How We Whitewashed The Classical Era
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
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Salt the snail
Put the lotion on the skin
No
Just don't play June.
Warning: this game will make you leak classified info
Imagine in a few thousand years, a museum proudly displaying their collection of unpainted 40k minis as though it were the epitome of high art.
To be fair, I've seen some models painted to such an level that I would definitely consider high quality art worthy of display.
So, apparently if you donate toys to the V & A museum in the UK they have to accept it (albeit it goes to storage) in theory these collections of miniature armies will be put on display as a part of exhibitions in the distant future.
The problem is that they're going to find WAY more gray, unpainted ones without a hint of pigment from all those minis bought but never painted lmao.
@@mulletalchemist stop looking inside my garage
But they aaarrreeee, especially the once not updated since 1890
Important to note that a lot of statues also had gold elements and other metals, but unlike the paint that just naturally faded away, they were often stolen to be sold.
That doesnt seem important at all. This leftist jusyt made a video claiming that Italians and Greeks are black not white.... What are you even talking about?
Some good old patient pillager with a chisel can make a good dime like that.
Buildings got that treatment too, notably pyramid rocks, the top limestone was deliberately removed to make a settlement in what's now Cairo, but thousands of years of tourists, grave robbers and researchers also took a lot.
@@KasumiRINA I've heard that the Giza Pyramids originally had a gold peak on top of it, I'm not sure if it's true. I would also like to give a similiar example of what happened in Porto, Portugal. Most of Old City Wall is visible today because, as a relative time of peace came in Portugal, having a walled city became unecessary, so a lot of buildings around and outside the original city wall, used that stone for construction. You can notice it on a lot of the remnants of the city wall that still exist today.
Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini.
If you skin is the color of white marble call an ambulance immediately assuming you're not dead already.
The classical vandalism I’m saddest about is the neutering of the statues. We lost so much historical detail!
I agree, the scrotums of the gods and kings is of utmost historical import.
@@emlmm88and the schlongs. Those were pieces of honor among society
That's fine they were usually inaccurately sized anyway. In that time period having a large phallus was considered a bad thing so they would downsize them in order to impress everybody.
The puritan popes demanded a secret throne made of dongs smaller than their own.
@@TheRedRobin96 the opposite of angle frauding your dickpics XD
The classical era didnt look cold and disturbing, it was vibrant and full of colour
and full of slaves
@@basedchad6035 huh
@@basedchad6035 Source? As far as i know, being gay/bi was considered the normal trait for every heroic figure in greek literature.....
@@aureliodeprimus8018 Out of thousands of art depictions of sexual intercourse, only 3 are of gay intercourse. In all of Greek literature, there are 2 instances of gay intercourse(many more of straight intercourse) and in both cases, it's r@p3. Most Greek city states had severe legal penalties for gay intercourse(except for $l@v3$), such as death or exile, including Sparta and Athens. You clearly have no idea of the subject.
@@basedchad6035 the Greeks invented sex, the Romans introduced women.
As someone who studied history and archaeology in a past life, I absolutely agree that we should be teaching the public about what ancient statues really would have looked like, i.e. that they were painted in bright colours rather than being plain and white. I think it can be very helpful for museums to show painted replicas alongside the originals, to give an impression of what they might have looked like when they were new.
However, I don’t agree with simply repainting the ancient statues themselves, since (a.) no matter how well informed we think we are today, it’s just another layer of modern re-interpretation, and (b.) it might make it more difficult for future generations of scholars to study the works with technology and knowledge available to them (for example using scanning techniques that don’t exist yet). It’s the equivalent of the Victorians rebuilding ancient ruins like Knossos according to their own idealised image of them, and in the process destroying a lot of archaeological evidence that would have been very valuable to scholars today.
I agree 100%. Personally I wouldn't like the actual physical statues to be painted for those reasons, but everyone is free to make their own digital version of what originally would have looked like, and we should teach what would be considered the most historically accurate digital artistic representation.
You thought they're putting paint on actual historic pieces instead of replicas? Why, they would have only one shot at it then! No practice!
In many cases replicas are used to "repaint" the statues ...
I agree that we shouldn't destroy things by trying to fix them...
The example of Knossos is a very good one. It was terrible to find out it's interpretation made up by Evans and constructed using concrete. When I visited the palace in Malia, I was much more satisfied with what I saw.
Well said! Totally agree
As mid as Assassin's Creed Odyssey was, the colouring on the buildings and statues was absolutely fantastic
Greek here, it was pretty accurate.
Well, the actual world building and the game overall however. Its just an insulting SNL sketch parody of Assassins Creed itself. Much like how Syndicate was.
Imagine my surprise that it was the same team that made both games.
Literally the only real value that game offers is a nearby perfect historical reconstruction of Greece cities and architecture. Ubisoft should dedicate themselves to making 3D models of ancient lost cities in high detail because they aren't that great at making games
@@raulponce9012 they honestly should drop the entire endless templar/assassin war stuff and just make a straight to the point historical epic story. Make it an anthology where the Assassin's are merely a small part of the story.
It was certainly good enough for one of my university archaeology lecturers to use it as a example of a decent recreation.
The most frustrating discussion about the colors on statues I had was back in University. A bloody art student kept arguing they could not have been painted because they looked more ugly like that. That was his whole argument. He didn't like the look so it wasn't real. And he tried to convince someone studying late antiquity to early medieval European history with that....
the recreations are badly painted. they look ugly because theyre badly done. get a makeup artist in there and we might get an accurate representation that would have pacified your friend.
they werent colored like a childrens coloring book (like they are in the recrestions) any extant fresco would quickly dismiss this idea.
these recreations are painted badly because nerds generally dont know how to paint or do makeups. the reality is in between the white and the clown shit they are claiming is "actually authentic". no its not. ancients painted eyelashes and details and didnt paint their extremely lifelike sculptures like they were painting a deck.
youre friend had a point - they are hideous. but if they had seen the thutmose nefertiti they would have easily accepted that they were painted.
they took as much care to paint the statue as they did to carve it - these examples show no care and no skill and should rightly be questioned for authenticity.
these sculptures are painted like an andy warhol print - its just as much of a fallacy as saying they werent painted. its garish and clownish and has nothing to do with the aesthetic of the era.
I mean, they weren't painted like the recreations. We have surviving tile murals with very elaborate and bueatiful shading. I'd love to see copies shaded with what we have of their surviving asthetic - not this base coat only nonsense.
yeah sounds about right for an art student
@@TheGrinningViking Afaik the base coats is one step in recreating the way ancient statues were painted, and would make for a great first publication on the topic before further researching the more intricate details (EDIT: that is, thinking as a researcher that has to continually source funding from somewhere in an incredibly competitive field). Determining the shading techniques is a tad harder due to those details generally fading earlier, compared to mosaics, where the colour is much more intrinsic to the material and not coating the base. Another interesting consideration might be that some form of glazing was performed, or that the lighting used on the recreations/modern day painted statues is not entirely representative of how they would see them antiquity.
