BMCR 2009.04.55: Bradley on Panzanelli, The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present

Roberta Panzanelli, Eike D. Schmidt, Kenneth Lapatin (ed.), The Color
of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present.  Los
Angeles:  J. Paul Getty Museum: The Getty Research Institute, 2008.
Pp. xiv, 186.  ISBN 9780892369188.  $49.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Mark Bradley, University of Nottingham
([email protected])
Word count:  3460 words
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

The first decade of the twenty-first century represents the latest
phase in a long series of periodic attempts by classical art historians
stretching back to the late eighteenth century to convince the world
that Greek and Roman marble sculpture was, on the whole, originally
coloured. Since 2003, high-profile exhibitions of painted Greek and
Roman casts, painstakingly studied and reconstructed by experts from
across Europe, have made their rounds across more than ten
international venues, attracting extensive media coverage and sparking
a renewed interest in sculptural polychromy in both popular and
academic circles.[[1]] This truly international initiative has been the
first major exhibition of the subject in over a century, setting the
scene for a number of important projects addressing the archaeological
identification and reconstruction of pigments, as well as the
art-historical importance of colour on ancient sculpture.[[2]] This is
not to say that sculptural polychromy has had the last word: the
provocative exhibitions have met with some stubborn resistance, and the
exhibits themselves attest as much to the limitations of our knowledge
and understanding about sculptural polychromy as they do to the fact
that colour on sculpture completely transforms the artifact on
artistic, iconographic and psychological grounds.[[3]]

The present volume, produced to accompany a homonymous exhibition at
the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2008, represents the most successful and
compelling effort yet to put sculptural polychromy on the map. Unlike
the other exhibitions, 'The Color of Life'  juxtaposed many of the
painted classical reconstructions to a wide variety of medieval and
modern polychrome sculptures, and so integrated different strands of
art-historical research that had previously, on the whole, been kept
separate. Panzanelli's volume is an extraordinary tour de force of
colour in western sculpture from Old Kingdom Egypt, ancient Greece and
Rome, through to medieval Europe and the modern world. Typically of
Getty publications, it is beautifully illustrated with nearly two
hundred illustrations (mostly in colour), providing - at a very
reasonable price - some of the best images publicly available for the
study of polychrome sculpture. It comprises five comprehensive essays
on different periods and aspects of polychrome sculpture written by
experts from various fields, followed by a catalogue of forty artifacts
displayed in the exhibition, representing the full range of sculpture
types and materials and spanning more than 2,500 years of sculptural
polychromy in western art. The essays and catalogue entries are written
by individuals from a range of backgrounds, principally curatorial
staff, as well as some distinguished academic names (Mary Beard, Paolo
Liverani, Alex Potts). The volume also contains a comprehensive index
and a useful selected bibliography. The Color of Life, then, is an
outstanding piece of work both for its art-historical scope and its
detail, and ought to be a first port of call for students and scholars
alike approaching the aesthetics of colour in western sculpture.

The volume opens with a substantial introduction by the editor
addressing the general contribution of sculptural polychromy to western
art. This is a wide-ranging essay which, although it moves around
rather freely among ancient, medieval and modern sculpture and offers a
largely ahistorical picture of artistic developments, identifies a
number of important patterns, regarding both the principal functions of
polychromy (vivacity/ heroicism/ artistic impact, mimesis, legibility)
and aesthetic responses to colour. Panzanelli, Senior Research
Specialist at the Getty, is particularly shrewd in her analysis of the
modern reception of polychrome sculpture and the aesthetic role of
monochromy in Renaissance and neo-classical art: for example, her
notion of the effect of time and weathering on ancient sculpture for
providing a 'topcoat of "good taste"' (p. 7) is neatly connected to a
modern aesthetic preference for incomplete, sullied and monochrome art,
and she does a competent job of outlining the Renaissance disjunction
between sculpture and painting which contributed to the growing
distaste for sculptural polychromy. She also points to a number of
important themes that are picked up later in the volume: artistic
collaboration between sculptors and painters; the difference between
natural and applied colour in sculpture; the role of colour in
physiognomical accuracy; intentional partial polychromy versus full
polychromy with partial losses; and Winckelmann's aesthetic of pure
unadulterated whiteness.

