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In The New Yorker’s increasingly frenzied pursuit of the Teen Vogue niche, we have a Donna Zuckerberg-style article:
The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture
Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction.
By Margaret Talbot
Researchers demonstrate the process of applying color to the Treu Head, from a Roman sculpture of a goddess, made in the second century A.D. Ancient sculptures were often painted with vibrant hair colors and skin tones. Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker
See, ancient statues weren’t of whites, you racists, they were of gingers!
Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time, he was a graduate student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and, like most people, he thought of Greek and Roman statues as objects of pure white marble. The gods, heroes, and nymphs displayed in museums look that way, as do neoclassical monuments and statuary, from the Jefferson Memorial to the Caesar perched outside his palace in Las Vegas.
… When Abbe arrived there, several decades later, he started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs.
My vague recollection is that this was reasonably well known in the 1970s, but I could be wrong about this.
What’s new about this is the emergence of the demon word “whiteness” into media abhorrence in the 2010s, allowing the press to declare an old controversy over aesthetics to be new proof that the Ancients were Diverse and modern white people are Racist for preferring ancient statues unadorned. After all, race doesn’t exist, except in the trivial sense of skin color, so you couldn’t possibly tell a subject’s race from facial features, right?
So, J.J. Winckelmann’s 18th Century exaltation of Greek sculptures as pure form wasn’t a big gay aesthetic breakthrough like everybody used to think. From Gay History & Literature:
Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) in his monumental History of Ancient Art established Greek art as the touchstone of all art irrespective of place or time. His ideal of beauty, which had a tremendous effect upon neoclassical artistic taste and art theory for more than a century, was grounded in his gay sensibility: “those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art.”
Instead, Winckelmann was hypnotized by White Supremacy! (Wait, Winckelmann was a gay white suprematist? Is that a thing? It is? Uh oh … White = Bad, but Gay = Good. Does Not Compute. … Okay leave out the gay part about Winckelmann. Nobody will notice. Who remembers anything?)
… “You need to transform your eye into an objective tool in order to overcome this powerful imprint”—a tendency to equate whiteness with beauty, taste, and classical ideals, and to see color as alien, sensual, and garish. …
Lately, this obscure academic debate about ancient sculpture has taken on an unexpected moral and political urgency. Last year, a University of Iowa classics professor, Sarah Bond, published two essays, one in the online arts journal Hyperallergic and one in Forbes, arguing that it was time we all accepted that ancient sculpture was not pure white—and neither were the people of the ancient world. One false notion, she said, had reinforced the other. For classical scholars, it is a given that the Roman Empire—which, at its height, stretched from North Africa to Scotland—was ethnically diverse. In the Forbes essay, Bond notes, “Although Romans generally differentiated people on their cultural and ethnic background rather than the color of their skin, ancient sources do occasionally mention skin tone and artists tried to convey the color of their flesh.” Depictions of darker skin can be seen on ancient vases, in small terra-cotta figures, and in the Fayum portraits, a remarkable trove of naturalistic paintings from the imperial Roman province of Egypt, which are among the few paintings on wood that survive from that period. These near-life-size portraits, which were painted on funerary objects, present their subjects with an array of skin tones, from olive green to deep brown, testifying to a complex intermingling of Greek, Roman, and local Egyptian populations.
Not to mention little green men from Mars.
Bond told me that she’d been moved to write her essays when a racist group, Identity Evropa, started putting up posters on college campuses, including Iowa’s, that presented classical white marble statues as emblems of white nationalism. After the publication of her essays, she received a stream of hate messages online. She is not the only classicist who has been targeted by the so-called alt-right. Some white supremacists have been drawn to classical studies out of a desire to affirm what they imagine to be an unblemished lineage of white Western culture extending back to ancient Greece. When they are told that their understanding of classical history is flawed, they often get testy.
Earlier this year, the BBC and Netflix broadcast “Troy: Fall of a City,” a miniseries in which the Homeric hero Achilles is played by a British actor of Ghanaian descent. The casting decision elicited a backlash in right-wing publications. Online commenters insisted that the “real” Achilles was blond-haired and blue-eyed …. It’s true that Homer describes the hair of Achilles as xanthos, a word often used to characterize objects that we would call yellow, but Achilles is fictional
Thanks for clearing that up once and for all in just four words!
, so imaginative license in casting seems perfectly acceptable.
… In an essay for the online magazine Aeon, Tim Whitmarsh, a professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge, writes that the Greeks “would have been staggered” by the suggestion that they were “white.” Not only do our modern notions of race clash with the thinking of the ancient past; so do our terms for colors, as is clear to anyone who has tried to conceive what a “wine-dark sea” actually looked like. In the Odyssey, Whitmarsh points out, the goddess Athena is said to have restored Odysseus to godlike good looks in this way: “He became black-skinned again and the hairs became blue around his chin.” On the Web site Pharos, which was founded, last year, in part to counter white-supremacist interpretations of the ancient world, a recent essay notes, “Although there is a persistent, racist preference for lighter skin over darker skin in the contemporary world, the ancient Greeks considered darker skin” for men to be “more beautiful and a sign of physical and moral superiority.”
