The problem:

Until now it has been nearly impossible to reconstruct the impact which marble sculpture in lively colors must have had on the viewer. Because of the expense of printing in color, relatively few color photographs of sculpture appear in the standard texts. Moreover, while Roman wall paintings and Greek white ground lekythoi give us some idea of the painter's palette, only a few pieces of sculpture have survived with their paint intact. Noone would study the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by relying on black and white photographs. It is just as unreasonable to expect students to understand fully the nature of Greek and Roman sculpture when their primary visual resources are black and white slides or photographs.

Current technology, including digitized images, computer modeling, and animation, is especially promising as a possible solution to understanding what this sculpture looked like because such technology enables us to manipulate visual images so easily. 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 Forum of Trajan at the Getty Museum includes computer-generated models in brighter colors; it also includes the column of Trajan, but not in color. As far as we can tell, there have been only a few serious efforts to repaint an ancient work and no attempts to paint one digitally. In Greek Art, Cook includes a black and white picture of a restored and colored cast of the “Auxerre Goddess”; the most persuasive example is the painted plaster cast of the Peplos kore in the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University.

We have designed this virtual gallery as a teaching tool for an upper level sculpture class and to support others’ study and teaching of ancient Greece and Rome. With the capabilities of something like Photoshop and scanned images of ancient sculpture, there is no reason to continue to teach as if this sculpture had never been painted. Moreover, with QuickTime VR, we are not even restricted to studying two-dimensional representations of sculpture which would have been experienced in - the - round.

Caveats and disclaimers:

Although we hope that others will find the site useful well beyond Miami University, this gallery is above all a teaching tool for ART 382 and Classics civilization courses. Users of this site need to know that neither of us is an artist, neither had used Photoshop before beginning the project. We have designed the site to address the need to understand this sculpture in color, not to produce individual works of high art ourselves. Our proficiency at Photoshop has improved as the project has progressed; we take full responsibility for any remaining awkwardness in our use of Photoshop. Originally we had intended to use as accurate colors as possible, but we have compromised that intention in the interest of using colors which are plausible and effective on screen. In some cases (“Geryon’s” hair and beards, for example), the palette of Photoshop and our desire to use Web-safe colors did not allow us to produce precisely the exact color we needed. In other cases, we decided in favor of the effect of the figure. For example, Boardman says that Geryon’s eyes were black, but we liked the dark blue and so used it instead.

Organization:

The fifteen images cover the major compositional innovations, aesthetic assumptions, and transitions seen in Greek and Roman sculpture through the second century CE. We have grouped the pieces not only to reflect stylistic development but to provide opportunities for comparison. Five Archaic pieces include pedimental as well as free-standing work; two Apollos provide opportunities to compare and contrast style as well as representation of the god; a Parthenon metope and a cast of a bust of Athena encourage questions about Classical sculpture, while the Dying Gaul and the Nike of Samothrace represent Hellenistic artistic solutions. Three separate pieces represent Roman portraiture; the Dacian trophy from the column of Trajan represents trends in Roman narrative relief and contrasts with the Parthenon metope. The Gorgon from Veii was too vibrant to omit from the gallery.

Sources of images:

We have made every effort to use images which are either part of the public domain or which are not restricted by copyright. In three cases we simply do not know about the origin of the piece: Antiochus, “Augustus”, Athena. The Apollo from Olympia comes from the Department of Classic’s slide collection; we have no documentation for the source of that image, which has been in the collection for at least thirty years. Selected list of good sites for images.

Thanks:

We are immensely grateful to all those who have helped us with this project. In particular, we want to thank the Office for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching for its support with a CELT grant (from the Committee for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching) for Judith and a Undergraduate Summer Scholarship for Eric. We could not have done this project without access to HELL, the High End Learning Lab of the College of Arts and Science, and the collaboration with friends and colleagues possible in this kind of lab. The Contributors link includes all those without whose help we would have been lost, but there were many others who walked into the lab and stayed to help or critique, from Joe Simpson and Jennifer Kinney to Reed Anderson, John Hughes, Anne Hershbel, and Ronald Crutcher. Judith thanks her department, especially Steve Nimis and Carolyn Seals, for their support and encouragement, and the community of Vroma.