By indoordin0saur 2025-12-1818:39 I totally agree with. This is not a reconstruction because the shading, detail and subtler colors are completely left off. It's just a reconstruction of the statue as it would have been in an incomplete state!
By marginalia_nu 2025-12-1814:17 Yeah, I've likewise always figured the reason these reconstructions ended up looking so awful is because paint is generally applied in layers (even to this day), so what they're likely reconstructing is the primer layer.
Like we know from Roman frescoes[1] and mosaics[2] that they were pretty skilled painters and solving the problem of how to paint something to have more hues than a King's Quest 3 sprite is unlikely to be an unsolvable aesthetic problem.
[edit] Changed from Secret of Monkey Island since that game has too many versions and remakes.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Chiron_i...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_Academy_mosaic#/medi...
"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?
By fsloth 2025-12-1916:15 "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.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-12-1823:51 > 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.
By fsloth 2025-12-1820:08 As a reference point to paintings in antique - these portraits from Roman Egypt are quite nice - from around 0 AD.
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".
By eudamoniac 2025-12-1815:501 reply 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?
By eudamoniac 2025-12-1823:03 "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.
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:47 The article makes very explicit proofs, in showing paintings of painted sculptures, where the sculptures are painted with very appealing, naturalistic hues.
By cxvrfr 2025-12-1815:41 Perhaps... it's just that they collaborated with experts on publishing coloring books for five year olds due to some reason.
By hibikir 2025-12-1816:03 Not all painters, and not in all cases: See, for instance, grisalle painting. One can then sketch the highlights and shadows first, and then come in with pretty translucent pigments. When the pigment is what is expensive, it can be more economical. We know for sure many a renaissance painting and fresco was done this way, and some of us do it today.
Now, was it possible that, given the pigments available, they were better off just going with the most saturated thing they could possibly have, and then work from there? Absolutely. But the right argument here isn't that "Painters layer paint this way", but that, as the article indicates, they are unlikely to be unsophisticated artists that don't believe shadows and highlights. So the highlighting and the shading must be in the place where we can't see, because we assume they must exist.
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:23 Agreed.
Armor historians from the 1960s, all the way back to Victorian age, sat in their offices smoking pipes and imagining what purpose the armor served, and and what constraints molded it.
Then the SCA and Renaissance Faires sprang up, and it was no longer purely theoretical. Recreationist research became a thing. And historical analysis became practical.
The most glaring example are the rectangular epaulets on funereal brasses and sarcophagi. Historian used to claim they were used to deflect blows from the shoulder.
Nothing is flat after a blow. All real armor is built on pressure-spreading arches, often first two-dimensionally, but ultimately in three dimensions (the armor over a 16th-century knight's legs are never conic sections, but more fluid curves).
So, those rectangles? Not defensive metal, but purely decorative, and probably leather or paper-mache. (None survive, and in fact there's some argument they exist only in art.)
Any historian who tried to make one and use it would learn this in a short exercise. But the fallacy survived for decades, because the people were operating outside of their area of expertise, while falsely claiming otherwise with no criticism.
Another example is the still-pervasive myth that medieval people used spice to mask the flavor of spoiled meat; I've heard it used by academics a couple decades ago at a conference presentation. Ever eaten spoiled meat? Ever think to yourself, this bellyache wouldn't be so bad if I didn't taste the source of my poisoning? That myth was tracked back to a singular author in the 1950s, IIRC, and copied without any rational criticism ever since.
By pantalaimon 2025-12-1814:39 That's what TFA is saying
> Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
looking at it from the absolute simplest of perspectives, money/time/effort, then the notion of a base, or primer layer that seals a surface and provides a non absorbant layer for the much more expensive coulor coat. primer bieng applied by aprentices and the finnish coat applied by specialists who would be very likely be useing ALL of the tricks of the trade to bring a statue to life, but then wejump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary, with everything from vegas type full primary coulors put on with a mop, and others that were master paintings done on 3d canvases, and still others who believd in.the purity of the "raw" sculpture
By kijin 2025-12-1815:06 > then we jump forward to Bernini and the total lack of paint, which makes it even more likely that there were competing philosophies around statuary
Most Greek and Roman statues had lost their paint long before the Renaissance. Early modern artists held up those paintless statues as the ideal form, which is why nobody from Michaelangelo to Bernini even tried to paint their sculptures. Instead, Bernini learned how to make marble itself interact with light to look alive. For centuries afterward, the purity of raw marble became the one true ideology. Diversity in this area collapsed, and took a long time to recover.