Thus, Clark Gable, with his year-round tan, had to stay in a hotel for blacks when he visited Jim Crow Atlanta for the 1939 premiere of Gone With the Wind. (And who can forget the memorable scene in that movie in which Scarlett’s last name is discovered to be O’Hara so she is immediately sold into slavery because the Irish weren’t white back then.)
‘Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction…’
My awesome mental powers! I became aware of this fact between forty and fifty years ago — and ‘scholars’ are just realizing it.
Let me try thinking about how a Faster-Than-Light drive would work…
I can handle tabloids being idiotic, but when the publications pretend to represent the cutting edge of our intellectual development and commit these sort of errors, it’s depressing.
Steve, any thoughts on Richard Spencer?
Yeah……he’s pink too!
No, Steve, you weren’t wrong about people in the past knowing that Greek sculptures were painted. They’ve known that for a long time, though as usual, it is news to the ignorant idiot who wrote the article.
But, more. Greek statues aren’t white. The marble is not white-white. Believe me, I’ve looked really closely. Most often a Greek statue ends up looking a little stained-ochre/umber, offwhite color, due I suspect to a patina the marble accrues over the years. No one wants to see a pure blinding white Greek statue. It would look strange. The only people who even think about such things are idiots who write for the New Yorker.
Does this look white to your eye? Compare it to the white border that surrounds this post.
None of the Classical Greek statuary or their Roman copies had any features of Africans or Asians… yet we’re told to swallow the “multicultural ancients” propaganda whole.
Definitely gay. I mean, being “moved” by aesthetics always involves the genitals, right?
‘…Mark Abbe was ambushed by color in 2000, while working on an archeological dig in the ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias, in present-day Turkey. At the time, he was a graduate student at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and, like most people, he thought of Greek and Roman statues as objects of pure white marble…’
Either (a) this is a falsehood, or (b), there is something seriously wrong with our educational system.
He got to the graduate level in fine arts without being aware of something that had become a commonplace in the field at least a generation before he entered college?
What pathetic bullshit.
Wy people and their …[spins wheel]…giant ancient Beckys!
It’s worse than bullshit, because it’s bullshit in aid of a thoroughly vicious and mischievious ideology.
After all, if I want to claim the ancient Persians studied astronomy because they had space travel, that’s obvious nonsense — but it’s harmless nonsense. This isn’t harmless nonsense. Us white people make the world work, and we shouldn’t be harassed and abused at every turn. It’s like letting the children of the first-class passengers run amok in the engine room of an ocean liner. No good can come of it.
Yes, every time I see a re-colorization of Greco-Roman statuary, my esteem for their art goes down.
Some women think race is strictly a matter of appearance.To them, racism is just another way to call someone ugly, in the shallow skin-and-hair sense of the word.
So this is the kind of lowbrow, agitprop drivel well bred ladies write for the New Yorker. This is who we are now. When the Chinese historians try to figure out where Whitey went wrong, they may present this sort of article to show what an expensive education got you around the turn of the 21st century.
Those statues look as orange as our fearless leader. More winning by Donald Trump!
The Romans were always more attracted to German women than their own. That is still true even today. Most of the body models used for marble sculptures were from the north and nothing was more attractive than a redhead. If you see a stature of a wealthy noble Roman women chances are it was actually someone else; at least the TnA.
Mr. Sailer thinks all statues of Richard Spencer should be left unpainted.
“(And who can forget the memorable scene in that movie in which Scarlett’s last name is discovered to be O’Hara so she is immediately sold into slavery because the Irish weren’t white back then.)”
Take note Katharine: WHICH actress was cast as Scarlett O’Hara, allegedly to be the “ideal beauty”? The role that many, many Alisters tried out for and wanted more than life itself of that era? Vivian Leigh. Smoldering, sizzling, and pure sexuality. A most delicate and feminine beauty (two words that do not, repeat, do NOT compute when mentioning Hepburn). If you do have a smutty picture of Vivian Leigh, of course do feel free to post it. Should you have one.
A most well deserved Best Actress Oscar for a film that has stood the test of time. Smoldering. Sizzling. And every single inch an ounce of pure fantastic fantasy. Delicate upon the eyes, delightful upon the senses.
Here a true beauty laid her mark upon the cinema. There Aphrodite, the Greek Goddess for passionate love was found. When they wanted to show the perfect embodiment of love, and beauty, and pure lustful yet wonderful femininity, they chose the right actress to live, breathe, and consume the part.
Because of Vivian Leigh’s performance as Scarlett, tomorrow is another day.
“so imaginative license in casting seems perfectly acceptable”
I’ll believe that when I see a pasty Irishman cast as the King of Wakanda.
The Greeks had slaves and confined their women ( well not temple prostitutes) to the house. Don’t these sound like badwhite characteristics?
Breaking news: ancient Egyptians did not walk like an Egyptian
Okay then, no more complaints about “whitewashing”!
nevermind
It just needs a good sand-blasting then acid etch. I wonder if Kilz was around during the Greek era. That and some 30-year latex, sprayed on every 10 years, would have kept them tip-top through the millennia.