V. Brinkmann, the author of the second contribution, is one of the
leading pioneers in the study of ancient sculptural polychromy and has
done more than any other individual in recent history to advance
research into the identification and reconstruction of pigments on
classical sculpture. His essay on the polychromy of ancient Greek
sculpture provides an excellent summary of the history of scholarship
on the subject and begins judiciously with a cautionary note about the
limitations of our knowledge, a theme which is reiterated several times
in the volume. There follows an outline of the various scientific
methods of identifying and analysing pigment traces, a set of processes
to which Brinkmann has devoted more than twenty years of research, and
a compelling statement about the importance of experimental
reconstruction. Less well developed is his interpretation of the
function of colour on Greek sculpture, which focuses principally on
realism and legibility: 'the goal of the artist was to give life to his
work' (p. 24). This is all fair and good, but has limitations as an
approach: it ignores the ideas explored in B. Ridgway's important essay
'How: the role of color' in her Prayers in stone: Greek architectural
sculpture ca. 600 - 100 B.C. (Berkeley, 1999) - surprisingly not
referenced by Brinkmann - about unrealistic uses of colour on Archaic
statuary and the fundamental differences between legible colours and
realistic colours. Brinkmann also fails to engage with some of the most
pivotal recent studies of classical sculpture which stress the
importance of the ambiguity inherent to the relationship between art
and life, particularly in the domain of religious imagery and the
representation of 'super-natural' figures; recent work on the
deployment of colour on Greco-Roman sculpture could make an important
contribution to this approach.[[4]] Nonetheless, this essay is useful
for its introduction to the palettes of polychrome sculpture, painting
techniques, patterns of colour usage, as well as the use of metal
attachments (which, quite rightly, should be integrated under the same
heading). Significantly, Brinkmann argues against the usual line that
earlier sculpture was painted in simple and underdeveloped ways, and
that sculptural polychromy became more sophisticated over time. This
has to be right: the idea of an evolutionary development of artistic
techniques is over-simplistic - although I suspect that Brinkmann could
have developed a rather stronger case for the patterns of archaic
sculptural polychromy than simply connecting it (as he does) to the
general tropes of Homeric ekphrasis. There follows a concise and
interesting summary of developments in later Classical and Hellenistic
periods and an excellent discussion of polychromy on the Alexander
Sarcophagus, although - and this is an endemic shortcoming of recent
scholarship on the subject - the author (p. 36) is dismissive of the
capacity for the underlying stone to enhance and enrich the visual
effects of the pigments.[[5]] Brinkmann ends by pointing to the
continuity between Hellenistic and Roman techniques and patterns, so
providing a useful bridge with the paper that follows.

J. Oestergaard's essay is an engaging and thoughtful overview of the
history, archaeology and aesthetics of Roman polychrome sculpture, and
provides an original and much-needed discussion of a period of ancient
sculptural polychromy that is comparatively neglected. Oestergaard
begins with an astute and sensitive discussion of the reception of
polychrome sculpture in art-historical and archaeological circles
across the last two hundred years, and offers a useful e/tat de
recherche on the study of Roman sculpture, pointing to the limitations
of Reuterswaerd's classic 1960 monograph. He discusses continuities not
only from Greek and Hellenistic patterns, but also from the rich
polychromy of Etruscan terracotta sculpture. One of this essay's
particular strengths is its engagement with the bigger questions and
issues that concern the volume as a whole: the limitations of our
knowledge and understanding; the importance of experimental
reconstructions; modern resistance to polychromy; the erosion and
decomposition of pigments and restoration. The essay then considers the
significance of Campanian wall-paintings as sources of information
about painted sculpture, although not taking advantage of P. Stewart's
sensitive discussion of the same examples in his splendid Statues in
Roman society: representation and response (2003), where ambiguity is
at the centre of sculptural representations, and colour is critical to
the complex interface between art and life. Like Brinkmann, Oestergaard
touches upon the problematic relationship between the innate colour/
texture of the stone and coloured coatings (e.g. at pp. 46-47 he
discusses the painting of the Parian marble Venus Lovatelli at
Pompeii), but does not really explore the possibilities available to
the painter to exploit the crystalline structure of the marble.
Oestergaard goes on to discuss the shifting aesthetics of Roman marble
copies of Greek bronze originals, as well as the corruption of pigments
and surfaces over time and the important question of how polychromy
might be restored. On bronzes, the author might have made use of two
excellent discussions of artistic mimesis in variegated bronze statues
and ancient ekphrasis by S. Descamps-Lequime and M. Muller-Dufeu in A.
Rouveret's 2006 volume Couleurs et matie\res dans l'antiquite/: texts,
techniques et pratiques (Paris), which demonstrate that ancient bronze
polychromy may have been rather more complex and sophisticated than we
might expect. Oestergaard goes on to consider the effect of the
architectural setting on polychrome sculpture and discusses artistic
developments in Rome in the middle and late-imperial periods, and
finishes by pointing to the need for further research, particularly for
the Roman material. In this respect, the significance of his own
project on sculptural polychromy in the Copenhagen Glyptotek, currently
underway, is not to be underestimated.

