We have known since at least the eighteenth century that Greek and Roman sculpture was painted. In fact, the world of the Greeks and Romans was not white at all. They often wore brightly colored clothes, and their buildings were often painted brilliant colors. Above all, the marble sculpture was painted and bronzes were often kept brightly polished and enhanced with in-laid eyes and painted details.

One of the hardest aspects of ancient art for us to teach or to understand is the impact on the viewer which marble sculpture painted in lively colors and unweathered coppery statues must have had. We would never ask students to study the Sistine Chapel by relying on black and white photographs, neither would we ask them to study only color photographs taken prior to the most recent cleaning. It is just as unreasonable to expect students to understand fully the nature of Greek and Roman sculpture when their only visual resources are slides or photographs in books. Indeed, in light of the expense of printing in color, remarkably few color photographs of sculpture appear in the standard texts anyway, and even color photographs can only rarely show the sculpture as it originally appeared.

Unfortunately, while the wall paintings in Pompeii and a class of Greek vases called white ground lekythoi give us some idea of the painter's palette, only a few pieces of sculpture have survived with their paint intact. For example, the "Peplos" kore, a free-standing sculpture of a young woman, has traces of color on her hair, her eyes, and the decorative bands of her peplos. The dark-eyed "kore of the red boots" sports brilliant red shoes, and the hair of the "Blond Boy" is still blond. On rare occasion we discover a bronze whose inlaid eyes are still in place, although all the metal is far darker than originally intended since it has been allowed to develop a patina, and painted details have usually worn off.

Context:

Current technology, including digitized images, computer modeling, and animation, is especially promising as a possible solution to this problem because such technology enables us to manipulate visual images in ways which cannot always be done as inexpensively and coherently in text books. There already exist a variety of efforts to represent on-line the colorful architecture of Greece and Rome. The video CyberRome includes such buildings as the Basilica Julia in Rome, in color, although the colors are extremely muted. The Virtual Fourm of Trajan at the Getty Museum includes computer-generated models in brighter colors; it also include the great column of Trajan, but not in color. As far as I have been able to find out, there have been few serious efforts to repaint an ancient sculpture. In Greek Art, Cook includes a black and white picture of a restored and colored cast of the “Auxerre Goddess”; the best known attempt is the plaster cast of the Peplos kore in the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University. The results of the 1996 re-painting are available on-line at the Museum's Web site. In my supporting materials I have included a color print out of the kore.

Innovation:

The last time I taught an ancient art course, Adobe PhotoShop (to name only one of the commercial products available) did not exist; there was no internet, no Web where students could examine virtual reconstructions of the ancient world. We had to rely on slides and photographs in books. I propose to create a virtual gallery of five pieces of sculpture either painted or returned to their original bronze color, and to make this gallery available on the Web as a teaching tool and as a model for student work in my sculpture class art class.

With the capabilities of something like PhotoShop and scanned images of ancient sculpture, there is no reason to continue to teach ancient sculpture as if it had never been painted. To be sure, we will still be looking at two-dimensional representations of sculpture much of which would have been experienced in - the - round, but at least students of the ancient world will have a chance of imagining what that world would have liked like ... not white, not pleasantly beige, but vibrantly, often aggressively technicolor.

Anticipated impact:

This gallery will provide students of Classics and of ancient art a rare opportunity to consider the impact of sculpture either fully painted or left in the original bronze color with inlaid eyes and details picked out in paint. Rather than trying to understand representative Greek and Roman sculpture as it now appears in museums and textbooks, students will be able to analyze sculpture against the colorful backdrop of reconstructions of the ancient world already available on the Web. Because of the peculiar problem which this gallery will address, I expect that all of us in the Department of Classics will be able to use it whenever we need visual materials to support our teaching of the Greco-Roman world. It should prove especially useful not only in the ancient art series (painting, architecture, sculpture) which we teach, but in such Miami Plan foundation courses as Greek Civilization and Roman Civilization (CLS 101, CLS 102).

Evaluation of the gallery:

I will design an assignment in which students first analyze these pieces as they appear in museums today. Students will use illustrations in their texts as well as the evidence from slides. Students will examine their own reactions to the works on the basis of what they have seen. The second part of the assignment will ask them to repeat the exercise, this time using only the on-line, colored and/or polished works. Again, they will analyze the pieces on the basis of the colored images before them. They will also read in translation those ancient authors (e.g., Pliny) who tell us what the statues looked like

Progress and timeline:

I will work on the project from July 1- August 5.

