Yesterday I've been visiting the exhibition "Gods in Colour" (English-language web site here :
https://buntegoetter.liebieghaus.de/en/ , Wikipedia article here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_in_Color ) , and I read in the exhibition's catalogue a very disturbing view : That the still too much present view of classical Greece & Roman statues being "as white as marble" is in fact an echo of the aesthetics of Fascism.
Meanwhile the colourfulness ["Polychromy"] of antique Roman & Greece statues is a proven fact for more than 100 years now ( ! ) , Fascism dictated that everything had to be devoid of colours.
Not only that, but there also still exists a common connotation of "colourfulness = inferiour", coming from the - still an echo of Fascism - belief that colourfulness seems to be a sign of not so "high" developed cultures like the western European ones.
Citing the exhibition's catalogue :
"The US-american Archaeologist Sarah Bond said 2017 in an interview in the economy magazine Forbes a connection betwern the "white supremacy" ideology of the US-american ultra-right and the erroneous vision of a white marble Antique of the Europeans. In this contect she pointed towards our research, which served her as a proof for a colourful European Antique. Sarah Bond received afterwards death threats.
More articles followed, among others a very precisely researched one in The New Yorker, but also 2019 a pointed, much observed contribution in the Satire show of Samantha Bee."
The head of the research mused in a small movie that he was wondering why - although proved to be wrong for about 100 years now - the image that all antique Greece & Roman statues were colourless marble ones still stubbornly persists so much in society.
Well, this is a completely different theme (one only worthy of my own topic "A thought", but I immeditely notoced that colourfulness in media (especially in games) is also strong in these times, together with the belief that colourfulness = childishness = inferior. Everything that is childish is inferior per se.
If I really really really really hard boil it down until nothing but mere salt crystals remain on the bottom of the cooking pot, then I must say that this belief that the "high Antique" as the perceived root/seed of European culture had no colours on its statues is in fact nothing but racism. Colourful art is still considered as "simple", "prmitive", "naive" and so on, and that's still an echo of Fascism and therefore of Racism which held the belief that colourless white marble = white man.
( The development of these aesthetics is a bit more complicated, in fact, starting with the Renaissance, but Fascism pressed its own heavy thumb on everything much later. )
Wikipedia entries :
Polychromy :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychrome
Polychromy/colourfulness in architecture :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_art#Polychromy:_painting_on_statuary_and_architecture
Colourfull ancient paintings :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_art#Panel_and_wall_painting