Remember seeing similiar thing with feather dinosaurs. "But they look stupid with feathers, like chickens"
The really fun thing is: We have known this for round about 130 years. The architect who built the Austrian parliament (his brother was an archaeologist and he himself spent a lot of time in Greece) even tried to make his classicist style parliament colourful. Remains of that attempt are still there.
Yeah, I feel like I learned about this in an anthropology class at university...and that was in the early 90's.
I think a big part is representation in media. Most people who didn't happen to hear about this will likely just assume that most of them were white since that's how much of modern pop culture depicts antiquity.
Yes, this is just bad pop history. The debate over classical statue polychromy was settled in the nineteenth century, and has been standard teaching in classical studies ever since. I'm a double classics major, and I learned this as soon as we started studying classical art.
@@veritasetcaritas this right here is kinda the problem . alot of well educated people sort of seem to think all this is their own closed off world. and when idiots and grifters find stuff like this online they make conspiracy bullshit out of it. of course the main offender there would be the neo nazi prick. but academia needs to stop being arrogant, and make things more accessible and simple be better at educating and informing the general public.
And the painting in the upper right corner shown at 9:10 was made by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1868. Which just goes to show how much the guy tried to be historically accurate for the time he lived in, his art is beautiful.
(Phidias showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends
I think a lot of the issues normal people have with colorful statues is that reconstructions don't have any shading which was probably there
Exactly. The modern painting on all of these is terrible. The original statues, whether mass produced or unique, were made by highly skilled artists and craftspeople. The statues are elegant and intricately detailed, and would surely have been painted as elegantly and intricately. But we don't know how they did that. Painting them badly is _far worse_ than leaving them blank.
@@dustybeijing Warhammer figurine painters know how to do it.
Any figurine-selling company does.
Even games back in 1990 knew how to do it, it was called texture painting.
Yeah, the claim that this is *actually* accurate is downright wrong. You can't just replicate the work of some truly magnificent artists by looking at the odd patch of paint residue. Past humans weren't more primitive. If someone said they could replicate the mona lisa from a few paintbrush scratches and spots of paint you'd rightly call them insane. I'm not sure where we go from here though- is it right to leave them ravaged by time, or should we let modern artists try their best to replicate a perceived style from the time?
@@JOCoStudio1 I think the only real way is to hire prop makers, they make well-painted statues and other stuff for film, right?
They could have the chops to do the statues justice.
Hah, or maybe makeup artists.
The problem with this view is a lack of evidence. Of course to our modern eye being painted without shading or other modern techniques looks at best weird and a worst straight up bad, but it wouldn't necessarily have to an ancient viewer. Art is not only subjective to an individual but also to societies more generally. Colour, its use and realism are, ultimately, subjective and so these statues may well have seemed "realistic" to a classical viewer. All that being said, there probably was more at play than some reconstructions make it seem like, but with such little evidence for it, using it on a reconstruction would be nothing more than conjecture. Ultimately, we may have to accept that sculpture wouldn't have looked as attractive by our modern artificial standards, but that's ok. History and archaeology isn't about projecting onto the past what we want to be there, but rather understanding what we know was there. I would also check out the work of Vinzenz Brinkmann who has some really excellent and highly accurate (as far as we can tell) reconstructions.
This is common knowledge here in Greece, don't know why foreigners are unaware of this.
Well racism was normalize bach then so back then maybe people choose to have a perception that it's always white and that pass on and everyone forgot and thought it always white and they been depicted as white every since
They're racists. They aren't scholars.
Same in Italy. We always have before and after images.
I'm kinda sad that this hasn't spread farther. I would've loved to see this discussion in school
@@USSAnimeNCC- not everyone, clearly. southern europeans definitely remember and have always known about the coloring of these statues, you can see 2 people attest to that on this comment alone.
Renaissance sculptors like Michelangelo, Cellini and Donatello made beautiful sculptures with plain marble far after the classical era. It's true that this was based upon a misunderstanding of classical art, but they belong to their own period of history and are beautiful in their own right.
I mean, sometimes not only was it a misunderstanding, but also a huge lack of information. The little traces of colour could be mistaken for dirt residue since red was the most preserved, and archaeology was basically not even a thing until the 18th century. So I'd say they didn't misunderstand most of it, but instead you could say that they worked best with what little knowledge of antiquity they were given (And also the slave trade and church control over science really pushed the narrative of white antiquity)
Hah! Us miniatures wargamers were right all along! You can't make the details pop or look interesting unless you put some paint on them.
Does DnD count as a miniature wargame?
untrue. with good lighting these skulptures have been invaluable to volume drawing practice for artists for years.
given. fabric stonework would likely be given new life if the fabrics had embroidered patterns
@@Skoopyghost wargames qre quite literally that: war games. No story, just battlefield, units and (sometimes) things that award points.
D&D is an role playing game. There is nothing wrong with that, It's just a different thing.
I'm pretty sue they meant everyone who paints miniatures.
Ironically you just know full well at least a few of the nazis who sent death threats over this were big fans of Warhammer 40k. Probably have a whole think about their ultramarine colour pallettes as well.
@@Skoopyghost I guess you could play DnD _as_ a miniature wargame, but the game isn't inherently about war, and often doesn't use any miniatures either, so no.
I’m a classical history PhD - this is not at all controversial. I don’t think that objects should be ‘restored’ without good objective information about the original though, but that’s just me being fussy about art conservation and restoration. But yeah the things glittered with colour wherever they could. There’s also evidence for statues being garlanded or dressed in materials (flowers, cloth etc) that certainly don’t survive. There’s also the issue of how the Romans of the Hellenistic period ‘received’ Greek culture - how they adapted it to their own ends, it wouldn’t surprise me if their decoration and display of imported & stolen statuary had significant differences to the Greek and near eastern cultures they adapted it from. And then how the Roman Empire in turn changed the cultures they conquered (a more well researched topic).
One more thing - ‘art’ is also a 17th century term in the way we understand and apply that term. Many of these statues would be out in public as or part of triumphant monuments, or be cloistered as part of the ‘sacred’ - viewing context matters.
"how many times do you want to re-make the same video Adam?"
"YES"
I'm not complaining.
at least this time he has actual argument instead of just strawmanning people and people and calling them racists because of his simplistic generalizations
He made a video on this before?
@@MeEntertainmentJo_876 This is, what, the third one?
@@MagnusMoerkoereJohannesen The third? I only remember one video.
Also, a lot of ancient statues were actually bronze with only their marble recreations surviving today, bronze was used for both its strength and because unpainted it looked like bronze tanned skin
Well that makes me see the Statue of Liberty differently.
@@henryfleischer404 the statue of liberty is made out of copper, which is why it's turned turquoise over time as that's what happens to copper when it oxidises.
@@Reiver-93 yeah, it's called patina or to be vexatiously pedantic on copper specifically it's called verdigris. it does happen to bronze too, which is not really surprising, since the alloy is mainly composed of copper.
My credential: I'm Italian, and after studying art and art techniques for a decade, in my youth I've worked as an art conservationist. I specified my nationality because there is a never-ending battle between the Italian and the Anglo-Saxon approach to art restoration, and you can guess from which trench I'm shooting. Curiously, said skirmish happens to be extremely relevant to the matter discussed in this video.