Even today, most people who are used to Western classical art will probably agree that marble statues look better without paint. We've been conditioned for generations to believe so. The ugly reproductions of painted statues aren't helping, either.
Makes sense. This is basically how skilled painters of miniatures (Warhammer) do it.
By orthoxerox 2025-12-1820:39 Yeah, these reconstructions look like tournament-grade paintjobs.
By philistine 2025-12-1818:591 reply I will die on an adjacent hill: when the details had washed away with time leaving behind merely the sturdier and ugly base, people removed the garish base coat cause that thing is uuugggo! Our ancestors were thinking what we're thinking: It looks better white than with only a base.
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:49 Like spraypainting over graffitti with a drab color that doesn't match the original stone perfectly.
By alterom 2025-12-1819:40 >This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.
The point the author made in the article is that the reconstructors are well aware of this, and are, in a way, trolling the masses to raise awareness and attract attention to the classical art and museums.
Keeping history alive generally isn't a profitable enterprise.
By ActivePattern 2025-12-1814:352 reply I assume you didn't read the article, since that's their exact point...
"Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence."
By boxed 2025-12-1814:36 Maybe it's the author of the article? :P
By rayiner 2025-12-1821:43 Thank you. I know nothing about painting, but I bought the original story about the statutes being painted these garish colors.
Even a middling warhammer miniatures painter would have done a better job of painting these statues than the reconstructions.
By mikkupikku 2025-12-1814:342 reply Makes me wonder if they ever used the same sort of gimmicky paint, like paint with mica flakes to make something look metallic.
By hibikir 2025-12-1816:11 They couldn't use the same paint, if just because for miniature painting we are almost always running acrylics, so it's all plastic binding the pigments. Even a modern oil paint is quite a bit more advanced than what they could do then.
They also had a significant disadvantage in pigment availability. Chances are that there's a whole lot of modern, synthetic pigments among the colors you use regularly. Pyrrole Red is from 1974, for example.
We know that painters were well aware of things like how many good, natural pigments get different outcomes when diluted (go see what happens as you thin ultramarine), so it's not as if they had no technoology. But something like mica vs aluminum vs just gold leaf is a budgetary issue, both today and back then. You will find that good metallics are more expensive and avoid mica. But for an important statue, I suspect they'd take fewer cost cutting shortcuts, just like we can tell in renaissance and medieval art that got to us in relatively good shape. This is the kind of thing some people spend their lives studying.
They probably used whatever paint was closest in chemical composition to the residue they found on the statue.
By mikkupikku 2025-12-1816:02 You mean the primer? Why would they use their fancy paint for that?
By Daub 2025-12-197:06 That is certainly how oil painters paint. But painting on absorbent stone is likely very different - more akin to fresco, and would probably not support a very layered approach.
By twelvechairs 2025-12-1819:181 reply The other side is lack of colourfast pigments back then. Underlayers would be cheap and colourfast. Top layers would usually be more expensive and deteriorate much more quickly.
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:52 Most colourfast pigments are minerals, and many of them are found in the natural world (purple hues being notoriously absent). Ultramarine, cadmium red, and lead white have been known since ancient times.
By jerf 2025-12-1814:46 This would be a great time to use AI, because it is very good at style transfer. Feed it a lot of contemporary painted art, feed it the base-coat version of the sculpture, and ask it to style-transfer the paintings on to the sculpture. You'd likely get something very close, and for once we can use "The computer said it, I'm not responsible for it!" for the power of good, by making it so no human is responsible for the heinous crime of assuming something without historical evidence (no matter how sensible the assumption is).
(And lest someone be inclined to downvote because I'm suggesting an AI, the real sarcastic core of my message is about our faith in computers still being alive and well even after we all have decades of personal experience of them not being omniscient infalliable machines.)
By BurningFrog 2025-12-1818:572 reply Are there really no statues with surviving full paint remnants?
By bsder 2025-12-1823:03 There aren't even that many of the original statues remaining. A lot of what survived are copies of the originals.
So, we are extrapolating from a very, very, very spotty data set.
By adgjlsfhk1 2025-12-1819:081 reply No. 2000 years is a long time.
By BurningFrog 2025-12-1916:15 Most of Pompeii remains unexcavated, so there is still hope.
