Confronting Anachronism: A Report From The Met’s Chroma Show

Battle Scene from the Met's Chroma exhibit, courtesy of Daniel A. Rabuzzi, 2022

Daniel A. Rabuzzi has had two novels, five short stories…

All photos by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

The entrance of the Met’s *Chroma* exhibit

Last month, with two fellow artists, I visited The Metropolitan Museum’s widely discussed Chroma: Ancient Sculpture In Color exhibition in New York City. Other visitors have described the show (see, for instance, here, here, and here), which is a collaboration with German researchers Prof. Dr. V. Brinkmann and Dr. U. Koch-Brinkmann, and partly based on their Bunte Götter – Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur exhibition. Much has been written about the concept more broadly, that is, of restoring the original colors to ancient Greek and Roman sculptures based on ever more revealing and precise scientific analysis over the past 40 years (see here, here, and #polychromy on Twitter). Many have noted the racist lens used by Winckelmann and others in the 18^th and 19^th centuries to define ancient statuary as “pure” and “white,” despite evidence of painted marble surfaces well known even at that time, and how this paradigm has supported white supremacist hierarchies up to the present day (see here, and here). The Met’s show helps correct the record–aesthetically, ethically and sociopolitically–reminding us that present-day prejudices often hinder a true or at least more nuanced understanding of the past, and that experts may misconstrue or misuse the past for dubious, or downright harmful, purposes.

What most struck me was the hurdle of anachronism solidly planted in my own mind. I loved the colors, so lively, so bold, and the patterns especially. Other published commentators have found the colors jarring, off-putting; they use “garish,” “lurid,” and “gaudy” to describe the effect. Perhaps, but maybe the vivacity and the popping patterns were precisely the point, just as it is in modern advertising. Within our small viewing party, we disagreed among ourselves. I found myself defending the colors, as firmly on the positive side as the detractors on theirs. I think the painted funeral stele, in its bubblegum package colors, looks better than the unadorned version – an equivalent for me to the second line from New Orleans funerals, or the sense of a wake celebrating the life of the departed.

The battle scene looks like something out of Game of Thrones or the Marvel Cinematic Universe – why wouldn’t viewers in ancient Rome revel in the colors as I do? And there’s the rub: we don’t have records (as far as I know) of what the average Roman or Greek viewer, the person in the street, thought. We have the birth of Western art theory and the origin of aisthetikos with Plato and Aristotle, but no opinions by the common person. We cannot even be certain how the ancient Greeks perceived and named colors, Homer’s “wine-dark sea” being a famous example. I am a lumper, not a splitter, seeking to find commonalities, so I am inclined to see kindred minds among our ancestors; judging from the graffiti at Pompeii, how different could they really have been? Plenty different, others would retort with good evidence to support their rebuttal, and so it would go round, an ultimately sterile argument based on our individual, presentist biases. I am trapped in my own senses, and cannot slip into the mind of the dead. Of course, this being the case, I cannot admonish the dead for lacking or ignoring my sense of artistry, or having aesthetic goals foreign to my own.

Once we realized that we were each bringing idiosyncratic, and likely irreconciliable, points of view to the debate, we tried to understand where those separate perspectives originated. One of us (younger by some decades so perhaps his eyesight is a bit better) noted that we needed to account for the setting and especially the lighting. The Met has done an admirable job of interspersing the colorized reconstructions among the existing pieces in its extensive halls of antiquity, and it has illuminated them well. Having said that, by definition, these are pieces out of their natural place, bathed in artificial indoor light. How might we react seeing them in the forum, the agora, or a temple, under a Mediterranean sun? Would the colors be more or less satisfying? I get a hint of this when I look at the Met’s Egyptian obelisk, “Cleopatra’s Needle,” which sits outside in Central Park. I love how the sun traces its shadows across the various faces of the obelisk as day proceeds, how each hieroglyph subtly changes shape in time with the hours. I do not feel the same exultation when I view the Temple of Dendur, exquisitely housed as it is by the Met in an airy hall facing the park. I am too aware of being under a roof, within a vault, no matter how grand. If the outdoor setting has this much impact on my perception of line, texture, and shadow, then I can only imagine the same would be true, perhaps even more so, on my perception of hue, value, and saturation. I believe each viewer responds differently to such stimuli, independent of the age or origin of the art being viewed.

Our youngest member mused on the question of age as well (that of the art, not of that of his companions). He observed that we expect a patina on objects from the ancient world, the inescapable marks of centuries gnawing and buffing contours and surfaces, chipping off noses and knocking off arms, everything begrimed with soot and dust and calcified bird-droppings. But, of course, the statues and reliefs, the vases and funeral urns, were brand-new once, fresh from the potter’s wheel or the mason’s yard. When we reconstruct them to look like the original in pristine form, we must force ourselves to forget that this ancient art was once new – a mental feat hard to achieve; we’ve come to see ancient art, after all, not a post-modernist conceptual installation. Arguably, the painted statue is new again, or at least no longer ancient in accordance with our usual understanding. It becomes a slightly threatening thing, disturbing our categories of reality – a chimera, a sphinx with her riddles. Debates about aesthetics are hard enough, those about ontology can break one’s head. Having agreed to disagree on our differing reactions to the chromatic sculptures, we agreed to leave ontological dispute to others…and to search instead for ice cream from the vendors in Central Park.