Why do you ask? Please don’t tell me there’s another embarrassing scandal afoot!
Fayum portraits prove ancient Egyptians were black:
Or at least as black as Elizabeth Warren is Indian.
So now marble and milk are both racist. What’s next, egg “whites?”
Besides, it’s simply an historical fact that not only were the Greeks and Romans white but they all spoke with upper-class British accents. Someone should really investigate that linguistic coincidence.
But seriously, at some point this obsession by New Yorker and New York Times types with seeing every object and concept through a lens of anti-white-supremacy has to warrant a DSM classification as some sort of mental illness.
Or, if not a mental illness, at least a de facto religious cult. As John McWhorter wrote from the Left in his excellent 2015 essay, viewed objectively from the perspective of a naive observer . . .
Diversity in hair color is like diversity in political opinion. Not only is it not real diversity, it is antithetical to diversity.
Diverse people can be identified because they have the same hair and the same opinions.
Chicago was not diverse when there were Irish, German, Swedish, Russian, and Lithuanian neighborhoods.
Now that all those zones have become Mexican, Chicago is finally diverse.
Spencer’s Jewish & Israel ass kissing didn’t stop him from being a target (same with Tommy Robinson). As for the allegations against Spencer of physical & emotional abuse, never trust any allegations that arise from divorce & child custody proceedings.
But personally I dislike Spencer so in this case the allegations are probably true.
there are traces of paint on the the Parthenon… knowledge that the greeks painted statues is as old as modern archaeology- what’s more the practice of painting statues continued well into the middle ages….
it actually would probably look a little over the top to us… but then again at least they didn’t have Frank Ghery.
Ancient sculptures were often painted with vibrant hair colors and skin tones.
Is that a dog whistle I’m hearing??
Just make sure none of them were burly.
The irony is that that thanks to Arab slavers, the modern Mediterranean and Near-East is considerably blacker than it could have been in antiquity. This is particularly apparent in the Maghreb, Egypt, some parts of Palestine, and Yemen.
I suppose large-scale black slaving got going about a thousand-plus years ago (apparently, there was some huge black slave revolt in early-Islamic Iraq). At any rate, the point is that the ancient Mediterranean world would have been considerably whiter, not blacker, than the modern one. Do modern Greeks look ‘black’ to you? The inference to be drawn about the ancient Greeks is obvious.
…and Christ. The ancient Greeks were not black. This reminds me of some of my fights with my wife. Do we have to waste time with this bullshit?
‘It just needs a good sand-blasting then acid etch. I wonder if Kilz was around during the Greek era. That and some 30-year latex, sprayed on every 10 years, would have kept them tip-top through the millennia.’
You’re hired as restorer for my art museum. Definitely.
This is how you know they’re lying, and not merely mistaken, wen they claim the white race is a fiction.
Oh cripes ,they were hipsters
‘Why do you ask? Please don’t tell me there’s another embarrassing scandal afoot!’
Apparently, his wife says he once dragged her down the stairs.
Hey: you work with what you got. If you can’t argue with the ideas, go after the man.
People do have their personal lives. Roosevelt cheated on his wife. Churchill was mean to servants. Hitler served wretched meals.
So if the media is to attack Richard Spencer, let’s hear on what ideological points they differ, and why.
Dunno:
To my Anglo eye, the one on the right just looks Elvis-on-black-velvet tacky…
Well those white-supremacist 18th century neo-classicists went to damn far when they sand-blasted the paint off Michelangelo’s David and Moses and the Pieta (Mary’s flowing, blue robes – what a sin!).
‘…But personally I dislike Spencer so in this case the allegations are probably true.’
The allegations are a red herring. Presumably, if they’re true, his wife will get a hell of a divorce settlement.
Now, back to Spencer’s ideas. I’m fairly sure I at best only partially agree with them, but I’d rather conduct the debate on their content — not whether their advocate jacked off last Tuesday.
Well, that’s a lovely hymn of praise to Vivien Leigh. If you’ve read the book, you might remember that the first words of “Gone With the Wind” were: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful…”
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.urGF5HuvTYVm0PqDSur9jgHaK1%26pid%3D15.1&f=1
There were plenty of bronze sculptures. I suppose that led archaeologists to conclude the Greeks must have been bronze.
I like Spencer’s wife from what I’ve seen of her on Twitter and elsewhere online. I like a lot of his work too but far from all of it. The people who badmouth them online are almost entirely scum.
At least one Fayum portrait looks like Colin Kaepernick, so I buy that there was some movement up and down the Nile.
The Fayum portraits probably weren’t exactly portraits from life, they were more like standardized pictures from which you selected a close-enough picture of your lost loved one for the funeral or something.
They do show us how much we’ve lost of the ancient world’s paintings compared to sculptures.
This is made-up bogus controversy.
People know the Ancients of Greece and Rome were white because there’s no proof that non-whites lived in those areas in huge numbers in the past. DNA tests of Greek and Roman remains show they were European.
