White sculptures (E)

0:00Perhaps one day you will go on vacation to Italy, maybe Rome. And on a weekend, you might go a little bit outside of Rome with a shovel and start digging. And if you're very, very lucky, you might unearth a marble sculpture, a bust, something priceless. But you will look at it and quickly come to the conclusion that something is very wrong. Because the sculpture won't be bright white marble. The sculpture will be painted. Hey, it's Arav, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:48Margaret Talbot, in a great article in The New Yorker, chronicles chromophobia. The fear that historically some people have had of paint, of color, and the history of why we think that Greek and Roman sculptures, the ones that are coming to mind when you think of Greek and Roman sculptures, should be white. Because they weren't white. They were painted. And yet, we think they should be white. She quotes art historian Fabio Bari, who's now at Stanford, who's complaining that a recreation of some sculptures that he saw of the Emperor Augustus at the Vatican Museum, quote, look like a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi.

1:39But it's not just recently that people have spoken up, because it turns out it's not just recently that colored statues have been turning up. For over a hundred years, experts in the art world have known that marble sculptures from Greek and Rome were painted. And yet, despite all the evidence. Mostly, they're displayed in their original white. One reason is that when you look at these painted sculptures, and you can see some pictures at akimbo.link if you click the show notes, is that they look wrong. Not only do they look wrong in the sense that they don't match what we think they should look like, but they're sort of ugly, sort of amateurish.

2:28They rub people the wrong way. How did we get here? And what should we do about it? First, a little bit of a note about the regular kind when it comes to art. Think for a second, I'll wait, name the most famous painting in the world. You got it? Everyone says the same thing, the Mona Lisa. But as recently as 150 years ago, the Mona Lisa was generally unheard of. It wasn't a famous painting. It certainly wasn't considered the best painting in the world. So what happened? What happened is a great story. In 1911, an artist went to the Louvre to look at one of his favorite paintings. And instead of seeing the Mona Lisa, All he saw was an empty wall.

3:19He went to one of the guards and asked, where's the Mona Lisa? The guard said, I think it's being photographed. While not content with that answer, after a few hours, the artist went to the head of the guards only to discover that the painting had been stolen. They closed the Louvre for a week trying to find it. They arrested a number of suspects, including Pablo Picasso, but it wasn't him. It turns out it was an employee of the Louvre, a guy named Vincenzo Perugia. And he, a proud Italian, felt like the painting didn't belong in a French museum. And he walked in during the day and in broad daylight hid in a closet.

4:04He waited until the museum was closed. Then he snuck out, grabbed the painting off the wall, hid it under his coat, and walked out of the museum. and for two years, he hung it in his living room. But that's not answering the question. It's just juicy trivia. He hung it in his living room, and no one knew where it was. There was a rumor that someone had hired forgers to paint six variations of the Mona Lisa so they could be sold privately as the real thing. But mostly, because it was such a juicy story, it was on the front page of newspapers around the world. And in the early 1900s, many newspapers were actually in color.

4:50So here was this painting on the front page of newspapers around the world over and over again for years. And then, just as it started to fade, Vincenzo lost patience. So he went to the people who ran the Uffizi in Florence and offered to sell them the Mona Lisa. They demurred, had him arrested, but that didn't keep them from hanging it in the Uffizi for a few weeks before they sent it back to the Louvre. The thief only spent six months in an Italian prison, and then he was freed. Even more juice. So what that means is that for three years, three years when we were shifting from a culture of villages, disconnected villages, to a worldwide media culture, a period when newspapers were really starting to hit their stride, the Mona Lisa was shown to us over and over again.

5:48So if we didn't have an icon for a famous painting before, we had one now. And so the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting ever. So here's the question. The first question, if scholars determined that Leonardo actually painted a draft of the Mona Lisa with a mustache, and that that mustache was in his final painting, but that an art restorer had taken the mustache off, the question is, would we put the mustache back on? Maybe we like the white sculptures because they're the regular kind, because they remind us of a certain point of view about beauty, because they're famous. To be in the presence of a Michelangelo sculpture, a sculpture from ancient Greek or Rome, is why we went to the museum in the first place.