To avoid the TED Talk effect, suffice to say that whilst Anglo-Saxons strives to restore any art piece to its "original state" (as close as possible to the way it looked when created), Italians conservationists follows the "Brandi's Rules": Reversibility, Recognisability, and Historic Mindfulness. In other words, every "touch up" must be easily undone if needed, distinguishable from the original parts, and respectful of the history of the piece. Whilst the first two rules are pretty straightforward (You don't want to get stuck with something you can't undo in case newer and better technologies pops out, nor you want to create a forgery), the third rule is worth explaining. How Historic Mindfulness even looks like in a piece?
Well, this part is the one that truly differ from the Anglo-Saxon approach, because it goes against the idea of "bringing back" a piece. Whilst from a purely technical standpoint trying to wind back a piece to the day it left the workshop could be problematic (for instance, it's well documented that most artists, especially during the Renaissance and the Baroque eras, used to mix their materials in such a way that only after decades the pigments would stabilise as the artist intended. It's called "patina", a very effective way to increase durability), the prickliest implications are historical. Every piece has its history, every alteration, every retouch, every sign of time, is part of that history, and is not the job of a conservationist to erase it (like those bunch of whitewashers did with the classical statues) but to preserve the mere matter of the piece in order to keep it standing as long as possible, in the best possible conditions.
There really isn't an instance where glossing over something like Time is a good idea, and Art is not an exception. It isn't a mystery that ancient Greeks and Romans painted their sculptures and low reliefs, but what happened to many of those works is now part of them. Adam said in the video: "Those statues for most part are not contemporary art pieces, they are historical art pieces, and the primary reason we look at historical art pieces is not to look at beautiful things but to look at history". And you are looking at it, Adam.
Should we try to restore the pieces who hasn't been scrubbed within an inch of their life? Absolutely. Should we create painted copy of the scrubbed statues for context? Absolutely. Should we gather as much information as possible about the nature and hues of the tiny specks of pigments left before embarking in a wild renderization of primal screaming colours that could be just as misleading as the whitewash? Abso-forking-lutely.
As an Italian lucky enough to grow up under the same roof with grandparents who seriously struggled during WW2, I have quite the massive bone to pick with any sort of fascist. Especially with those who wobble in my area of expertise and try to plaster their stinky rhetoric over the products of a culture that has nothing to do with them. So, I'm seriously pissed that I have to take this stance in this discussion, but it's about Art. It's supposed to be above all this, it's suppose to be immortal, and record every milestone of our time on this Earth. Even the one we don't like.
Shit, I did the TED-talk thing, didn't I?
Is anyone actually pigmenting historic statuary? Every example I've seen has been on reproductions.
@@calmeilles Of course not, even the most enthusiastic among art conservationists wouldn't dare to alter such iconic pieces with so little documentation. And I mean, even if they could: I most certainly doubt governments and private collectors will ever agree to any of that until the science and the documentation are rock solid.
But they're painting copies with the same level of "intelligence" (or better, lack of thereof), and then they publish the result. Which is a questionable thing to do, imho, even with all the disclaimers this kind of projects usually bring along.
the newest fascism is what this vid represents the anti-white woke culture, which tries to ridicule and destroy our history, very disgusting
@@EveningSoother I didn't think so.
But given what the French have done with the recent "restoration" of Chatres I thought it necessary to ask.
The search for spurious authenticity leads to some strange places at time.
@@calmeilles Couldn't agree more. There are some serious offenders out there, sometimes not even illustrious landmarks are safe, as you have mention, Chartres is an unfortunate example of just that. In this case I think the ancient statues are relatively out of reach (for now), because adding something comes with more red tapes and controversy than _removing_ something. If you add the lack of info to the equation, more than a renovation it would end up to be a guesswork at best. That should stop even the zealous ones, or at least so I hope.
This also happens to more recent history! There's a common misconception of Victorian fashion being dark and dreary, but look at fashion catalogues and fabric samples from the time and you can see they loved colour.
they definitely wore it if they could produce a dye for it. much of our dyes today are a relatively recent development using chemistry to create synthetic pigments safely (much of the green used in late victorian era was processed with arsenic...people literally dying for dye)
while there are some examples of victorians in some color, the vast majority was still black and brown, and white as these are the easiest colors to produced and most common of the era. (but also i think people see black and white photos and unless they look at paintings are gonna think its more goth than it was...but...it kinda was goth, lol)
What in Gods name are you talking about? This leftist has just made a video saying that Southern Europeans are not white but black and that their statues were whitewashed to justify black slavery....
Yoo fun fact about that, I have a fashion book in french from the 1880's, huge ass book bigger than an a4 and leatherbound. The thing is full of colourfull outfits, like if you ignore the rib crushing corsets those outfits are gorgeous.
@@senrogas387 have you scanned this? I'd love to take a look.
Hell, it’s already happening to the 1990’s!
Tbh I prefer the colored statues. They feel alot more natural. Like something a person of the Era would actually make
Eh, a person of the ROMAN era. Most Greek statues were bronzes, and most famous “Greek” statues made of marble are Roman-era copies of Greek bronzes.
I do prefer the bear statues but it’s purely to do with my interest in art being more based around light than color. I like seeing how light bounces off of fine details in marble, color can be a bit of an absorber which kills a bit of the vibe.
that's because the painted copies are only given the base coat, not the ones that bring out the shading
It took me some time getting used to it but now i prefer them
I just prefer seeing what the artists of the time were able to do. Like, there are some works from ancient China and Japan that show off the colors and designs they were able to get in the way, way back on their diningware. Some of it could pass as stuff you'd eat off of today. Understanding that artists in the older eras were just as keen to use color as we are is a big realization.
I remember being told as a boy by my father in the 1970s that classical sculptures were originally painted and colorful. This was also noted by my classics teachers and in a number of readings as I recall. Did I somehow shift to a parallel world were this wasn’t known? The world has become a pantomime of stupidity. WTF is the big deal?
WHat do you mean what is the big deal? This leftist goofball is trying to say that Southern Europeans are/were not 'white" so they were 'whitewashed' to justify slavery of black Africans.... Its the dumbest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. Are Southern Europeans black like this leftist is saying? They are not white? WHat are they?
OMG I feel the same way! It's like I have found myself in Bizzarro land. I need to get back to my regular timeline but I"m stuck here in Crazyville where the fascists are taking over! It's scary!
i never knew lmao, only learnt through this video
We've known about painted statues and buildings for decades, but nobody told the far-right until recently.
The author is just anti-white and tries to convince us how ridiculous their history is.
That the statues and buildings were painted is basically basic knowledge now. Everybody remotely interested in ancient architecture and art knows that.
Warthunder trying to replace us.
Shameful.
But most people who are not interested in ancient architecture don't. Yet it's relevant even to them because white supremacists keep lying about it.