Also, color is irrelevant here. Sculptures were made of marble, bronze, and obsidian.
The real give-away are the facial features.
A negroid face would look African even without black color.
A caucasian face would look European even without white color.
Btw, the fading of garish colors from the sculptures and buildings actually improved them. Sometimes, less is more.
Wonder if we’ll see articles pointing out that the ancient Egyptians portray the ancient Hebrews and their cousins migrating into Egypt as an invasion of subhuman barbarian hordes?
Interesting enough, the only race with diversity of hair color are the whites.
Blacks all got nappy black hair.
Arabs got curly black/brown hair.
Asians got straight black hair.
I have to wonder if the Romans and Greeks really did load on the paint as thickly as the modern reconstructions suggest? Lightly tinted marble would look so much more lifelike than the examples they give us here. It may as well be plaster underneath all that paint; which leads me to think they wouldn’t ruin good marble like that.
Fayum portraits prove ancient Egyptians were black:
Actually, those are portraits of Roman settlers in Egypt. They are racially distinct from original Egyptians who had a mix of Caucasian and Negroid features.
Ok, who else is thinking about Reservoir Dogs here?
“You’re not Mr. White, you’re Mr. Pink!”
To what extent should white supremacists really try to lay claim to the Greeks (or even the Romans) anyway? Aren’t the “Whites” better represented by the Northern Germanic tribes that the Greco-Romans considered as uncivilized (but vital) barbarians.
The Greeks and Romans had an impressive run in their day. But in the last 1,700 years, not so much.
As Lord Byron discovered to his great disappointment in the 1820′s, the Greeks of Homer and Pericles had long since been replaced by an unorganizable gaggle of bandits and sheep-buggers.
Most of the body models used for marble sculptures were from the north and nothing was more attractive than a redhead.
Roman sculptures were second-rate copies of Greek ones, and Greek beauty is distinct from Northern European Germanic beauty.
You can see classical features in some Greek people today. They are different from Northern European types.
Whoops. Steve, if my jocular rendition of African-American Vernacular English at 11:00 pm GMT was over the line, I apologize.
Attack Richard Spencer? As long as he keeps telling them how Trump and his old friend Stephen Miller sre secret Nazis, their love for him will never cease.
Sorta OT, but really not: Tucker Carlson just called Univision rock star Jorge Ramos part of Mexico’s “blue-eyed ruling class” as he called him out on his blubbering all over the “caravan” headed to the United States; he also is asking how many of these “migrants” are going to Jorge’s home in Miami…great iSteve stuff.
This is just ridiculous. Germans aren’t particularly redhaired. Even if they used German models I doubt they would have used red headed ones. Red headed people look diseased compared to blondes and brunettes and are not particularly athletic.
Classical authors seem to have been quite aware of racial distinctions. Here’s Black Classicist Frank Snowden on the topic of race in antiquity:
http://library.howard.edu/content.php?pid=554250
And here are two Greek writers engaging in a bit of racial comparison:
Arrian (Indica 6.9)
Strabo Geography 15.1.13
Clean up of the Sistine Chapel was ‘racist’. It turned swarthy characters into whiter ones.
Flavius Philostratus: c.170 to c.247,
– Manilius, Astronomica 4.724
I Googled “Fayum portraits” and looked at the “Images” tab. There sure are a lot of them. Most look somewhat Southern European or North African, with a few out at “quite fair-skinned” and a few more at “sub-Saharan African”.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
One good point in this article is that some scholars think the modern recreations of colored statues are over the top in their saturation of the colors.
There could also be class differences in taste. Perhaps the nouveau riche of Pompei liked gaudier colors than the old money in Rome, or vice versa? Say you inherited your great-great-grandfather’s statue and its colors had faded. Would you pay to have it recolored brightly or would you feel that its faded colors were a mark of distinction for your family?
I can’t get to my copy but am certain Huxley talked about this in the mid-fifties. Greek temples had garish colors, not because Greeks were garishly colored, but for visibility in candlelight and artistic effect.
http://humanisme.dk/citater/huxley.php
ALDOUS HUXLEY: »Bright pure colours are of the essence, not of beauty in general, but only of a special kind of beauty, the visionary. Gothic churches and Greek temples, the statues of the thirteenth century after Christ and of the fifth century before Christ – all were brilliantly coloured. For the Greeks and the men of the Midle Ages, this art of the merry-go-round and the wax-work show was evidently transporting.«
Heaven and Hell, 1956
They don’t need Spencer to run the same tired plays. Anyone more militantly White than Jeb Bush is a Nazi to them.
I know one thing white goths Niue’s Bjavk Men as the masculine ideal
whites women are probably objectively the most beautiful worm
Bkdvk Men are the best looking men
No wonder they like to have wed with racinotjer
For you to know so little of history and the humanities is probably unavoidable, but for you to say this on a genetics forum is careless.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/greeks-really-do-have-near-mythical-origins-ancient-dna-reveals
https://medium.com/east-med-project-history-philology-and-genetics/something-nordic-supremacists-will-not-like-44d99e8a4188
The inside of Chartres Cathedral has now been cleaned and it’s much brighter than was expected.