Latest excavation: https://www.pbs.org/video/episode-1-eyvf5d/ (Also on Apple TV)
Good read! The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best.
> Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly?
> ...may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
That seems plausible -- and somewhat reasonable! To the credit of academics, they seems aware of this (according to the article):
> ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public – that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
By CGMthrowaway 2025-12-1815:048 reply > The idea that these marvels of artistry were painted like my 10th birthday at the local paint-your-own-pottery store always seemed incongruous, at best.
Have you seen medieval art though? https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/explaining-weird-mediaeva...
The technique is quite different from the "old masters" of later periods that we often think of as fine art.
Sure, but medieval European art generally sucked. (Call this a hypothesis if that helps.)
Compare the damn cave paintings of buffalo to most medieval European art. Some of the 10k-year-old stuff is much better observed. Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint. I'm sorry about that.
It's just not always taste. Sometimes it's taste. Sometimes people are bad at making art.
I think that the medieval art article is making a different point. The art there had a style that was dictated by its purpose and the beliefs of the artists.
For example, most of the examples given in that article are illustrations from manuscripts. This was something (as far as I know) that was new in the western world. The idea that books should be illustrated. And being before the printing press was introduced, each illustration (of which there were often many per page) was hand made. This added a substantial amount of time to an already labor-intensive process. And each image was not intended to be a standalone work of art.
Also, some of the other examples are of iconography. That style remains, largely unchanged to this day. If you do an image search for "religious iconography", you will see plenty of examples of sacred art that are not visually realistic but are meant to be metaphorically or spiritually realistic.
Sure, but for me the standard isn't whether it's visually realistic. Plenty of good stuff isn't particularly realistic. Traditional Chinese landscapes aren't realistic, but a lot of them are great. David Hockney has a lot of good work that isn't realistic and uses primitive-looking technique. The standard is not realism or which style was used. The standard, for me, is whether the artist was any good at art. Hockney is. (Usually.)
I'm not particularly basing my opinion on the examples in this article. It's easy to see that a lot of surviving European medieval art sucks. Maybe "surviving" is the problem. Maybe the good stuff got all smokey from being displayed and only the leftovers and student paintings, in storage, have survived.
On illustrations, everybody can see the difference between Durer and most medieval stuff. It's not simply style or taste.
By ianstormtaylor 2025-12-194:29 So, just to make it clear… you define good art by “whether the artist is any good at art”.
Illuminating…
——
For anyone who’s interested in a slightly more nuanced take on how people in the Middle Ages perceived of “art” — and how different that notion was to how we perceive it today — Forgery, Replica, Fiction by Christopher Wood [1] is a really interesting read.
Here’s the last sentence of the Goodreads summary, which describes the major transition in thinking:
“… Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.”
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3921524-forgery-replica-...
By red75prime 2025-12-1910:53 It's all good and spiritual, but it seems that they lost some artistic tools like point-projection perspective during non-that-well-documented ages.
By YeGoblynQueenne 2025-12-1823:111 reply Well, I mean you find lots of wonky sculptures and reliefs in medieval art but people in Europe still made some really stunning pieces of art, e.g. see The Lady and the Unicorn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_and_the_Unicorn), or the Choir Screen at the Amiens Cathedral (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiens_Cathedral#The_Choir_scr....)) and so on. So it's kind of a sweeping generalisation to say that "medieval art generally sucked".
Mmm both of those are from 1400s and OP do limit it to 1300. And that 1300 limit is for good reason. Renaissance is usually dated after 1453 and that's when European art quality exploded. So yeah, those examples instead prove OP's statement.
By YeGoblynQueenne 2025-12-1917:251 reply If you want to nitpick, I can point out that the full quote is "Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint"; stress on "about", and those aren't paintings.
Besides the comment started by saying that "medieval European art generally sucked", so it covers the work I mention.
That's if you want to nitpick. If you don't, both those works are hallmarks of medieval art and while they're not necessarily exemplars, it is important to remember that there were still artists who knew their stuff in and out in medieval times and the Renaissance didn't come out of nowhere.