The fourth essay by M. Collareta on sculpture in the Middle Ages and
Early Modern times is a wide-ranging diachronic study of evidence for
polychromy on wood, terracotta, wax and marble church sculpture, and,
through a discussion of the increasing disunion of painting and
sculpture, offers a useful background to Renaissance preferences for
monochrome sculpture. It is a shame that the editor was unable to
incorporate into the volume an essay on colour in Byzantine art (on
which some seminal work has been done by L. James, though not
specifically focused on sculpture), as it would have been useful to
consider the nature of developments in this intervening period, which
must be critical to understanding the continuity of artistic practice.
Nonetheless, by surveying both visual and literary evidence, Collareta
offers an interesting analysis of the relationship between intellectual
thought and sculptural practice in the period he examines, interpreting
artistic preferences as the product of various political and religious
developments in Europe. Of particular interest is the author's
discussion of the relationship between colour and holiness (an idea
that chimes with work on Byzantine art), as well as the increasing use
of precious materials for sculpture which contributed to aesthetic
preferences for the materiality of sculpture rather than just its
capacity to imitate life. This growing preoccupation with sculptural
materiality, Collareta argues, alongside Renaissance rediscoveries of
classical pieces devoid of colour, contributed greatly to the movement
towards sculptural monochromy.

A. Potts's 'Colors of Sculpture', which focuses on modern polychrome
sculpture, is a well-written and engaging closing piece, and presents
some of the most pertinent and sophisticated theoretical considerations
in the volume. Potts begins with the important observation that 'all
sculpture is colored, in a literal sense' (p. 78), and offers a
compelling interpretation of the role of monochrome sculpture in modern
art. He argues that the plasticity and monochromy that characterise
modern sculpture are a result of the differentiation of painting and
sculpture, an aesthetic that appeals as much to the tactile senses as
to the visual. Potts then makes a number of important observations
about modern resistance to polychrome sculpture and the subversive
character of recent coloured (i.e. non-white) sculpture that challenges
conventional boundaries between art, life and materiality. He goes on
to discuss three historical phases when issues of colour particularly
came to the fore in modern western sculptural practice: neoclassicism
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when colour first
became an aesthetic principle rather than a matter of practice or
convention (with polychromy expressly rejected by thinkers such as
Herdel, Hegel and Joshua Reynolds); the reaction against the
classicizing aesthetic at the turn of the nineteenth century, where
neoclassical 'purism' was challenged by bold, experimental artists such
as Canova, John Gibson and Jean-Le/on Ge/ro^me, in part responding to
new archaeological discoveries of ancient polychrome sculptures; and
the breakdown of traditions surrounding sculptural art between the
1960s and 1980s, marked by a deliberate confusion of painting and
sculpture and bold experimentation with unorthodox sculptural materials
and colours. Throughout all three phases, Potts emphasizes the guiding
significance of individual protagonists and his account of artistic
developments is therefore predominantly prosopographical. Nonetheless,
Potts puts his finger on a number of broader cultural and aesthetic
trends, and offers a compelling interpretation of the relationship
between sculpture and colour in the modern world. He ends (p. 95) with
the claim that 'we live in a world where both possibilities [monochrome
and polychrome sculpture] are a distinct reality, and no particular
virtue any longer attaches to either alternative'. While there has
certainly been a recent shift in modern sensibilities about sculptural
polychromy, the passionate responses still sometimes elicited by
exhibitions of painted classical casts, and the continued stubbornness
of classical art historians to approach sculptures such as the Prima
Porta Augustus (however aesthetically unpleasing its painted
reconstruction might be) as polychrome artifacts, suggest that Potts's
claim -- at least in classical circles -- is an optimistic one.

The splendidly illustrated catalogue of forty artifacts that concludes
the volume is no less worthy of note than the essays themselves. As in
the exhibition itself, these are not presented in strict chronological
sequence; instead, ancient, medieval and modern are loosely
interspersed. As Panzanelli points out, this was deliberate, so as to
'probe aspects of the more universal urge to create sculpture that more
closely imitates life' (p. 14). This idea (virtuous as it is) of
exploring a common universal approach to sculpture is not as well
developed in the volume as it might be, and readers may feel as I did
that a chronological ordering would have better helped to identify
historical shifts and developments in the deployment of sculptural
polychromy, to complement the emphasis of the essays. Nonetheless, the
catalogue does present the full range of sculpture types, periods,
materials and subjects that are discussed throughout the volume, and is
complemented by brief insightful descriptive and analytical entries on
each artifact written by a team of twenty experts from a range of
different backgrounds.