I’m not very white, being of a peach-pink hue, so I welcome our new color correction overlords…
Okay, that’s obvious art-history retconning to make Augustus look like Zuckerberg.
She’s purty alright. I! GET! THAT!
Were you the one that turned in that worn out copy to our public library? The librarian spend like 10 minutes unsticking it from the case.
Dear Tiny,
I can see you’ve switched to wearing thick wool socks for your winter typing with your big toes, so you’ll probably be virtually incommunicado until next spring.
Margarett Mitchell wasn’t interested in Scarlett so much as she was in Rhett Butler. In her mind only one man could play her ideal lead on the screen, and that of course was Clark Gable. She got her wish come true, and in return, David O. Selsnick made sure to cast the right woman to symbolize Scarlett and create a lasting image of pure classical (in the Greek sense) beauty.
At last Aphrodite was loosed upon the silver cinematic screen and into the minds of filmgoers everywhere.
Well, they’re not entirely wrong–just not in a way they imagine. When I visit my friends in Tuscany, they mention cultural practices, dietary habits, and dialectical differences, e.g. between Florence and Siena and Pisa and Lucca, not to mention Rome and the South. For them, those from the South speak a foreign language, difficult as is it to comprehend. Italy was formed in 1870, so it is a young country despite it being populated for so long. It’s long history of warring city-states makes for a multiculturalism, just not the kind the grievance studies propagandists had in mind.
Uh, no. Mainly because the book contained no smutty pictures of Vivian Leigh. Still looking and waiting for the pictures to arrive.
Ha, ha, ha…
It looks like The New Yorker has been secretly reading Jared Taylor’s publication:
http://www.unz.com/article/what-race-were-the-greeks-and-romans/
The MLK statue in DC, on the other hand, is white.
‘This is just ridiculous. Germans aren’t particularly redhaired. Even if they used German models I doubt they would have used red headed ones. Red headed people look diseased compared to blondes and brunettes and are not particularly athletic.’
Plus, they have no souls.
EEEEWWWW!
‘I know one thing white goths Niue’s Bjavk Men as the masculine ideal
whites women are probably objectively the most beautiful worm
Bkdvk Men are the best looking men
No wonder they like to have wed with racinotjer’
One of your more interesting posts, Tiny. I’ll have to contemplate it when I have more leisure.
All that fuss over such a little thing.
I think I saw the black Troy thing on Netflix. I just skipped over it. There releasing another Queen of Scots movie. Besides them showing Elizabeth and Mary meeting when they never met. They casted some black guy to play a noble and another to play a lady in waiting to Mary. Just nonsense.
It’s just so forced and stupid. The thing is that in older period pieces they would occasionally show blacks in believable roles as extras on the street or servants.
Is that Alison C Trainwreck?
We may be the last generations of Americans who know that ancient Greece and Rome were white. Students will now be taught that diversity ruled.
According to the article you cite:
So I’m a little confused about what your beef is exactly. Are you saying that white-supremacists should, or should not, identify with these Greco-Semites?
There was some “scandal” back in the 80s about some Arab millionaires who bought big houses in Beverly Hills [?] and had “greek” statues out front that they painted in vibrant colors. I think it inspired an SNL skit about The Bel-Aire-Abs (get it?) with Jethro as Jugdish and Granny was Gilda Radner in a black chador waving a scimitar and jumping on people ululating “lalalalalalalala!” Not possible today, of course.
LOL I was thinking the same thing.
I would love to see re-colorized statues by master artists who have spent a lifetime perfecting their craft. Somehow, I suspect it would be a little more subtle and lifelike than the poster paint colors we see on these today.
We recognize the excquisite craftsmanship and talent of a master sculptor. We realize some of these took years or decades to complete. And then we assume the painting was something that was slapped on over a long weekend by some flunkie?
If you are referring to the claims the DNA test he took showed him to be only 99.5% white and proved he is a joke, I would have to say that those making those claims are pretty stupid.
The divorce from Spencer’s Russian/Armenian wife would free him to marry a younger, white American woman who shares his belief in white people’s flourishing. Perhaps he and Emily Youcis could pair up and form a family.
Good and worthy research, man.
That’s exactly the article I thought of. I had read it here on UR. Thank you for providing it!
We should be so lucky. I daresay you mean “incomprehensible” which is often the norm for him anyway.
it was over done restorers and art historians and realist painters have been arguing for years that restorers ‘over-clean’ and remove layers of varnish that were intended to soften and harmonize the colors.
oh my gawd and they turned it into a feminist lecture too..
Mohammed al Fassi, of Sunset Boulevard infamy in the 1970s, preferred his statues brightly painted.
When Ted Turner had black and white movies colorized about 30 years ago, the technology was real primitive. Today, it would be interesting to see what could be done: have, say, Wes Anderson colorize a b&w Fred Astaire musical like Top Hat. Could be interesting.