Edit: I travel through Europe by train a lot (mainly France and Italy but also Switzerland and Germany occasionally) and I visit museums, cathedrals, and art galleries in every city I stay. I have seen a lot of medieval art because those places just seem to have it lying around by the bucketload. There is a broad range in quality, but I have seen some very high quality woodcuts and, indeed, paintings, although those tend to be religious icons. Sculptures also, but mainly in statues of saints on the outside of cathedrals (see e.g. the Rouen cathedral). I'm trying to say that I'm not some kind of art authority or expert on medieval art, but I have seen my fair share of it, and no, Europeans didn't just suck at art in the medieval. I think what happened is there was a lot of mostly religious art that was lower quality, sort of like you can find plenty of slop on the internet today, but there were still skilled artists that created shockingly good art. You'd be more likely to find it in the palaces of the rich and powerful, I reckon, because they were the ones who could afford/support talented artists, as opposed to more ordinary craftsmen, who would be paid less. For the same reason you might find less of the good art lying around than the rougher, cruder kind, because the former was more expensive and thus harder to obtain. This also goes for religious art, which tended to include a smorgasboard of art forms, from painted icons and sculptures to reliquaries and liturgical equipment like communion chalices. But good medieval art existed, I've seen it, and it wasn't that rare.
It's not nitpicking. 1450 is not between 500 and 1300. You may stress "about" but I certainly didn't.
I put the cut-off at 1300 very intentionally. As soon as you go much past 1300, you start to see stuff like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Rublev#/media/File:Rubl... That's some good shit. I see this in Wikipedia dated 1338: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lorenzetti_amb.effect2.jp... Not bad at all. They're already creeping up on or El Greco or Da Vinci or something.
And if we move the cut-off all the way to 1450, fuhgeddaboudit. You have freaking Albrecht D\:urer by that time. No fair. I'm sorry. The challenge concerned a particular 800-year period, which I chose carefully.
Yes I hear you about the range of quality. You're right. Many of the best pieces may have been "exhibited to death." There was presumably lots of student art and whatnot, probably not considered very good at the time, but it happened to survive. I accept that. But I'm only asking for a single counterexample in an 800-year block of time. I think that's fair.
If you like, though, I'm happy to amend my claim to this: "No, medieval European art did not suck. European art between 500 and 1300 sucked. But from 1300 until whenever the Renaissance starts, watch out. Those folks did some really nice work."
By YeGoblynQueenne 2025-12-2213:181 reply Well then that's not nitpicking, it's cherry-picking, trying to fit your claim into a specific but arbitrary period. You start by saying "medieval European art", then you reduce that to "between about 500 and 1300". Why between 500 and 1300 specifically? What happened to the other ~200 years?
It doesn't matter. There was plenty of good art between 500 and 1300 too. I mentioned the Rouen cathedral, whose west front, the one with all the statues of saints and the hyper-detailed architecture wikipedia tells me was "first built in the 12th century, entirely redone in the 13th century, and then totally redone again at the end of the 14th century, each time become more lavishly decorated" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouen_Cathedral#West_front). That's just one example that fits your spec, that I have personally visited. As I say I'm no expert.
Here's another: the sixth-century basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, with some of the most famous mosaics ever, including those depicting emperor Justinian, his wife, empress Theodora, and his court, which again Wikipedia tells me were completed in 547.
With a cursory look online I can also find a bunch of other famous art pieces from your chosen period that I haven't seen myself, like e.g.the Diptych of the Virgin and Child Enthroned and the Crucifixion (https://www.artic.edu/artworks/16241/diptych-of-the-virgin-a...) which however is very typical of the ecclesiastical art I've seen in many museums and art galleries I've visited.
So I do think your claim is a bit exaggerated, even if you try to limit the time period carefully. There was always good art made in Europe.
Btw, I'm Greek so I'm not offended by your claim about Europeans, in case there was a lingering doubt about that. The Greek middle ages (i.e. Byzantium) are usually not included in the European middle ages but Byzantium produced absolutely gobsmacking art throughout the medieval so leaving it out is also a bit arbitrary (but that's not your fault).
The Rouen Cathedral is so impressive that I find it suspicious since there's nothing like it in that period. I think the "and then totally redone again at the end of the 14th century" (after 1300) carries the answer but I doubt I can find proof of what it looks like before that.
San Vitale is also so impressive that I think it heralds the end of that golden age. Nothing will be like this for 800 freaking years In contrast, that diptych from 1275 looks like it heralds the end of the dark age and it do looks like it (starting to be good but nothing like what'll come after it). So if we cherrypick again a little bit, 550-1250 is quite a long dark age.