Significant themes raised by the catalogue include: the erosion and
distortion of surviving pigments (esp. catalogue entries 1, 7-10,
12-13, 18, 34); limitations of knowledge about original location (1,
10, 24); use of colour for realism (1, 6, 12-13, 25, 28-29, 36, 38-39);
use of colour for surrealism (20, 40); use of colour for idealization/
stylization (2, 5, 7, 10, 19, 37); use of colour for visibility/
legibility/ differentiation (12-13, 23); association of polychromy with
precious materials (5-6, 27, 31); precious materials as a rationale for
monochrome/ unpainted sculpture (23, 26, 32); experimental nature of
reconstructive work (8, 9, 10, 14-16, 18, 22); use of binders/ patinas
(8, 10); use of complementary attachments (10, 12-14); periodic
restoration (10, 27); sophistication of polychrome art (9, 11, 27); and
the artifact's provocative reception (14, 25, 28, 30, 33, 38). A digest
of themes along these lines might have assisted the editor in
justifying the particular order and juxtaposition of artifacts chosen,
as well as fleshing out some of the more universal issues and tropes
that characterise polychrome sculpture.

Entries of particular note in the catalogue include the two painted
replicas of the head of Caligula from the Glyptotek at Copenhagen
(catalogue 8-9), which expose the limitations of our understanding of
ancient painting techniques and the possibilities offered by
experimental reconstruction. Then there is the painted cast of the
Peplos Kore in the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge
(catalogue 14), whose creative and provocative polychrome
reconstruction in the 1970s, M. Beard tells us, already occupies an
important and complex position in the history of museum display and
reception. Another fascinating piece is the early sixteenth-century
Venetian chalcedony Madonna and Child with an Angel (catalogue 24; cf.
26), where the artist took advantage of natural colours and impurities
within the stone to render polychrome effects; the sophisticated use of
polychrome marbles in antiquity for similar purposes is, unfortunately,
not explored in this volume. El Greco's painted wood Epimetheus and
Pandora (c. 1600; catalogue 25) elicit the suggestion that polychromy
in early modern Spanish sculpture may sometimes have been used
provocatively to allude to pagan ideals. Another notable piece is the
eighteenth-century interactive wax Anatomical Venus (catalogue 30), one
of the most spectacular and sophisticated exhibits in the Museo di
Storia Naturale at Florence, which is a splendid example of the
hyperrealistic potential of particular types of polychrome sculpture,
as well as the significance of collaboration between experts in the
production of sculpture (in this case, anatomists and waxmakers). The
astonishing prevalence of sculptural polychromy in post-Renaissance
Portugal, Spain and the Spanish colonies that features so prominently
in this catalogue merits particular attention, as does the
proliferation of hyperrealistic uses of polychrome wax in Florence from
the seventeenth century onwards (catalogue 28, 30). For what historical
reasons, one may well ask, did certain parts of Europe maintain
continuity of practice with the past, while others developed new modes
of sculptural expression? This would certainly be a fertile area for
further research.

One particularly striking example of recent polychrome sculpture in the
catalogue is J. De Andrea's rendering of the Dying Gaul (1984;
catalogue 38), a reinterpretation of the classical marble piece using
polyvinyl with oil pigment and acrylic hair that is so lifelike that
viewers could mistake it for a living man. Are we to imagine that the
original Dying Gaul, when painted, was so realistic? Is this what the
professional sculptors of antiquity aspired to in creating their
colourful 'breathing images' (spirantia signa), as the Romans sometimes
described them? 'Probably not' is surely the answer, and one may
reasonably argue that the original piece needed to look like a work of
art; this said, we should not trick ourselves into thinking that the
Prima Porta Augustus looked like the unsightly painted Vatican
reconstruction (catalogue 10) either. By considering polychrome
sculpture from different periods side-by-side, Panzanelli's volume
forces us, quite rightly, to consider a full range of possibilities
concerning the appearance, function and reception of ancient polychrome
sculpture.