“Thus, Clark Gable, with his year-round tan, had to stay in a hotel for blacks when he visited Jim Crow Atlanta for the 1939 premiere of Gone With the Wind. ”
I remember in high school I found an old “slang dictionary” and one of the definitions for a Black lady’s man was “Dark Gable.”
I went to look at that mansion. It was something.
Besies, what a lame excuse she found. Even if he’s fictional, Homer explicitly wrote that he was supposed to be blond. That’s part of the fiction, as are Odysseus’s broad shoulders and Ajax’s huge frame.
All to avoid admitting that they want to make Achilles black for propaganda purposes.
Yes and the same goes for the mirrors and gilding in 18th century france in a dimily lit room it literally helped brighten things up – in bright lights it looks gaudy.
What about “white-armed Hera,” “gray-eyed Athena,” and red -haired Menelaus?
Definitely, we wuz kings!
Shingas, Hope someone here can help me, but last year IIRC, a museum took statues off exhibit because they actually looked like the people they were supposed to depict.
it would probably resemble 15-16th century Spanish polychrome:
https://www.pinterest.com/martaghu/imaginer%C3%ADa-spanish-polychrome-sculpture/
sans, the matry blood, of course…
as mentioned about the Sistine chapel, restorers nowadays tend to overclean and remove varnish that softened and harmonized the colors of paintings.
over time also, Egg temporar tends to appear much more light because the paint fades and the white under painting reflects white.
The ancient Minoans were apparently most closely related to:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-22527821
O/T
Uh, huh
Not as if your job is in any danger
Not as if your self-determination is being taken away.
Please name one “white supremacist” and fully explain why he cannot benefit from external cultural innovations, if external they be, taking care to not name agents, nationalists, globalists, or people who are only “white supremacists” because you don’t like them.
Paddy O’Finnegan, King of McCandaugh.
It is highly likely that the artistic skills of the modern digital colorizers doesn’t come close to that of the ancients who painted those statues.
It is unlikely that sculptors such as Phidas or Praxiteles would have created masterworks for the ages, and allowed some talentless hack to slap on a few coats of thick, undifferentiated pigment. The painting would have matched the sculpting in its level of talent, I think. Imagine Titian or Rembrandt creating 3-D paintings—that’s probably the level of artistry that was used in painting the sculptures.
The modern digital colorizers should have employed a teenage girl—she would have been much better at applying color, pigment and shading to faces.
probably something like Spanish polychrome (though they used wood):
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhyperallergic.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F07%2Fjesusmarymet02.jpg&f=1
It’s impossible for me to believe that an artist who could get the form so right could get the coloring so wrong.
Surely there must be better approximations of what the original must have been like.
“The thing is that in older period pieces they would occasionally show blacks in believable roles as extras on the street or servants.”
But that was just as much historical anachronism as Mary of Scots. Shanequa and Shantavius weren’t tooling around the City of London ca. 1463 during the height of Wars of the Roses.
If they can’t do the job no more, looks as if the Brits need a hand in crafting their own historical period pieces ‘specially when it comes to the casting.
The First World War has been restored by Peter Jackson and looks stunning:
Snobs have always been tiresome midwits. What changed was somewhere along the way too many people who should know better decided to start calling them elite.
Stop.
SJW have a sort of reverse Midas touch; everything they touch turns into crap.
Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings, has just released a colorized documentary on World War 1, titled They Shall Not Grow Old. It looks like colorization has improved quite a bit, although it is still far from perfect.
When discussing how gaudy or subtle the colors on the statues were, we should keep in mind that people then did not have the media we are used to. There were no photographs, color or otherwise, and there was no film or television. The art of painting wasn’t all that well developed either, compared to what has been done since the Renaissance.
Those painted statues might have been the height of realism. They might have amazed the people of the time.
Furthermore, it might not be possible for us to determine all the subtleties of the paint from what remains today. For all we know, the colors we find now could just be part of what the artists were applying in a more complex, subtle effect. Look closely at any good realist painting of our time. It will have many colors used together to achieve the illusion of reality and the colors that you think you see. If you were to come back thousands of years later and just pick out what’s left on the canvas, you might just think you find a few bright bits of color.
Same here. The modern reconstructions seem to assume the worst about their taste – a preference for highly saturated, strongly contrasting colors.
Why not consider the possibility that their taste was (at least) as good as ours, and that they colored their sculpture with subtlety & sensitivity?
Thanks.
Among blacks maybe, but have they never heard of a tanning bed? Every girl I grew up with was terrified of being too pale. The President of the United States spray tans.
Their obsession with race, gender, and gay identity is so tedious. Every article must be write through the “lens” of one of these pet obsessions. They were taught to do this in college for every term paper, hence the army of NPC graduates ruining the culture (often young, female, from the humanities). The new “flavor” of the month is anti-white.
True. I find it impossible to believe the Greeks and Romans wouldn’t want to take advantage of the way light reflects off marble and can make it seem to glow, when compared to plaster.
Pink Supremacism will be the new worry.
Mrs Roosevelt was also known for serving wretched meals. At least Hitler’s meals were certified organic vegetarian health food.