Also in Germany, we know, that medieval Building were paintet in bright colours. The only myth is, that red paint was red because it was made from blood, as old blood would turn brown. The red Paint was actually made from iron ore (mixed with blood to stick it onto the surface). Also the glory days of Torture weren't the middle ages, but instead the rennaisance. And the catholic church didn't burn witches, it burned heretics. Protestant burned witches. Catholics even considered people who believe witches exist to be heretics (and burned them). Also Christians never claimed the Earth were flat, as this was already dated at the time of christ himself.
@@Ribulose15diphosphat Technically the catholic church burnt no one, at least in Germany. They found out that some was a heretic and then handed him over to the local jurisdiction who then burnt them (sometimes like in Bamberg or Würzburg they were the local jurisdiction themselves, but semantics...
there's also people not remotely interested in ancient architecture and art
The high medieval era is indeed in need of a makeover in its popular depiction. The people and buildings were clean and colorful.
HE JUST MADE A VIDEO SAYING THAT GREEKS AND ITALIANS ARE BLACK NOT WHITE AND THEIR STATUES HAVE BEEN WHITEWASHED TO JUSTIFY WHITE SUPREMACY AND BLACK SLAVERY! And that was your comment? What?
the joke is people in the renessance era were dirty and didn't bathe while medival society used saunas
While they were most likely not clean by standards of modern society, they were most likely a lot cleaner than people in later eras as public baths fall out of fashion after plague. Not to mention the times church started to mess with hygiene later on.
Yeah, standards went severely downhill after the plague into the early-modern era.
There's also the nomenclature we use - "dark ages" is intended to refer to the lack of intellectual advancement not the color palette used at the time.
But even taking the intentional meaning, modern folk tend to assume that people of the day were a bunch of absolute idiots. That's just completely silly. People weren't appreciably different in medieval times - that lack of "intellectual advancement" relates to philosophy and (what we now call) science - stuff that average farmers and millwrights generally wouldn't have participated in no matter the era, but they still knew how to work a farm or run a mill just as well as their ancestors.
the newer assassins creed games in egypt and greece had super nice painted statues and temples etc.
You mean the new one in Egypt that is. The one in Greece was an SNL sketch cash grab parody of Assassins Creed.
@@memecliparchives2254 The point is that good or bad, the game did get the details about the buildings and statues right.
@Pepe Edge Meh, it more or less didn't in certain areas. It just plastered colors and samey buildings almost everywhere.
And how can anyone forget how they made with the bit of the Misthios' child going to Egypt when apparently the pyramids were being BUILT WHEN THEY WERE SUPPOSEDLY BUILT LONG AGO?!
This game only does a fraction of something right.
The 2004 Alexander movie also had them.
From what I remember, the statues were still plain marble. But architecture, clothing, etc were all top notch.
I believe it's only in Odyssey that they actually gave the statues colour.
these statues are so beautifully carved, I can't imagine that they didn't do proper shading because all the details from the stones would vanish. I always imagine these statues to be almost photorealistic.
They're described as that and they were probably shaded, it's just that we don't have those shades, we just have the plain colours. The most famous pictures of painted statues come from ane xposition taht chose to not interpret any other layer than the base one ^^
@@krankarvolund7771 Would be nice if they'd show some recreations with shading. Maybe just describe that no one really knows how the original shading would have looked like or something
@@Vynzent they likely would've been shaded specifically for the place where they were displayed with specific lighting so it would be extra hard to do in a museum
If you are thinking about the detailed lace carvings and statues like David, those are 1500 years younger than for example the Venus of Milo. Classical statues don't necessarily have that detail, and they were made in quantity for the roman elite.
The Greeks saw the works of Egypt, the near and middle East, Persia
After all they fought as mercenary soldiers for many of those countries
They didn't invent monumental architecture or statues.
"They're also strangely obsessed with height, and consider tall people to be inherently superior to short people"
I give it ten, twenty years and we'll be there
The Minoans would be horrified at the lack of color, tbh.
Were they black?
@@theoneonly259 They were actually a tribe of sexy vampires that lived in peace prosperity until one with burning ambition crafted a stone mask that would help his people conquer the sun.
They struck down his ideas and he had to destroy them.
@@Vynzent *awaken starts playing*
@@theoneonly259 You know their ancestors still live, right? Look up "Crete people". by Slavic definition, yes, they're who we call "black". By American definition, no, they're who Americans call "brown" because race is a social construct that differs depending on which country and society you look from.
Adam Something has two moods:
1. Showing the pointlessness and tragedy of the war in Ukraine
2. Getting that sweet sponsorship from War Thunder
Great video overall :D
You forgot about his third mood: when he becomes train-o-philic.
We have Twitter feminists, and UA-cam socialists.
booo for wt
I mean Putin could just play WT instead of actually going to war.
@@einbaerchen2995 Well boys we did it, we fixed war. Turns out that plan of capturing Kaliningrad by building a beer pipe from Prague was not necesarry.
i've said this before, in museums and historical exhibition there should be 3 to 4 version of one exhibit that shows 1. the current and real specimen which is preserved to prevent even more wear, 2. a replica that shows how it might have looked like in it's hay day, 3. a modern replica that incorporate modern techniques to build upon the piece so we can show how far we've progressed and the optional 4. a replica of the specimen when it's first discovered so we could see how misunderstanding or mistakes could've been made from our predecessors that discovered it
This also happened with European plate armour from the medieval and renaissance period. It was typically painted or enamelled and highly colourful, but so much of it got wirebrushed to shiny bare steel in the 1800s and 1900s by antiquarians. Either because they thought it looked better or because they didn't want to upkeep the fading paint.
In the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) we still paint our plate armor for practical reasons. If you show up on the battlefield and you're the shiniest person, you're much more likely to get clobbered. You'd be amazed how quickly practicality takes over what you're taught is historical when you actually start doing it. Then only later people find out that was the legitimate way all along.
Historically the more expensive your armour looked the LESS likely you are to get arbitrarily “cobbled” because you’d be seen as a valuable hostage. Many a fortune were made dragging an enemy Noble off the Field and ransoming them.
This also happened to dinosaurs, where we figured out that most of them had feathers.
Thing is, you can still draw, imagine, and enjoy stories about naked dinosaurs, or white statues.
Just know that it's not as correct as we once thought it was.
I like both styles. However, the bleached statues look good in a vacuum, while the painted ones look good with the appropriate context (so as intended, restored properly).
I do like the "misunderstood" building styles too. I like toimagine what the capitol building would look like full of color 😂.
Does the bleached statue look good because we've always been exposed to that colour scheme for decades and told that "this is a relic from a great age of enlightenment"?
@@ChasmChaos I'll say it looks good because of the craftsmanship, the structure looks good on it's own, but obviously I wouldn't have the same "superficial" opinion if I would have seen the same statues but painted through all my life ig
@@emiliosuarez2232 that's true. It's so hard to guess because there are no counterfactuals.
I guess white clothing is also a sign of opulence. Cricket, a British sport, was traditionally played in white clothing since it's a "gentleman's game". The gentlemen never had to bother with cleaning those clothes themselves. Football, another popular British game, was pretty much a working class sport and it never involved white clothing.
I can imagine that those hidden biases came to dominate archeologists as they discovered these statues.