Regardless of definition of "medieval" here, there still seems to be a very long contiguous era where there is dearth of good European, especially western/northern, art.
By YeGoblynQueenne 2025-12-2820:41 "Dearth", maybe. "Genearlly sucks" not that much. Happy holidays :)
I won't bother getting into trying to demonstrate Medieval art doesn't "suck", it's not worth dignifying. But you should be aware you might be placing too much emphasis on painting and drawing specifically as opposed to other art forms.
By nyeah 2025-12-1821:23 Fine, good point. Medieval paintings and drawings suck, but the pottery may have been incredible.
Yeah, why sacrifice dignity by providing a counterexample? Dignity is important.
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:57 Isn't the actual topic of this thread specific to painting? On sculptures, but the skillset is painting; you can't paint a marble bust with a chisel.
I have my own take that painting as art peaked long ago. And now we are mostly at similar level to that in middle-ages...
Paintings used to be better, and before that they were worse.
By IAmBroom 2025-12-1914:58 Pre-Raphaelites still exist. Your tribe!
By joefourier 2025-12-1817:392 reply If you think medieval artists lacked skill, check out Villard Honnecourt’s sketchbook, especially the insects on folio 7 and Christ in Majesty on 16:
https://www.medievalists.net/2024/12/sketchbook-villard-honn...
Medieval art is very stylised, but the quality of the lines, the details in the clothes, the crispness of the composition, all that requires a lot of skill. Check out Jean Bondol’s work for instance https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/tapisserie-de-l-apoc...
You may not like the style, but being able to produce works like that requires you to be good at art on some level.
By nyeah 2025-12-1818:27 Ok, but the Honnecourt sketches are kind of strong. Not professional by today's standards, but decent. I'd be happy to have done them--but I'm not an artist. The tapestry can be appreciated, like Klimt's 2-D-ish stuff can be appreciated. The style is fine. It's not fantastic work, I wouldn't hang it up, but it's reasonably accomplished.
In general, though, yes, I think medieval European artists were short on skill compared to artists from Europe in pre-medieval and post-medieval times, and art from other places between ~500 and ~1300. They had some skill, but not as much.
Artists with limited technique are a real thing. Not everything is taste or style.
By thaumasiotes 2025-12-1818:531 reply You convinced me that they lack skill.
The clothing does often look good. In folio 16v ( https://www.medievalists.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Vill... ), it's been overdone and appears to be far wrinklier than fabric could support, suggesting that Jesus is embedded in some kind of strange plant.
The faces are terrible in all cases.
In general, perspective is off, anatomy is off, and you get shown things that aren't physically possible.
By regentbowerbird 2025-12-190:191 reply Are you aware there are artistic styles beyond photorealism?
By thaumasiotes 2025-12-192:251 reply Yes, but in that case, as this article argues, you'd expect something that looked good. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/teentitans/images/e/e3/TTO...
The Honnecourt illustrations strongly suggest that (a) photorealism is the goal, but (b) Honnecourt doesn't know how to draw it. He does things like place a person's right eye at a different angle to the rest of the face than the left eye has. But hey, how likely is it that viewers will notice a malformed human face?
By regentbowerbird 2025-12-1911:02 Teen titans as reference xD stop it you're killing me
By Der_Einzige 2025-12-1816:262 reply So were the Japanese better at painting circa the 1700s and 1800s? Because you got a whole lot of paints of, uhhh, octopi…
By nyeah 2025-12-1816:46 That's hard to call. Both Europe and Japan seemed fine in that time period. Octopi or no octopi.
By MyOutfitIsVague 2025-12-1820:251 reply Octopuses or octopodes. Octopi is incorrect.
By Der_Einzige 2025-12-1821:29 Tell that to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...
(warning, NSFW)
The medieval art was better then those cave paintings. Like, common.
> Europeans between about 500 and 1300 mostly couldn't paint.
They could. And they had wide variety of what they painted and how.
By nyeah 2025-12-1913:44 I've given up asking for an example to support that.
Utterly bizarre to claim that a diverse group of people within an 800-year period were simply “bad at art.”
No need to generalize. Post some clear exceptions. Or if the statement turns out to be "utterly bizarre but correct" I'm fine with that.
What do you mean by “exceptions”? Who are we, in our own infinitesimal slice of human history, to judge historic taste in art? And is naturalism the be-all, end-all of good taste? If so, we need to throw out the majority of art in the 20th century.