Gay, health food, alternative medicine animal rights activist vegetarian tree hugger environmentalist anti tobacco mandated equality for both girls and boys sports advocated hiking and biking created affirmative action for Aryans by executive order socialist built low cost government housing projects vast propaganda machine expanded government jobs to end unemployment blamed one specific ethnicity for every problem in the world
Hitler was a liberal!!
Japanese had lots of highly polished wood and gold paint on screens to be able to reflect as much light as possible.
My point with Huxley was that I cannot prove or cite it now but he absolutely was talking about statues, how the idealistic all-white statue is a sort of Platonic abstract thing, but this idea is an accident of history because they were intended to be in primary colors and buried in incense-mist. 1956. So that antedates the breaking statue news brought by Mark’s sister.
Hey, the city’s name has aphro in it. Gotta be colored!
Contemporary right wing identification with ancient Greece derives in large part from 19 century German scholarship and mythologizing of ancient Greece, which inspired German romanticists, nationalists, and right wingers. Germany was only unified in the latter half of the 19th century and other countries like England were commercial and industrial powers compared to Germany. The German response to this was to assert that while powers like England might be commercially or industrially superior, they were philistines and Germany and German Kutlur were spiritually superior. There was lots of German scholarship of classical Greece during this time, and it promoted the idea that Germany and German Kultur were the true inheritors of classical Greek culture. This is what motivated the Nordicist theories that developed during that time. Since Germany did not have much of a significant ancient past, it was proposed that it had connections with classical Greece. German Kultur is great, and it derives from ancient Greece, which must therefore have been really Germanic and Nordic, since contemporary Greece was backward.
It would probably also help to do this on actual marble instead of the plaster that the reproductions use.
As compared to all those North African redheads.
Rome and Italy have done pretty well in the last 1,7000 years. Greece not so much. The Turks destroyed it.
Just before his death, Orson Welles had it specifically stated that Citizen Kane was not to be ever altered in appearance in any way whatsoever (and of course he had colorization in mind).
https://people.com/archive/there-are-3-billion-reasons-why-the-al-fassis-of-sunset-blvd-arent-dancing-sheika-to-sheik-vol-17-no-6/
There have been many instances of appalling taste among the nouveau riches of California, but I’d say south Florida still takes the cake. But then most of them hail from N.Y., NJ and Latin America.
They’ll be picking oranges and lemons in California by Christmas and cleaning hotel rooms by Election Day.
Snobs have always been tiresome midwits. What changed was somewhere along the way too many people who should know better decided to start calling them elite.
Magazines like the New Yorker are supposed to hire well-educated people who are good at making cultural topics accessible to non-experts. Wanting or expecting that is not snobbery. People who are good at what they do are elite. The fact that “our” formerly impressive and admirable institutions are now full of stupid and nasty people doesn’t make that any less true.
Stop.
No.
Thanks for the link – so beautiful.
I can’t imagine why anybody would think that Greek & Roman sculptors of the classical age would have done a worse job.
What was goofy about the African Achilles was that he was wearing a helmet that was shaped to protect the skull and face of Greek White men. As a result in the promotional poster you see his prognathic African face jutting out past the face pieces, making him look like something that stumbled across the helmet and jammed it onto his head.
Well, I’m a good painter and I’ll tell you that the best way to achieve a true flesh effect is with layers of translucent glazes.
Oh boy, here goes.
In the old days, all oil painting was done in the studio. Colors were mixed thin and applied in successive layers, each given a day or two or three to dry. An apprentice’s job was to grind the dry powdered pigment into linseed or walnut oil using a muller on a plate of glass. The mixture was loaded into small leather bags which were pricked with a pin and squeezed out on the pallet as they were needed.
Sometime around 1850 color makers began mixing the pigments with oil in their factories. They loaded the resulting mix in lead tubes which could be resealed with a removable cap. Around the same time, they developed new synthetic bright colors, ultramarine blue, the cadmium yellows and reds.
For the first time artists were freed from the studio. They could pack up a box of tubes of paint and an easel and head outdoors. The result was Impressionism.
Impressionism. Bright colors laid on straight from the tube and painted in the bright white light of outdoors.
But painting outdoors requires that you move fast. The Sun is moving across the Heavens. Shadows change rapidly. Speed is of the essence. The approach has to be direct. No time for subtle glazes and waiting for layers to dry. Put it down and get it done.
Glazed paintings derive their beauty from the subtle interplay of light as it is reflected and refracted off the layers of glaze much like the effect of looking at a pearl. A pearl is lustrous because we are seeing light reflected back to the eye from deeper layers shining through upper layers.
Impressionist painters couldn’t rely upon layers of multicolored transparent glazes to give their paintings depth and subtlety so instead they laid related colors right next to each other in small brush strokes. Light is reflected from each of these dots of color which from across the room are mixed by the eye.
With no time to wait for layers to dry, the paint is put on thickly. But a large mass of paint put on thickly tends to crack and fall off with age. The solution was to break up the layer into a sequence of dots, each being one brush stroke.