1) Identify the sculpture to be included. This step is now complete; I have selected works which are characteristic of the periods when they were made but which are also illustrative of artistic solutions to material, aesthetic, and political problems. I have my own slides of most of theses pieces; in those cases where I do not have slides of my own, images are available in the archives of VRoma and as such are not restricted by copyright laws.

- metope, rape of Europa, Temple C, Selinus

- bronze Charioteer at Delphi 475 BCE

- metope, Athena, Heracles, Atlas, Temple of Zeus at Olympia, 460 BCE

- Hermes from Veii in the Villa Giulia, Rome early fifth century BCE

- Dying Gaul from Pergamon, Roman copy, Rome ca. 180 BCE

- I will also link the gallery to the Cambridge Peplos kore

2) Learn to alter images with PhotoShop during second semester.

3) Review current scholarly opinion on the palette of Greek and Roman artists. Review current scholarship on each piece.

4) Create a file of scanned images.

5) Consult with two classicists who combine sophisticated technical expertise and experience developing on-line materials (e.g. Diotima) with experience teaching ancient art: Ross Scaife, Classics, University of Kentucky, and Suzanne Bonefas, formerly in this department and now Director of Instructional Technology, Associated Colleges of the South, Atlanta, and a director of VRoma. While I will consult with both of them vie email and on the VRoma MOO, I will need to visit each to complete the editing of the images.

6) Edit the file of each scanned piece:

- eliminate background clutter and clarify each image

- "paint" each piece; polish and paint bronzes, add inlaid eyes

I already have some idea of what painting these images will entail as well as how long it is likely to take to learn how to do it. At my request, Stephen Gentle (Middletown campus and a former major in my department) has produced a sample by coloring an image of the Priestess off Isis in the VRoma archives. The results were not intended to represent in any faithful way what the actual colors might have been. Steve was simply trying to see what the effect would be of taking the gently weathered marble and turn ii into technicolor. (Among my supporting materials I have included a copy of the results of this coloring.)

7) Prepare a catalog documenting each piece and including appropriate bibliography.

8) Put the gallery on-line, along with the catalog, in a file locked to everyone except those enrolled in my Classics and art classes. Once I have tested the gallery and refined it during first semester, I will put it on the Web for general use. I already have some experience with designing and using Web resources. I will also link the gallery to the VRoma archives for easy access. I prefer to use the Web since I do not want to restrict students' access to the gallery by reason of platform, accessibility of on-campus labs, etc.

As a member of the core faculty of VRoma, I have been putting my courses on-line since August, 1997, and have been developing assignments and teaching techniques to take advantage of Internet resources. Last spring my students and I contributed to an on-line commentary on Plautus’ Aulularia as part of a collaborative course on the play (taught with the fifth year Latin class taught by Susan Bonvallet at the Wellington School in Columbus. Steve Nimis (CLS) was technical consultant for this class.)

Use of funds:

- salary

- travel to consult with Ross Scaife, University of Kentucky

- round-trip mileage

Extent:

The creation of this gallery goes beyond the usual preparation for teaching since it requires me to learn PhotoShop in order to prepare essential teaching materials which are not available elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with the traditional way of teaching ancient art, relying on slides and books and, in some cases, videotapes, but I am convinced that the creation of even this small gallery will enhance students' experiences studying the ancient world. This is especially important because we are not used in Western society to seeing marble sculpture painted. Indeed, the only monumental sculpture we may have seen painted might be the work of such Pop artists as Marisol; Moore’s bronzes are unpainted, and the resin casts of George Segal are white.

In addressing the rubric of "Reflecting and Acting" for foundation courses under the Miami Plan, this department has described the challenge of studying ancient Greece and Rome. The warning applies as well to upper level courses as well: "Although it is most difficult to be intelligently critical of that which is completely different from ourselves or that which is very similar to us (and thus "second nature" to us), the Greco-Roman classical world presents us with a perfect laboratory for exploring presuppositions: there is a sufficient number of similarities to our world to form a horizon of familiarity against which important differences can emerge." Since we expect marble sculpture to be white, it is even more important that students see Greek and Roman sculpture as the Greeks and Romans would have seen it, in color.

Supporting Materials:

I am including the URLs of my fall 1998 mythology (CLS 121) to indicate the extent to which I use Internet resources and design assignments for students to make use of the ample electronic resources in Classics. I also include a color copy of the Peplos kore at Cambridge as well as Stephen Gentle's coloring of the stature of a priestess Isis.

* ART 382 is taught by members of the Department of Classics, in spite of the ART designation.