Understanding Color in Ancient Greece: Challenges and Obstructions

Our appreciation of Greek painting and polychromy has been dramatically enhanced during this last century. Not only major discoveries of figural, large scale paintings in Northern Greece, but also novel methodologies and sophisticated scientific approaches have allowed for a closer insight into the uses and functions of color in ancient Greece. Those in turn, have generated a series of modern reconstructions, both pictorial and three dimensional, establishing a new era in our way of seeing ancient Greek painting and sculpture. The systematic analytical investigation of painting materials and techniques has allowed us to reconsider a series of established ideas and ideologies on matters of artistic craftsmanship and color intention in antiquity, from the Mycenaean down to the late Hellenistic times. The rich pictorial corpus of Macedonia has shed entirely new light on the acquisitions of great masters, and has given us the challenge to resurrect artistic idiosyncrasies of painters in Classical Greece. Nonetheless, having in our disposition both such a prolific archaeological documentation and a rich scientific background of physico/chemical applications, does not a priori resolve all our problems, nor does it precludes misinterpretations. The problem today is somehow different than it used to be in the previous centuries where information was scantier. Relying in great part for our research on new technologies and scientific data, we are tempted to consider modern reconstructions as objective and therefore as correct, overlooking the danger of our own subjective way of perceiving ancient polychromy through the prism of an excessively “multicolored” culture of which we make part.

Hariklia Brecoulaki