I like the exhibitions where they project the colour on the original statues using lights. The lights can be slowly brought up and down to show the difference. I think its an effective way to bring people over who are otherwise resistant because of the perceptions they've had since childhood.
7:20 man, Cultural Tutor is probably the only good non-farright twitter account with an antique statue profile pic, and you just put him at the forefront as a farright personality. You just did him diiiirty
Was looking for this, feels like it was a poor categorisation. Would love either a correction or explanation!
Yeah, that account does NOT belong with the others.
My problem with the "why not do shading on these statues?" Is that many of these statues were meant to be put outside/naturally lit environments. The lighting would constantly change. It would look weird to anyone for a statue to be shaded as though it is 6:30 pm and view at any other time.
I agree with the photorealism part, add texture, be ambitious, but photorealistic doesn't mean putting black in the creases.
If anything I'd say that photorealism on those statues mean hiring some lighting tech wizards to make the lighting moodier and given them shadows. They're sculptures, they don't NEED shading, they HAVE IT BUILT IN, take your spotlight away and upward and you'll see!
It's kind of like complaining your high-quality action figure isn't shaded, when it's supposed to be posed and the lighting is supposed to cast shadows and shines.
Painted or not, those statues mainly portay white/caucasian people. So I don't understand, what difference does it make to paint them or not from a cultural standpoint. Therefore I can't understand those who think that painting them or writing about them being painted, somehow is anti-white. But I also can't understand those who think not painting them is somehow whitewashing.
No. White is an American term used to lump all Europeans together, people who live in Europe call themselves Italian, French, etc.
The people depicted in these paintings were white accourding to the definition that they were European, but their skin was olive or brown as they were not Northerners. This means that if they were accurate depictions, the idea that they have actual white skin like the slavers who found them would be instantly shattered: Instantly making them worthless for furthering their racist propaganda.
@@Dimitris_Half Then pls. tell me, how can you whitewash a caucasian culture. I mean, that those scupltures are portraying white people, not black, not asian etc. So? You can see the facial structures and all. So liking them painted or not is really just a preference.
Are you drunk, high, on drugs or just trolling?
If there is paint still on the statue that I think it needs to stay there, even if it's patchy. But if people are making educated guesses then I'd rather they leave it alone. A good compromise would be having a copy nearby with the assumed color work added and why we think that.
Pretty sure they only paint replicas
@@tf7602 looked it up, and everywhere that is the case. you always save a backup, and in the case of archaeology, always leave the original as future reference. the 4 colored statues side by side example present multiple times throughout the video is even a cast scaled replica, I believe.
@@firstletterofthealphabet7308 That also makes easily the most sense, because you might want to reaxamine details of the statue to try to extract more information from it in case you missed something.
Historians are not idiots ^^'
"And then they started getting death threats from the far-right"
I feel like anyone who proposes any change can expect those at this point.
Change? You don't receive threats from alt right for simply existing? What level of privilege is this, lol.
Tbh those "death threats" were as serious as the "rape threats" 12 yrs old CoD players pose when fucking your mum when they lose
Honestly it's hard to consider that anything more than an adult child throwing a temper tantrum. Imagine getting so fucking triggered by a statue having paint on it at one point that you have to threaten to murder anyone who says that.
@@Colddirector I think it's more because people are spending their time in (online) echo chambers and it's easy to type a death threat on Twitter and not face to face with a fellow human being
We must not tolerate this bullshit any longer. Those vicious trolls should get punished at court for threatening or stirring up people. Lock them up, until they have finally learned how to behave like a reasonable adult person.
In antiquity there was the concept of the 'Horror vacuii', the fear of nothingness. And the colour white represented this absence of something. This resulted in white parts of the statue even being painted with a white paint, so that way there would be at least paint on it, even if it would not change the colour of it. The perception of the colour white as a symbol of cleanliness and purity only came to be with Christianity.
for me its like people getting angry at feathers on dinosaurs
like .. bruh .. that's the animal
1.) Thank you for pointing out the middle ages also suffering from this. I cannot speak for the "medieval community" or however you want to call us, but I'm sure I'm not the only one appreciating a more well-known youtuber talking about this outside of the explicitly medieval historical niche of this site.
2. I think it's very good that you emphasised the last point about the "culture war". I find it very harmful how apparently anyone and anything needs to be openly politically biased to "the left" or "the right" nowadays. I continue to unintentionally get into political arguments when merely talking about history due it not fitting modern ideals, and it's very refreshing to see someone as public as you speak about this, especially considering the political nature of much of your content. I appreciate it very much.
"height guilt" had me rollin' 😆
9:45 As a German I always wondered why these medieval German architectures in movies were greyed out, always thought it was just an effect to sell the bleakness of the scene since living here you always see all those historical buildings in bright colors. The more you know.
The painted statues look WAY better. And it's much more fun to imagine ancient Greece and Rome with all those colors. The only problem is, at least here in Canada, we only ever see painted statues in parks for children or McDonald's or whatever, so yes, by that association it makes them seem targeted at a less sophisticated audience, or "cheap". Most of our "statues for adults" are a monochrome green (oxidized bronze). I don't think I've seen a purely white statue outside of a museum.
Personally I prefer the unpainted look, but there's no reason we can't have both - acknowledge the statues were origionally painted but appreciate the white statues for their albeit unintentional pristine aesthetic.
The fun part is that armour from medieval periods was also frequently painted, but was scrubbed and polished by folks in later centuries when the paint was worn (for decoration in mansions of course) so we see a lot of plain metal in the maintained examples.
Still, Cleopatra wasn't from the Bronx.
Wtf u talking about
True, she was from Egypt which makes her even more dark skinned.
@@trithos7308
No idea what skin color the ancient egyptians had.
Cleopatra, however, came from an incestuous Macedonian-Greek dynasty.
At least the Cleopatra that we know from art, culture and media.
i mean the pure white look is kinda cool
I don't usually play Ubisoft games but I got AC: Odyssey for free, and walking around ancient Greek cities with painted columns and statues was magical.
Thank you for touching upon the horribly botched restorations. A point other content creators tend to skip when covering this topic.
I personally do not want the statues lazily/incompetently painted over like that, because it hides the incredible craftsmanship and attention to detail.
It is like having someone put ketchup on a Michelin dinner.
We can make copies, put pain on those.
EDIT:
What I am saying is that surely the ancients spent a ton of energy on color grading or else there would have been zero point in the super detailed sculptures. Because without colour grading, you cannot see the effing detail and would be a waste of time.
Yeah, like how there are super well-painted Warhammer figurines... and then very badly painted ones comparable to classic restorations.
@@Utrilus even badly painted figures can serve as literal cannon footer on the battle field.
But... those are the finest of the finest pieces, not a terracotta army; yet even those where painted, but the theory that a general was more elaborately painted then a foot solder should not be controversial.
You thought they're putting paint on actual historic pieces instead of replicas? Why, they would have only one shot at it then! No practice!
@@mfaizsyahmi Because that is what they have done to paintings and statues from other periods, instead of making replicas.
You can see examples of that in this very video, examples I actually mention in my response to the previous video.