Finally, then, what is missing? The volume discusses an impressive
range of material and manages to integrate the different artifacts and
sculpture types very well under the umbrella of western polychrome
sculpture. In this respect, it makes an outstanding and original
contribution to the study of sculptural polychromy. It is perhaps a
shame that there is no consideration of non-western polychromy (with
the exception of Egypt - although its cultural status in this respect
is contentious). Some important work in recent years has been carried
out into near-Eastern, Indian and Chinese polychrome sculpture (take
for example the 8,099 painted figures of the terracotta army buried
with the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang), as well as Mayan painted
stucco sculptures and ceramics and other examples from even farther
afield. This begs some important questions with which the volume does
not directly engage: is the development of sculptural polychromy in
western art the result of the dissemination of ideas and cultural
influences across the Mediterranean world, or part of a much broader
anthropological development in the history of art? Is the use of colour
on sculpture an integral part of a universal dogma about artistic
'realism'? Do all societies and cultures employ 'hyper-realistic'
colours to render the sacred and the divine? Are some artistic systems
more inclined to monochrome sculpture than others? And do they all
evaluate and respond to sculptural polychromy in the same way? Although
Panzanelli's volume provides an excellent platform for addressing these
questions, these are some of the principal lines of enquiry, I suspect,
that need to concern scholars engaging in research in this area in the
future.

CONTENTS
c. 1. Roberta Panzanelli, 'Beyond the pale: polychromy and western
art', pp. 2-17
c. 2. Vinzenz Brinkmann, 'The polychromy of ancient Greek sculpture',
pp. 18-39
c. 3. Jan Stubbe Oestergaard, 'Emerging colors: Roman sculptural
polychromy revived', pp. 40-61
c. 4. Marco Collareta, 'From color to black and white, and back again:
the Middle Ages and Early Modern times', pp. 62-77
c. 5. Alex Potts, 'Colors of sculpture', pp. 78-97
Catalogue, pp. 98-177
------------------
Notes:


1.   The initial exhibitions of painted casts were: Bunte Goetter,
Munich (2003-2004); I colori del bianco, Rome (2004); ClassiColor,
Copenhagen (2004).  Versions of the display have also been exhibited in
Basel, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Athens, Hamburg and Frankfurt, and in
America as Gods in Color (Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 2007-8) and part of
The Color of Life exhibition (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008). All the
above exhibitions released an accompanying catalogue, which included
(by and large) the same essays translated into the appropriate
language, with the exception of The Color of Life, whose catalogue is
the subject of this review. An important symposium, 'Rediscovering
color: new perspectives on polychrome sculpture' was held at the J.
Paul Getty Museum at Malibu in May 2008.

2.   The leading pioneer of this research, and a key mover behind the
exhibitions, is Vinzenz Brinkmann, whose seminal Die Polychromie der
archaischen und fruehklassischen Skulpturen (Munich) was published in
2003. Jan Oestergaard (Curator of Ancient Art, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek)
has established the interdisciplinary 'Copenhagen Polychromy Network
Project' (2008-10) in order to analyse a representative selection of
classical sculptures in the Glyptotek with a view to identifying
pigment traces and attempting reconstructive work, and similar work is
being carried out by the British Museum, the Louvre and researchers in
the US. My article 'The importance of colour on ancient marble
sculpture' (Art History 32(3), June 2009) provides a comprehensive
overview of the state of this research, and attempts to identify the
contribution made by colour to the interpretation of Greco-Roman
sculpture.

3.   See, for example, M. Beard's sceptical blog post 'Were ancient
statues painted?'
(http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2007/12/were-ancient-st.html)
(December 2007), and the responses it elicited.

4.   See esp. Gordon, R. (1979) 'The real and the imaginary: production
and religion in the Graeco-Roman world', Art History 2: 5-34; Tanner,
J. (2001) 'Nature, culture and the body in Classical Greek religious
art', World Archaeology 33 ('Archaeology and Aesthetics'): 257-76. I
have test-run some of these approaches for the study of sculptural
polychromy in my article 'The importance of colour on ancient marble
sculpture' (Art History 32, 2009).

5.   There remains, unfortunately, little constructive collaboration
between scholarship on coloured marbles and scholarship on sculptural
paint. On the choice, colour and associations of marbles for ancient
sculpture, see Schneider, R. (1986) Bunte Barbaren (Worms); De Nuccio,
M. & Ungaro, L. (2002, eds.) I marmi colorati della Roma imperiale
(Exhibition Catalogue) (Rome). I have discussed some of the
possibilities in my article 'Colour and marble in early imperial Rome',
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 52 (2006): 1-22.