This is a question for an art historian, not some anon on a tech forum. (For what it’s worth, I find Medieval and Renaissance art to be about equally tepid despite the difference in execution. And plenty of people non-ironically enjoy Medieval art despite its supposed deficiencies.)
"some anon on a tech forum"
Don't sell yourself short. Post some art from those 800 years that doesn't suck, and I'll change my views.
Sure, there's plenty of crap in 20th century art. I've seen examples of that. But that's a different subject.
Like I said, I find the majority of European art before 1800 or so to be fairly dull, so I can't really answer this question. The prevailing technique improved remarkably post-Renaissance, and that's enjoyable to an extent, but the same themes get repeated over and over and over again.
If you're looking for art with an impact, the iconography of Andrei Rublev (and other icon painters during this period) is still massively influential in the Russian Orthodox Church today. 600+ years of direct use and inspiration! The lack of naturalism is not a deficiency.
The problem is not a lack of naturalism, it's obvious mistakes in the way the naturalistic poses are attempted. Many of Rublev's icons have obvious mistakes in the way joints are painted, for example - but not all of them or the exact same thing; it's not a style, it's simply a limitation of his skills. Many later painters who were inspired by him have corrected this mistake, not sought to reproduce it.
Not to mention, Rublev lived at the end of the Medieval period, and well into the Renaissance - the period where painterly skill in Europe was revitalized.
By archagon 2025-12-198:32 Again, I’m not sure why it matters. Henri Rousseau couldn’t draw for shit and yet people adore his art. The represented idea and its aesthetic execution are what people mostly respond to, not how realistic a figure’s joints happen to be. (And FWIW, a large number of Renaissance painters clearly have no idea what a female body looks like.)
By nyeah 2025-12-1917:56 Oh. My. God.
Andrei Rublev, 1360-1430? This dude? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Rublev#/media/File:Rubl...
Yeah he's good, that's obvious. Klimt cribbed from Rublev I bet. Naturalism was never the topic. But note that Rublev didn't do much work between AD500 and AD1300. Because not born yet. This is precisely why I wrote down dates, and why I am insisting on counterexamples instead of vague generalities.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-12-1821:061 reply Your exposure to medieval art must be very limited. I have seen some very magnificent pieces of medieval art personally. And paintings are a small part of what falls under "medieval art". Include those in the category, please.
And there is another element to consider, which is the purpose of the art. Medieval art was not concerned so much with realism, but with the symbolic.
I wonder: do you think Byzantine icons "suck"? I suspect you do.
Do you just want to generalize, or do you want to provide a counterexample? Fine either way.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-12-1918:261 reply Stop being an obnoxious pest.
What would be the point? Any example given will be met with some snarky and ignorant remark. Veit Stoss's Krakow triptych? Gentile da Fabriano's "Adoration of the Magi"? Byzantine art, like Monreale Cathedral? The Christ Pantocrator icon from St. Catherine's Monastery? Romanesque and gothic cathedrals? Ornate illuminated manuscripts? Shall I continue? You don't have to like medieval art, but claiming it "sucks" is not only generalizing (your very accusation in this thread), but it is boorish and ignorant. You've already gotten more "discussion" out of this topic than you deserve.
So, go troll somewhere else.
By nyeah 2025-12-1920:20 I checked your first example. It's from 1423, well outside the time period 500-1300. If you have valid examples, including the other works you mentioned above, please provide dates. I'm a little tired of doing that for people.
Adoration of the Magi, 1423. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoration_of_the_Magi_(Gentile...
Weell, there's a reason the Renaissance is called "renaissance" and not something else.
By Bayart 2025-12-1821:11 That reason is self-hype. The Renaissance was dreadful in comparison to the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period in much of Europe.
Go read the Book of the Games from the 1200's and now you'll learn something. The Middle ages were centuries wide. The last centuries had nothing to do, say, with the 5th century.
By Sharlin 2025-12-1912:17 I should have clarified that I meant there are reasons why the people who branded the Renaissance branded it like that.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-12-1821:102 reply The Renaissance is really the tail end of the Middle Ages historically, and the name is a bit of propaganda, just like "Enlightenment".
People flatter themselves.
By anthk 2025-12-1822:32 This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libro_de_los_juegos
13th century. Not just the art, but for the content. Truly ahead of its time.