6:46And if they start painting them, maybe, just maybe, they won't feel like the famous sculptures. maybe they'll feel like cheap imposters. The story goes deeper than this, though. A guy named Johann Winckelmann was the German scholar who is often hailed as the father of art history. He lived hundreds of years ago. He wrote, the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is. And he also wrote, color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Now, it's really easy to infer some racial overtones here. Or consider Goethe. Goethe, who by some measures is the Shakespeare of Germany. He wrote many books, treatises, scientific papers.

7:39Here is Goethe's estimation of himself in his book on color theory. That I am the only person in this century who has the right insight into the difficult science of colors, That is what I am rather proud of, and that is what gives me the feeling that I have outstripped many. Wow, if he was around today, he would have invented Facebook. Anyway, here's what he said about whether or not ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were white or whether they were painted. Savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors. He went on to say, people of refinement avoid vivid colors in their dress and the objects that are about them.

8:32One theory then is that Northern European scholars were differentiating Greek and Roman sculpture from the sculptures they were finding, say, in Egypt or in parts of Africa or even Asia. Because those sculptures, those paintings, were painted vividly, sometimes garishly. And that's understandable. They are art, after all. And so one theory goes that Northern Europeans, like Goethe, like the sculptor Auguste Rodin, wanted the Greek and Roman statues to be white. White, the color of purity. White, the color that they were used to in their culture and society. Because white was beautiful. Color was garish.

9:24Color was from the other. Color was from the outside. But white, white was what they sought. But it goes even further than that. Because let's imagine for a moment you're a restorer, that you're working on the Elgin marbles at the British Museum, or that you found some sculpture in the ground, a sculpture that takes months to dig out. Your job, it seems, is to get as close to perfect as you can. Anyone who has ever used a power washer or a pair of electric hair clippers knows that the easiest way to get to perfect is to go all the way down to the skin. That once you start restoring one of these sculptures and part of it shows up white.

10:11Just keep going. Keep going because it's asymptotic. You can get closer and closer to perfect. There are no spots that don't quite match because it's all the same piece of rock. And so we have all of these things lining up as one. And then I'm going to add one other one, which is this. Sometimes we want to look at things that are beautiful and sometimes we want to look at things that are historic. And when we look at the recreations of painted sculptures, it's easy to say the person who sculpted this was a genius. There is almost no one alive today that we know of, if we're an outsider like I am, who could ever carve a piece of marble to make it look like this.

11:04And the thought that thousands of years ago, with no electricity and no power tools of any kind, someone quarried a giant piece of marble out of the side of a mountain and turned it into this, that is an act of genius. On the other hand, when we look at the colors that were chosen, at the way these sculptures were painted, it's easy to look at it and say, not only doesn't it inspire me, and that could be cultural, but I don't think it's that good. Because the fact is, the person who painted it probably wasn't in the same league, wasn't coming from the same background as the person who sculpted it.

11:51And that might be okay. So when we look at art historically, Maybe we need to celebrate the fact that when it was built, when it was erected, it looked like this. But it's not going to change the way our culture, influenced by positive and negative thoughts throughout the years, has decided it's supposed to look. And the same thing is true with every other element of our culture. We are surrounded by perceptions and myths about how something is supposed to be because that's the way we grew up with it. Think about something as ordinary as Indian food. Indian food wasn't spicy a thousand years ago.

12:35There were plenty of people in India, but there were no hot peppers, just black peppers. Hot peppers didn't get there until they came over by boat from the Americas. but that's the regular kind. Or consider the tomato. The tomato, something that wasn't served on a pizza in Italy until the year 1880. Why did it take so long for the tomato, first found by Europeans in Mesoamerica in the 1500s, to make its way onto the pizza? for a really long time, for centuries, Europeans were told that it was poisonous. It was poisonous, they said, possibly because if you had pewter plates, the acid from the tomato would react and could give you lead poisoning.