Look, the ancients were amazing artists, who did incredibly detailed sculptures and used different materials for eyes and teeth to make them look like real people.
It is borderline a mockery to have amateurs(based on their craftsmanship) cover it all in flat colors, making the statues look like something from comic books.
He meant the other way around. Comparing the scrubbed white statues with the botched restorations. Unless he was sarcastic?
I think the original statues shouldn't be restored, because what we're seeing looks like just the base paint. It would probably be pretty easy tho to make replicas that you can paint in accordance to the pigment traces researchers have found, and ancient descriptions/ surviving art, but also add some shading on it, so that people get an idea of what it probably looked like. Just like they don't go around making new arms or heads on broken sculptures, because you couldn't replicate it well enough
Both the Antiquitous Periods and Middle Ages get terribly misinterpreted due to Renaissance/Enlightenment perspectives and stereotypes. As someone who loves antiquity and is studying an MA in Medieval History, its always mind boggling hearing the stereotypes
I personally prefer the color statues and usually focus on this more in terms of Ren/Enlightenment Progression theory but this is a pretty fun look at trying to understand the emphasis of white statues in the later Renaissance and early modern period
well this is over focussing on periods and extrapolating the medieval period the reneisance created it exists, it's basically the 1300's and 1400's as the medieval system collapsed into an era of crisis due to the plague, and the increasingly unsustainable feudal structure's incentives. which lead to massively violent, and brutal civil wars in england, france, and the empire. while their view of the clasical period was influenced by like the athenian golden age, and the Roman pax romana before the empire went into full collapse
This again?
There is no proof that the Ancient Greeks preferred poorly painted statues over not painted at all.
I find it absurd that the Ancient Greeks would make statues with lifelike anatomy only to paint with the most basic of colours with no shading.
Egyptian hieroglyphics aren't anatomically correct, they are SUPPOSED to be stylized, and the colour also adds to the readability. Meanwhile these poorly painted statues subtract from the readability due to the lack of any shading or detail.
Funny how much of it comes down to the best stone on hand for carving happening to be white. Of course, it's also the best base color for painting other colors onto.
Haven’t you talked about this before???
Yeah he did speak about this before in one of his first videos and then again in a remake of that same video
Now he has better editing. I thin he hired someone.
Hes running out of ideas. Recent videos have not been quality
He did talk about it twice, but the video got pulled down twice, so he’s doing it properly this time around.
Have you watched the full video? Adam explains it in the end (after ad)
this is an aside, but, at 7:17; 'The Cultural Tutor' is definitely not a white supremacist page imo
Like, first of all, WE did not whitewash anything, time literally did that. No one in Renaissance-era Italy could have, would have or should have known that the white sculptures they knew and saw scattered around were once colorfully painted a millennia or so ago. They saw them as being white, so white statues became a fad, but we thankfully grew and we know better now. People who cant cope with that fact today, on the other hand, are complete assholes. As are people who use it as some sort of critique of society and make it out to be full on planed and purposeful anti-colorism and anti-queer agenda. It just happened. Its a historical misunderstanding, and its a topic Left UA-cam had now done multiple times. Its been done ad nauseum. Like fine, we get it, classical statues were painted, and some demented right wing fan boys got upset over it. Its not a proof of a wide societal far right conspiracy, and the left seems to be the ones who actually crave to make it another culture war talking point. Chill out, its not that serious.
I think a nice compromise would be having a plaque with an image depicting what the sculpture would have looked like originally, in front of the sculpture. And perhaps when people warm up to the idea, we can paint only the ones that we ourselves removed the paint from, leaving the ones where the paint degraded over time and wasn't due to our whitewashing.
Ironically iirc there is a letter by a roman stereotyping light skin with weakness (by staying indoors) and "uncivilized rashness"
Sunburn is no joke, and then pain gets worse at night.
There is a certain simplicity and tranquility to the completely white marble statue look. That said historically accurate painted statues can look gorgeous as well. (Though sometimes they do look kind of garish)
when there's little paint detail at all, they look terrible. But when added the right detail and amount of paint, they look incredible. But yes, plain stone is it's own aeasthetic
check out the thutmose nefertiti bust! this is a beautifully painted extant example!
the recreations look garish because they are. these recreations do a disservice to the reality of the era because the they are colored in crudely and with no actual artistic skill. they seem to think the ancients painted their statues like we would paint a car, when the reality the statues would be incredibly lifelike with delicate eyelashes and changes in tone across their complexions. highlights would be added into their hair and cheeks. think of how mannequins back in the day would be painted to resemble actual women.
these statues look like they were painted with homer simpsons make-up shotgun.
like any art, some of it is amazing and some of it isnt
@@diktatoralexander88 Exactly. And it would be rather 'inconsistent', if they were to put so much effort into creating a highly detailed and accurate statue from stone would would then not have taken - the substantial lower effort - of painting it in detail with multiple layers and shading.
What you consider garish is probably culturally indoctrinated into us all - put there deliberately by people who wanted a way to deride other cultures who often wear brightly coloured things - think traditional clothing in Africa, India, South East Asia, and the Americas. It becomes more apparent when you look back at how colourful Western styles were before this cultural hierarchy needed to be established to justify Empire.
Identity politics really do be the worst modern concept
As a model painter, I would love to see some speculative layers and details restored to a replica of these just so get a closer look at what they might have been like when recently painted, since sadly allot of it is lost.
ps. love the Heroes of Might and Magic score.
We live in an era where people care about the detail of the carving, not the colour. We care more of the skill of the artist designing than the extra colours added.
@@relvezz6997 I can admire a model for it's mold as well as appreciate a good paintjob, one does not exclude the other.
But looking at an unfinished render becomes boring eventually, as well as historically inaccurate.
One thing you did not mention is that Bronze statues do exist and have been known for centuries. They have been created both by ancient greeks and reinassance artists, and they are displayed in museums (for example, look up to the Riace Bronzes or the Donatello's David)
Were they painted, too?
Making bronze statues goes much further back than the Greeks, there are examples known from 2500 BCE. The Greeks are notable for making them life sized, a difficult task for lost wax casting.
@@tortenschachtel9498 check out some with the eyes still intact! hauntingly lifelike. i wouldnt be surprised if they were painted - but ancient greek mythology has a whole thing with past generations of humans being made of bronze - it could literally be what they were going for - or perhaps the statues helped influence the mythology.
but definitely check out the bronze sculptures with eyes, they appear to be looking into your soul! haha😂
You should definitely not 'restore' classical statues. The thing is that we have no idea how they were painted. Little to no physical evidence has survived and we don't have any detailed descriptions. So unfortunately it's impossible for us to restore these statues. You could make your best guess as to how they looked, but if we don't know for sure I think it would be a huge disservice to try and paint them. To me that would not be restoration, just guesswork.
And no, I'm not a nazi.
I like the unpainted statues, but that's because it feels less cheap than a plasticy looking painted one. But to the Romans and ancient Greeks, colors were symbols of wealth, which means a painted statue would symbolize wealth more to them than me.
