Exhibition of the week

Exhibition of the week

Color of Life

Getty Villa, Pacific Palisades, Calif.

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Through June 23

Most of us imagine that sculptures in antiquity were a “pristine white,” as we see them in museums, said Jim Farber in the Torrance, Calif., Daily Breeze. In fact, many were vibrantly colored—some more or less realistically, others using pigment “as a coded message to imply status, such as gilded faces for the gods.” A “myth-debunking” new exhibition at the Getty Villa suggests how Greek and Roman sculptures may have really looked, and in the process “demonstrates how color has been a part of sculpture and architecture for nearly 5,000 years.” The exhibit includes many sculptures rarely seen outside their home countries, alongside plaster re-creations of what they might have looked like when new. In the show’s centerpiece, a speculative model of a Greek temple to Athena, “the painting of the figures and the patterning of their costumes is vibrant.”

But it’s not particularly pretty, said Holly Myers in the Los Angeles Times. “The colors are bright, flat, and slightly garish—more suited to a child’s playroom, it would seem, than the hallowed quarters of a fine art museum.” After decades of admiring elegantly bare antique sculptures, these loud shades are an affront to our expectations—and our sense of taste. This exhibition reminds us that many virtues ascribed to ancient works—form, simplicity, elegance—in part reflected the preferences of such Renaissance imitators of classical works as Leonardo da Vinci. By supplementing re-creations of the ancient works with examples of colored sculpture from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance itself, the Color of Life “makes a valiant—and persuasive—case” that the past was more colorful than we thought.

I’m not quite persuaded, said Mary Beard in the London Times online. “I may be an old romantic,” but the garish hues on the re-creations in this exhibition seem implausible. Surely the Romans, at least, painted their sculptures with delicate washes and a degree of subtlety. More worryingly, the Color of Life raises certain questions it can’t answer. “Why on earth did Romans polish their marble statues (as we know they did) if they were going to cover them up with thick coats of paint?” And why are there so

few references to colored sculpture in Greek and Roman sources compared to those that “sing of the translucent, unadorned white marble of their favorite statues”? This fascinating exhibit is just a bit too sure of its scholarly assertions. Sorry, but “the jury’s still out.”