> The Renaissance is really the tail end of the Middle Ages historically
And the Space Age is really the tail end of the Steam Age. Human history doesn't have any sharp divisors, aside from total genocides or the even rare natural disasters on the scale of Pompeii's demise.
The admittedly artificial definition of the start of the Renaissance, however, does help frame an explosive growth of useful new tools in art (and other endeavors), like perspective, oil paints, and so on.
By lo_zamoyski 2025-12-1918:02 You're missing the point.
Obviously, there is no sharp line. That is too trivial to mention. But the distinction is made, because it captures something about the characteristic spirit of an age.
In the received black legends of whig history, the Renaissance is typically presented as some kind of enlightened rift with and rebellion against the supposedly dark and evil Middle Ages, but in some sense, it is more accurate to view it as a culmination of the Middle Ages or something continuous with it.
You will find great rifts later on with the rise of modernism.
By marcellus23 2025-12-1818:14 The medieval period is different from the classical period. There's no reason to compare to medieval art when we have other examples of classical art that we can compare to.
By mminer237 2025-12-1815:34 Those are a few examples of weird art from hundreds of years of examples, but even then, those aren't super unskilled paintings. Medieval artists still used shading.
By Employee6645 2025-12-1914:18 "Written By Angelika Semynina" She writes exactly what we're taught in Russian universities; it's a textbook, almost word for word. Apparently, she's simply repeating the words of her teachers. I haven't seen anything like it anywhere else, and it comes not from professional art scholars, but from "philosophers." So I consider it more a form of coping than the result of scientific research. I have two Russian degrees, one in cultural studies and one in philosophy, and this is just my opinion.
By peacebeard 2025-12-1820:43 Medieval art isn't comparable to a 10 year old's paint by numbers kit either. As seen in your link, they understood how to use shading for light and shadow for example.
By cgh 2025-12-1818:56 You graciously omitted the article’s follow-on conclusion: the public is being gently trolled.
“On the other hand, at a time when trust in the honest intentions of experts is at a low, it may be unwise for experts to troll the public.”
By ActivePattern 2025-12-1814:451 reply I still don't understand is why they don't even make an attempt to apply overlayers, when (as the author notes) there is ample secondary evidence that it would be present. It's not like there isn't already some element of inference and "filling in the blanks" when reconstructing how something was painted from the scant traces of paint that survived.
By mbo 2025-12-1815:06 This is somewhat an unfounded theory of mine and I was hoping if anyone has any insight: but I sense that this is perhaps a construction of Western restoration/preservationist theory. A lot of effort seems to be taken to either preserve original material, not take liberties etc. While touring temples and museums in Japan, I got a sense that restorations were much more aggressive, and less regard was taken to the preservation of material (or building "fabric"), with a greater focus on the use of traditional techniques during restoration.
I think the best explanation is that classicists are not makeup artists. I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy. (I looked for the source I'm thinking of and it's drowned out by more credible modern attempts). There's a tendency the further north you go to think of the classical world as completely lost, discontinuous, and opaque to us, too, which adds to it.
By AdmiralAsshat 2025-12-1814:343 reply > I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy.
A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]
Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.
[0] https://eatshistory.com/the-oldest-recorded-recipe-babylonia...
[1] https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew
By buescher 2025-12-1814:44 There's probably a village in Iraq that traditionally makes something that would be recognizable to the ancients even if it uses potatoes now.
I have been reading cookbook from 1767. And mostly you get ingredients and probably not all of them. And sometimes you get amounts. And useful instructions like boil so many times... I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.
By ink_13 2025-12-1819:37 Old recipes are more memory cues for experienced cooks than the modern step-by-step guide for amateurs we are used to. They're scanty in detail because they assume quite a lot of existing knowledge.
It's the difference between "a chicken stew flavoured with turmeric and cumin, then rice enough to cook in and fully absorb the broth" and "first, take 500g of boneless skinless chicken thighs..."
By thaumasiotes 2025-12-1818:57 > I have understood that with those really old recipes, the person recording them might at best have been in the same room. But probably was not a chef.
That's going too far. The person recording them might be the same person who is used to making the food, or might be taking literal dictation from that person.
Knowing how to make food isn't the same skill as knowing how to explain the process in a way that someone who isn't already trained to make the food can follow.