Not really, marble had always been expensive ^^'
@@krankarvolund7771 yeah its bizarre how people are literally just making things up in this thread
@@krankarvolund7771 Marble was still expensive, but pigments (at least for some colours, especially red, blue, and purple) were much more expensive in the classical era than they are today, especially ones that lasted a long time. Johan isn't wrong. The marble was cheap _compared to the paint._
If you look at any roman painting or mosaic you always see realistic looking colors, shading etc, nobody can tell me they did that for everything but some of the most expensive and most public things they had. The plasticy look, in my eyes is just scientist screwing up, not the way the romans or greeks actually painted their statues, at most it was the base paint with every other layer seemingly having been lost due to the sun.
@@nathangamble125 absolutely not. the argument makes no sense. the statues were incredibly expensive and time consuming to create. whoever commissioned them would want them painted beautifully. the artist doing the painting would be trained in the craft of producing their own paints and pigments, it was part of the professional craft. an artists job was to know how to crush up their own pigments to create the paint and then paint them.
yes these painters were expensive and yes their supplies were expensive - but nowhere near the cost of a professional sculptor and the supplies needed to carve the figure (including the marble - the most expensive aspect of the whole production).
whether it was a private client, the governing body, or the religious temple commisioning the statue - it would be a massively expensive and time consuming thought out process, and the idea that it was actually the paint that was so expensive to the whole ordeal is ludicrous.
its like buying a brand new mercedes, but oooh its the paint job that really sets you back. please, if you dont know what youre talking about, why say anything.
Damn, how about a "receive far right death threat any % speedrun" aka. work in science
Or just come out as trans. Saves you the trouble of making the choice to study something for years when instead you can just be hated for being born
@@VitaeLibra or just exist really, because i am not trans and got bashed by the far right for being a leftist, thank jod they didn't found out i was autistic
@@chronictimewasterdisease basically, if you aren't with them you're against them
You aren't completely wrong but I have some concerns about the timeline. Scientific racism was a thing, and Fascism does cling to idealized ancient Rome and Greece (while also misrepresentating them like by scrubbing Roman sexuality) , but IIRC best estimates put the start of the Atlantic slave trade around 1526 which is after the deaths of Leonardo and Raphael who are partly credited with the "high rennisance" in Italy where the whole revival began, because like, Rome. Even michalenglo was more into architecture at the time and was pretty much done with statues and paintings he took inspiration from. So while the end result is the same, how we got there is kind different, Italians were obsessed with the form and body structures of the statues more than the colours which was expressed more through paintings.
I’ve always found the white statues quite boring, and I find it very interesting that they did in fact color the statues.
It makes sense, of course, why wouldn’t they? It’s not as if color didn’t exist, or they didn’t know how to make things have different colors. lol
Especially if you stop and consider that everything else was painted ^^
Mosaïcs were colourful, frecsas were painted, etc... But only the exterior of the buildings and the statues were not. I wonder if that's because it was the only thing that were left in the elements XD
@@krankarvolund7771 or perhaps why these colors appear so garish - the outside weathered off the details and only the base coat or primer remains. i can imagine the colors needed wouldnt be immune to the elements, and would require regular touchups.
i have a hard time placing the lifelike frescoes in the same space as these terribly painted statues. the only conclusion that is left is that these statues were not painted terribly, but actually would have been the pinnacle of artistic merit. a lifelike sculpt deserves a lifelike paint.
@@NIGHTGUYRYAN The terribly painted statues were an exercise to show what could be reconstructed from what was left from the painting. No one believes they really looked like that, not even the historians who reconstructed them, they just didn't want to too much extrapolations.
i think the viewers and general public are confused. i wish they'd provide an honest example so we could appreciate that the sculptures were painted well, and that these reproductions are only worse than the blanks because of some specific scientific analysis or experiment. it sends a confusing message as there has been little to rectify the misunderstanding.
Whitewashed architecture was a thing in Medieval times as well.
Where castles were whitewashed by the ones who made them, because a white castle is a striking visual that showed your wealth and influence to keep it clean as well.
These are times way before the mass enslavement of Africans. So no, the origin of whitewashed architecture is not to justify slavery, it's a flex on your contemporaries.
And as people continued to be wealthy into future eras, and new elites want to show that they are also among the elite, they just continued the whitewashed architecture.
Ok, is Adam going to make video how much of this video is incorrect? Scholars already knew about the color of statues since the 19th century. And no, people weren't intentionally trying to scrub off the color in museums. No, we knew that plates weren't just in black and white. This is what happens when you don't based your information on scholarship and instead, of some article in media. Kinda disappointed in Adam here. Oh, and Renaissance happened in a different period than the Transatlantic slave trade and nothing to do with ancient sources. C'mon people.
Someone has already added sponsor block to this lol. Good work.
I think it's at least a bit automated. I've occasionally had clearly parody advertisements blocked by it before, which humans wouldn't do.
Salt the snail 🐌
@@DrDrao skillshare and war thunder could have automatic detection 💀
i really like the idea of the statues being painted, and its not like it invalidades solid color statues either, monochromatic drawings/paintings coexist alongside colored ones so i dont see why the same cant be true of statues, also a similar thing happened to plate armor, most of them werent shining polished steel, cause that degrades really damn fast, and honestly i love the idea of knights wearing really elaborate painted armor
Most armor in the high renissance period was polished, and blued. GIlded in some areas. Over time, and due to washings, it becomes grey and down to bare metal. But when brand new it would've looked really classy.
@@diktatoralexander88 Also, if one is rich enough and wants to show/flaunt it. Having elaborate forming or colouring on it does not seem out of the question due to the cost involved in it (similar to how pure white cloth was long reserved for the wealthy due to the difficulty in keeping it perfectly clean at all times).
@@zephyros256 youre still all around hammering this idea that the paint was so expensive when youre actually talking about fabric dye.
fabric dye and paint are two completely different things. for centuries and centuries we only had like 4 or 5 colors we could dye clothes - and even then there were SUMPTUARY LAWS making it illegal for commoners to ever where these colors.
youre conflating paint and dye and spreading misinformation all over these comments making it seem like the paint was so expensive and using examples that are clearly referring to fabric dye.
then you are conflating someone showing off colors as if its the most expensive thing only a king could afford it - when in reality the king was the only one allowed to wear it.
WEARING PURPLE didnt show people you had money, it showed people you were KING. it had nothing to do with appearing wealthy to show off, if you werent a member of the ruling class, it didnt matter how wealthy you were - it was illegal to wear the color if you werent a member of the ruling class legally allowed to do so.
it has NOTHING to do with paint. people dont go - oooh this painting has purple in it, it must mean whoever commissioned it must be sooo wealthy. now if it was a painting of a specific person of royal stature - then the purple in his clothing would tell the viewer that this person is wearing purple - he must be a member of the royal family or whatever governing aristocracy it represented to that era and that location.
if someone commissioned a painting of a purple flower - perhaps it could be interpreted as symbolizing a ruling class or person - or it could be just a purple flower.
it has NEVER been the case that someone looks at purple paint and thinks "oh wow, purple paint is so expensive - this guy must be so wealthy. he went an splurged on purple."
now PURPLE DYE for CLOTHING is a different story. but that has nothing to do with this topic.
if someone commissioned a marble statue it means they have wealth. its not the purple paint on a statue that makes it impressive. and its not that purple dye was soooo expensive you had to be wealthy to wear it - it was illegal for anyone below social class to wear it. it would be akin to impersonating a police officer today. a very big deal.
stop mixing up dye and paint. they arent the same thing and they dont represent what you think they do, or atleast for the reasons you keep repeating.