13:27It was poisonous, perhaps, because sometimes in the garden, big, ugly worms would eat the leaves of the tomato. I love this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said, The worm was an object of much terror, it being currently regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it should chance to crawl upon it. And the rumor spread that these worms were actually poisonous. But it's most likely that the tomato came from far away. that the tomato came from a warm climate. And so Northern Europeans, fearing the strange, fearing the warmth, the equator, said that it was best eaten by people who lived in a climate like that one.

14:20My point is, even after the tomato was demonstrated to be delicious and completely safe, you can imagine that generation after generation of traditionalists refused to put tomatoes on their pasta. The same thing may be true of the way we're looking at the history of what color a marble statue ought to be. Now when I look at it, having grown up believing that the regular kind of statue is white and maybe a little off-white, it looks weird, it looks funny, it looks wrong. But what the art experts, the art historians, the scholars are telling us is this is what it used to look like. And we need to look right at it and see it the way the Greeks and the Romans saw it.

15:10Because only then do we have a chance to develop the empathy to be able to understand that for them, this was the regular kind. The next time we take a look at a piece of culture, our piece of culture, and decide that we can't challenge the accepted regular kind. Perhaps it's worth taking a moment to consider why we think the new thing isn't the right thing. In a minute, we'll be back to answer your questions from last time. Hey Seth, it's Maria. Hey Seth, my name's Kyle. Greetings, Seth. This is Stephen out in Madison, Wisconsin. Hi Seth, Alicia from Charleston here. Hi Seth, this is Anupam. Hi, Hey, this is Caitlin.

15:52Hi, Seth. Warm greetings from Curacao. Hey, Seth. My name is Nick Ryan from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hey, Seth. This is Rex. Hey, Seth. Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. As always, we love to hear from you. Visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and press the appropriate button. you can ask your question, and I'll do my best to answer it. Before I answer Russell's question, a clarification about the fabulous Cubby Broccoli. Cubby Broccoli, like many people in Hollywood, made up a lot of stories. Some of those stories have been reported as truth by the LA Times and managed to surface their way into various corners of the internet.

16:44Cubby Broccoli's father did not invent broccoli, and I know that, But it's also true that many, many generations earlier, his family were broccoli farmers. And it's true that the land his father farmed broccoli on in Long Island enabled Cubby to have the resources to head to Hollywood, where it is possible he met Howard Hughes on his first day. And Howard Hughes ended up giving him a big break years later. Maybe. You can never tell with these things. Hi, Seth. My name is Russell from Ashland, Oregon. And I had a question for you about the evolution of ideas and maybe beliefs. So to make that clear, I think that we're largely driven by what we believe and what we believe is often unconscious.

17:43so if you're trying to reshape yourself or your small community that you've created and start pushing towards a different hopefully more positive shared belief that will guide people's actions like the belief that you can do good and get out there and make a ruckus For example, what do you do for yourself to maintain awareness, I guess, so that you can continue to push yourself in a new direction? And then what do you do when you're trying to have that persistence necessary in someone's life to continue reinforcing this new idea that you're trying to share with others? I hope that was clear, or at least is an interesting seed of a question that might come up later.

18:47Thank you. Thank you for this question, Russell. you're getting at the heart of how our brains work. It turns out that our conscious narrative, that homunculus up there that's narrating what's happening, almost never gets involved in our happiness, what we believe and what we do. That the subconscious is what's running everything and the conscious is simply a narrator. But to your point about beliefs, what we know is that we change our beliefs by changing what we do, not the other way around. That if we start acting like a generous person, we will come to believe that we need to be generous, not the other way around.

19:35So if we want to change the way a community believes, we begin by changing the way the community acts. Then when we catch people doing something right and amplify it and repeat it, the ideas are more likely to stick and to spread because people repeat what's working. So as the leader in the community, as somebody who is helping to set the standard, what we get to do is not really change beliefs. We could argue about those all day long. what we can do is model and reward and amplify actions. It gets back to the key sentence, people like us do things like this. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.