By knome 2025-12-1815:04 archeologists needing a hand from modern experts reminds me, too, of Janet Stephens.
https://classics.rutgers.edu/the-hair-archaeologist-janet-st...
By JoeAltmaier 2025-12-1815:471 reply Huh. That's exactly how you make garum - an unpleasant horror of mashed fish. Refer to Max Miller and his spectacularly successful effort to reproduce Garum in his back yard.
It's one thing if you make a youtube video starting from already knowing how to make modern fish sauces, and what they're supposed to taste like, and quite another level of horror if you don't. My recollection of the letter or paper or whatever it was was that the person who wrote it was not at all pleased with the result.
There are folks that will insist that we don't know at all what Roman garum really tasted like or everything involved in its preparation, and they're not exactly wrong since Colatura di Alici can only be traced back to the middle ages, but it's also oddly obtuse. I think it was probably like modern fish sauces but Roman garum could have been as different from Colatura and Asian fish sauce as those are from Worcestershire.
By JoeAltmaier 2025-12-1913:22 Max had no idea whatsoever what he was doing. He did all the steps, didn't stop at the 'jesus that's disgusting' phase. Saw it through to the end. Even the complaints from his neighbors, he put up with. And got the most divine, golden syrupy sauce you can imagine, at the end. After all the gagging and stirring, straining and filtering and pressing.
By emursebrian 2025-12-1814:202 reply Fish sauce is also really popular in southeast Asia and Worcestershire sauce is often made with fermented fish so can also be considered garum adjacent.
By marginalia_nu 2025-12-1814:291 reply There's even a case that Ketchup is a distant relative, as it started out as South East Asian oyster sauce, was imported to Europe, turned into fermented mushroom sauce, was exported to the colonies, and finally turned into tomato sauce (though originally sometimes with fish in it).
Fermented mushroom sauce sounds so much better than ketchup! Tell me more. Does it still exist commercially?
By eszed 2025-12-1815:32 Yes! Search for "mushroom ketchup", and you'll find various examples for sale. Whatever kinds I've had are nice on bread, and really nice with eggs, but I wouldn't want to eat with chips / fries.
By camtarn 2025-12-1815:22 You can still sometimes find mushroom ketchup in UK supermarkets. It tastes a bit like Worcester sauce (spicy and 'brown' tasting), but milder as it has no anchovies in it.
By bsder 2025-12-1823:14 > so much better than ketchup
Careful. What we refer to as "tomato ketchup" has been bowdlerized and degraded by being made shelf stable.
"When Every Ketchup But One Went Extinct" https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-heinz-ketch...
By buescher 2025-12-1814:36 There's speculation that Asian fish sauce came from Greece through the same cultural diffusion processes that brought Greco-Buddhist sculpture as far as Japan.
By bgnn 2025-12-1820:32 And fermented shrimp paste and fish sauce are a thing in pretty much whole southeast Asia. Garum isn't too different.
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp_paste
By WorldMaker 2025-12-1816:371 reply There was a similar, maybe apocryphal, story recently of academic archaeologists stumped about an ancient tool until a person pulled out a crochet kit to fidget with their hands near the exhibit and it became obvious that it wasn't a lost tool they just hadn't put it in the right context.
That's the roman dodecahedrons that are a bit more mysterious than that - the "this is for knitting gloves" explanation is a real stretch, and not only because the Romans didn't have knitting.
By WorldMaker 2025-12-194:10 My understanding is that while wool knitting may have been a later invention (and that's disputed) and gloves a need for colder climates than the majority of the Roman Empire (assuming just function over fashion, and the Romans didn't seem immune to fashion), the Romans still had some forms of knitting (and/or "nalbinding" if you want to get extremely technical, but knitting seems a useful enough catch all word), it was just mostly knitting of things that weren't wool. One of the related theories I've seen is that the dodecahedrons may have been for knitting gold and surviving gold necklaces with intricate knit patterns do exist. (That theory maybe also helps explain why the dodecahedrons were often found among "jewelry boxes" and gold stashes.)
Also, even if the Roman Empire had wool knitting a lot of it wouldn't have survived archaeological records (textiles rarely do, which is a shame in general, and also arguably why there is so much bias against certain types of textiles in "historical records") and it seems hard to entirely dismiss the Roman Empire from having wool knitting given the extent of the Empire and how deep the history of wool knitting in the British Isles goes, at the very least, to which the Roman Empire had contact and trading.
