The Blackberry Walk

Archaeological evidence of pigments has shown that in the Classical world the marble statues we know them best by were painted. To discover this to most is a shock. A great shock. A shock which uproots our aesthetic impression of the Classical age. These statues weren't painted subtly with subdued colours either. We would expect perhaps some browns and pastels to contour and highlight. No, these statues were painted with bright primary colours, and would've looked like real people. How could we have gotten it all so wrong? Our exposure to the ancient world is honestly minimal, with only a few works preserved from that age. The bulk were preserved by monasteries who transcribed many classical works in which they saw value. A smaller yet not inconsiderable number of ancient works came from the Byzantines, the successors of Rome, who hung on for another one-thousand years after the fall of Rome. Centred in Constantinople, the Byzantine empire translated many Latin works from the fallen West, and preserved many contemporary and ancient Greek works, written in the Byzantine mother-tongue. After the sack of Constantinople, that dastardly Faustian act, in the fourth crusade, Byzantium in time fell to the many attackers raiding them on all fronts, until in 1453 Constantinople itself fell. Upon the fall of the city and in the decades leading up to the fall, many of Byzantium's most prominent intellectuals fled to the West for safety, and with them they brought these works to the West. This, we call the Renaissance. Forgive me for this rather biased history. My ancestry is part Greek, you must understand, so taking such strong positions is a matter of course. There were other causes for the Renaissance, of course, such as the Black Death and social reform, if you are a Marxist, and ascribe to all historical events a material cause; or, if you are more of an ideas guy, you will point to the failures of Mediaeval Scholasticism, usually making jeering reference towards monks counting how many angels could dance atop a needle head. As an aside, I have great respect for this Scholastic inquiry. I like to imagine the Thomists positioning themselves at the end of history, having discovered everything there is to know, with only these few niggling problems left. Us today, having passed through our own Fukuyama moment and hopefully towards our own Renaissance in thinking, may see the obscure and esoteric scientific investigations of today in a similar light. That is an aside, though. Every era of stagnation becomes bored of its own brilliance. The material causes for these ages of greatness may be endless, but it takes genius and drive to create a new culture. I say 'create', what I mean to say is 'culture': the word culture means also to grow and incubate microorganisms, like a yeast, a bacteria, or a virus. Culture is much like this, it must be cultured; it's a delicate thing to grow at first. Yet, like the black death, once ready will sweep across the ends of the Earth. So too was this revival in Classical interest. Cultured by the Humanists, and spread across the elite world. But the Renaissance men got it wrong. When Donatello and Michelangelo chiselled away at their marble blocks, they had no interest in painting them. The statues discovered, unearthed, and displayed from the Classical era weren't painted, and theirs, whose style imitates the ancients', wasn't to look any different. What developed then was a strange version of the past. An altered version. A version no Greek two-thousand years before would recognise - or maybe they would recognise it, but as an unfinished statue. Nevertheless, this tradition of unfinished Classical statues is today the archetypal image of the Renaissance, of this era, of this movement, this moment. But it goes deeper. This Renaissance statuary continues into the Baroque era, with sculptors like Bernini; and the aesthetic and ideas of the Classical age are again folded back into the present in the Enlightenment era, with figures like Winckelmann. The Enlightenment also saw Classical ideas re-emerge in a modern context. But were any of these ideas and aesthetics true? After all, the statues weren't painted. It feels as if the foundations are faulty, as if the Neoclassical cultural city we've built isn't quite so sound. So much of our understanding of ancient Greece and Rome comes from sources, sources we haven't even the worldview to understand. Can we truly understand the past? The past is a foreign country, it has been written, they do things differently; and in ancient Greece, much was done differently. Not just their lives, but their very cosmology of mind is profoundly, irreconcilably different to our own. They are so far away. I'm sure I've mentioned this point elsewhere on my blog, but I'll repeat for good measure. C. S. Lewis lays out in his great work The Discarded Image how when the Mediaeval man looked up at the night sky, he saw something different to us. To us, we see a cosmos of fiery balls far, far away, all distance being relative, with black being the colour of space; to Mediaeval man, the stars were instead really high up - the Earth was after all the centre of the universe - and the night sky was black not because space was black - to him space was irradiated by the sun's light - but because the side of the Earth not brightened by the sun's orbit was in shade. The Mediaeval man saw the stars high up, not far away, and the universe bright with light, not dark and empty. That was one thousand years ago. One-and-a-half thousand years ago before then, those stars in the night sky were gods. The world back then was far more different, in Classical times. And yet we can't help but try to return. Each time Western civilisation begins to get stale, or perhaps overly moralistic, this injection of the Classical, of the pagan, of the unknown, brings a sense of life to the West, and puts a bit of colour in our pale faces. For better and for worse. After the Victorian primness and moralism, we had Nietzsche and the up-current of pagan vitalism, again harking back to Classical times. The movements and bloodshed across Europe attest to the dangers. In the Second World War, the influence was obvious; but even in the First war, soldiers, German soldiers especially, were known to carry Nietzsche to the battlefield. Western civilisation moves in cycles umming and ahhing between Socrates and Christ, between thumos and agape, between the eagle and the dove. The muddled tension is how our civilisation has come so far. But I ask again, what of the statues? They were painted, and yet we see a Classical world of unpainted statues. Each age re-imagines the Classical world again with a new aesthetic and new values: it is a wellspring of inspiration. The painted statues may well be yet another wellspring, another source of intellectual and artistic life. But there's something unsettling about painted statues. Something deeply unsettling. If you imagine a Greek statue painted, you begin to see what it actually is: an idol. The sleek, rounded marble is de-fanged. There's something exact, elegant about marble statues, something approximating Platonic perfection. That statue of David by Michelangelo is right at home amongst the digital imagery of vaporwave, in the world of the virtual, of absolutes. The generative, virile, furtive power and meaning a Greek statue of old had is dead in it. His cheeks are bloodless and marble-white. The Humanists saw Greek statues without the gods - or rather perhaps the demons - which possessed them. They saw the statues without souls. These statues in their time weren't looked upon in a museum, Athenians didn't remark on the beauty of the art piece as we would. The statue to them was something living and to be used. It lived in the temple, and the god lived in it. It was likely dressed and fed. It was coloured like a person, and was treated like a person. It wasn't mere 'art'. In those pigments, in those paints, the statue appeared to come alive, and without those paints, Western civilisation received the Classical world dead, in a soulless state. The more we study, the more we discover that soul, but there's something unsettling: the Classical world is truly a foreign country. We can handle the Roman Empire as only a memory of a deceased ancestor, but not as its ghost. Nevertheless we are haunted. And if the true spirit of Classicism were to sweep the people, heaven knows what that would look like.