Whitewashing Marble

Dr. Sarah Bond, a professor of the classics at the University of Iowa, has recently written on the “whitewashing” (literally) of classical art and, consequently, our perceptions of the ancient world. Though classical sculpture is almost universally associated with white marble, over the last few decades researhers have employed increasingly complex methods to detect traces of the orginial paint and gold leaf; they have determined that, rather than the pristine marble that has come down to us over centuries of Eurocentric scholarship as the ideal of classical beauty, the statues were brightly polychromed, allowing classical artists to depict the wide range of ethnicities and skin tones that were, we now realize, present in the ancient Medeterranian. However, the study of classical sculptures and our conception of the makeup of the ancient world has not changed much, if at all, with the discovery of this would-be revolutionary information. This is attribtuable largely to the West’s collective prejudices and worldview, even within the academic community, that continue to hold the whiteness of Greek and Roman sculpture (long regarded as the foundation of European art) as the ideal, and percieving colorful ancient statue as somehow “barbaric.” We have long had evidence of this coloring of classical sculpture (even Pliny referenced it, so this willful ignorance has a long history in European art historical scholarship) but it didn’t fit our narrative of who we were, as ideal European creatures descended from the great classical cultures, and so it was for centuries if not denied then simply overlooked—ruled as having no bearing on our narrative. It is interesting to see how the ideas informing exceptionalsim and the epistimology of ignorance manifest themselves in much smaller and more obscure ways, seemingly unrelated to the history of the treatment of Africans in the West. This is a testament to the all-pervasive nature of a white-centric mindset in all aspects of traditional Western culture, and serves as an admonition to people who think we live in a post-racial society: even in the 21^st century, white culture can’t let go of the belief, almost humerously inconsequential, that it isn’t the exclusive focus of ancient sculpture.