And dinosaurs were feathered
And still nobody asked the Greeks who are the owners of the classical era artworks. Literally it is common knowledge here that the statues were in colour and there are displays of classical statues in colour in museums, nobody in Greece cares too much about it, but somehow far right Americans and Europeans need to have an opinion about our culture
Just to add, this is well known in Belgium, not controversial at all.
But honestly they look nicer just plain white imo. Painted they kind of look tacky
Can't wait to see the next part of this series!
I will never quite understand how either side likes to forget mediterranean people exist, Cleopatra wasn't black or white, nor was Julius Caesar or Alexander.
Mediterranean peoples (Spain, Egypt, Libya, Greece, Turkey, Italy, etc) come in a huge variety of colors and shades; my own skin can go from pale olive or even greyish in winter to a bronze tan in the summer; from this alone and all the trade going around the antiquity would have been really quite colorful, and that's just skin.
Far rights don't know that paint has been a thing for thousands of years? Hieroglyphs were painted, they just preserved a lot better indoors in a dry environment, what? the greeks didn't know how to make paint? Despite the many descriptions of color and heraldry in the epics? The wind and sun corroded the colors!
In the Ashmolean there's a painted version of the 'Augustus of Prima Porta' statue, with an explanation of why it's painted
Pretty neat
Wait a second this is just the same video you’ve made 2 times already
I can't remember who said it, but I remember someone said "Right wingers hate painted Greek statues, because it reveals the fact that the ancient Greeks were just gay Mexicans."
7:47 Sure, with the amount of paint residue it's not always possible to replicate the layers, so archeologists can only reproduce the base paint, not the shades or highlights. But at least for the ancient Roman statues it's still ahistoric to assume those weren't there originally because if you look at their other classical art (such as frescoes of the era) they feature high detail and shading. For me it's not about what we find pleasing, but more about how artifacts should be presented: just as they were dug up, restore only the features we know for a fact, or recreate missing details based on holistic knowledge about the region and era. Each are valid, just don't try to scrape the paint off.
Now I want to play Age of Empires, and I don't know why......
Let's hope the constant rewriting, upgrading and polishing of this video will become a yearly tradition on this channel.
'We've been lied to' - by whom? Your clickbait title is irritating because you point out that the experts explain that the statues were painted (and they've been saying this for at least 20 years, btw). If people choose to listen to anyone else more fool them. This feels like a filler video so you can milk the sponsor than a video with much real content to it.
You’re commenting on costume and set inaccuracies in medieval-set films? This feels like an Adam-Bernadette/Karolina fusion and I love it! Lol
When it comes to purity, as represented by color, you can't possibly get any less pure than white.
is this a follow up or a repost?
either way I am glad you are covering this important subject!
A entire video dedicated to batshit insane reaches that make pike formations seem like toothpicks. Impressive.
I love you showed Ben Shapiro as an example of a short person
Yes making fun of someones physical appearance is hilarious stuff. Especially if you dislike them. I mean - its not wrong if you believe they deserve it right? That why the left will always have the moral high ground....
I have to wonder if in the classical era the original painters understood layering and shading. Our attempts at restorations do look flat, but it's based on what we can tell from what little we have to look at. Looking at the sculpts, they obviously had the skill to create a lifelike representation of a person out of a rock.
Pompei frescoes. Other classical frescoes. Other classical mosaics. Encaustic portraits of the dead on Helenistic Egyptian coffin lids.
They knew colour, shading - they _knew_ it and they _did_ it, sometimes exceptionally well.
The far-right whenever people discover ancient civilizations had taste: "And I took that personally."
As a Greek, I must say that the civilization of my ancestors isn't their property and it never will be.
@@azazel166 Far-right Greeks have as much right to the past as you do. 🤷♂
Well, they look at the statue of David and get penis envy. Sad people.
@@jackbenny4458 What exactly does a right to the past entail?
Well, they are Greek like me, despite their brains having being burnt by that poison.
Far right Americans, and other like minded foreigners on the other hand have no right to it.
Well. Yes, but actually no. So, yes, greek statues were in most case painted, if in white marble.
No, we should not start painting them, because the sign of the time that passed is also important. We should not alter any statue in any way.
We do not know how the statues were painted, we only know some of the pigments. Also, no, not every statue is white. Romans and late alexandrines did not always paint because they used colorfull marble and golden bronze instead. Then the reinassance people had their own taste, that is the one that inspired neoclassical, that is fairly white...but slave trade and reinassance are separated by hundreds of years.
So the ideology of white statues might be bad. But let's calm down.
God thank you, I thought I was losing my mind. This controversy is insane to me.
"Ahh you main helicopters, that's WOKE" hahahahaha
Thank you for not shit talking vaporwave, not a nazi movement lol
That can't be right, colours weren't invented until the 1960s.
If you take an art history class the fact that there was more color than previously known is discussed. This is discussed in depth, in fact. Since when was this controversial? It’s my understand that the reason why most of these status don’t have color is because many of them were discovered that way.
Controversial in places where people don't have art history classes, in my country, art is not an obligatory subject and a school can choose if they are going to teach it or not, and most people don't go to university to get an Art History degree, so probably there are some ignorant people out there.
I learnt this in University and playing AC Odyssey.
It didn't become controversial until a few years ago when Sarah Bond an article about it in Forbes, explicitly linking the preference for white sculptures to racism. I don't know if there really is much "controversy" tbh, just a few people grumbling that they like bare marble better. But Adam frequents very different parts of the internet than I do.
@@EebstertheGreat yeah twitter is where all the nazis are now and they always use greek sculptures as part of their adentity
Yes but a couple of people on the far right who were most likely leftists posing as Nazis made some death threats about this which means that Southern Europeans are black and that their statues have been whitewashed to justify white supremacy and black slavery... Ha. Leftists.
tbh, this one is a bit too reductive. Renaissance Italy's white statues and English scientific racism are 200 years and 750 kilometres apart. I''m all for painted statues but that does not mean white statues are nazi.
Because some of those colored statues would undoubtedly have red, brown, and black skin. But anytime you bring up that black people had civilizations, and even mingled with Europeans, they fly into a rage. The funny thing is that black people have all of the features of other races. They have blonde hair, blue eyes, almond shaped eyes, aquiline noses, thin lips, high cheek bones, etc. But cognitive dissonance is a mofo.
I really gotta appreciate the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 OST in some parts of the video! Kudos 😁
how can someone who spends so much time talking about how bad elon musk is be sponsored by warthunder a russian based company, on top of the game being pay to win and eternally grindy
yea idk dude is losing respect by the boatload with how he handles sponsorships :(
Breaking news, paint exists.
Great video, but the renaissance and scientific racism happened almost 400 years apart.