The consistency of the paint in the tubes was much thicker than what had been mixed in the studio. Such thick paint had to be handled with a stiff brush. Whereas the studio brush was a soft sable, designed to spread a glossy thin layer, the brush used to handle the thick paint that came from tubes was short and blunt, just the tool for making dabs of heavy paint.
Shadows weren’t brown, they were violet! Distant mountain ranges were blue-violet. Whatever is on the other side of the color wheel from the ambient light is the complement, the shadow. So if the light is orange at sunset, then the shadows will be blue-violet.
Colors weren’t mixed on the pallete and then applied as a uniform glaze but rather to create the impression of a muted color, the complement was put down as a brush stroke right next to the color to which it was the complement and the eye mixed the light from across the room.
So, technical advances in color manufacturing, a novel way of storing paint, the demands of sound picture construction and a new theory of color mixing all co-operated in creating the Impressionist Era.
“The art of painting wasn’t all that well developed either, compared to what has been done since the Renaissance.”
Way wait, way wait. Are you really saying that Renaissance painters such as Michelangelo and Da Vinci weren’t all that? The giants of the entire age, who helped to usher in a more realistic era of painting are cream puffs?
Michelangelo was one of the few undisputed creative geniuses of the Renaissance. He worked in both sculpture and painting and was a master of both. It has been posited that his painting helped usher in the Baroque era as well.
Certainly the Renaissance was the starting point or the birth of more realistic painting. Just half a century before you had the Bayeux Tapestry and semi-stick figures in illuminated manuscripts.
They’re just waiting for some wealthy American kids who’ve never even washed the car or unloaded a dishwasher to build them a nice new house during their $7,000 plus airfare week of saving Africans from themselves for college applications.
It’s been written over at American Renaissance that actually, there was very little mating between black slaves that the Arabs brought with them into the Middle East. Many of them died over the long crossing of the Saraha, and those that made it ended up as eunuchs in the Sultan’s harems. Black women weren’t held in near the high regard as captured white women from Eastern Europe were.
So actually the modern Middle East has very little Sub-Saharan African admixture at all.
Haha! I’m glad you didn’t take my post in the wrong way. You just seemed pretty, what is it, smitten? She’s pretty old now, I’m guessing, so don’t wait around for her.
;-}
Ummm maybe if you’re used to white and beige boxes with disproportionate fenestration and those ghastly 99 cent store white vertical blinds.
… and finally : good bye New Yorker … into the bin …
The best BH new mansions are the ones built or remodeled by the Persians. Beautiful. I think I saw the Arab one too. Better than a drab shed the size of a house.
I never go to movies with blacks or watch Netflix or TV shows with blacks.
Only the stupid kids will think that. They can’t burn all the books, or censor the whole internet. Any kid who isn’t a numbskull looks things up on his own.
JMW Turner, the great pre-Impressionist English landscape painter from the first half of the 19th Century, has had a big problem with his paintings deteriorating over the last 200 years.
His tweet sounds like a joke missing its punchline.
Those Gothic cathedrals were the Sound/Light Shows of their day.
When the big bass pipes of the organ play, the very columns resonate. The note is transmitted down to the floor and the attendee can feel the Earth move to the magisterial music. It was literally a moving experience. And the light streaming through the rose windows, laying across the variegated grain of the marble columns created a complex, ever-changing visual feast.
A country bumpkin would have been awed into speechlessness by the experience. I was awed when I heard an organ rehearsing in Vienna–and I’m a jaded veteran of Pink Floyd’s laser light show, (among others).
How long before the Muslims convert Europe’s great cathedrals into mosques?
LOL gets overused.
I will just say that has to be the most on-target and funniest line of the year on iSteve.
Speaking of pink complexion the new insult word for bad whites in the UK is gammon. So maybe the ancient Greeks were gammon colored.
Better than a 4,000 sq ft modernist box with a flat roof
The problem with California residential architecture isn’t the occasional person who has the money and good taste to build something that isn’t a modernist shed.
It’s the fact that 90 percent of the homes are drab low ceiling boxes designed in 1950 modernist Scandinavian Puritan housing project style
The real crime of the blacks was invading and conquering all the pre 1950 neighborhoods with attractive houses.
We White refugees were forced to live in hideous drab boxes designed by Scandinavian puritans for the deserving poor
‘So actually the modern Middle East has very little Sub-Saharan African admixture at all.’
That depends on where in the Middle East you mean. I can’t recall ever seeing a Syrian that had anything detectably negroid about him at all. On the other hand, in Egypt the touch of the old tar barrel seems to range from just a dash to a decided dollop. Consider both Nasser and Anwar Sadat.
“The Romans were always more attracted to German women than their own.”
No they weren’t. Roman women dying their hair in admiration of Germans didn’t occur until into the later years of the Empire.
“Most of the body models used for marble sculptures were from the north and nothing was more attractive than a redhead. If you see a stature of a wealthy noble Roman women chances are it was actually someone else; at least the TnA.”
No evidence for any of this other than the fantasies of a nordicist sperg who wants to somehow salvage the “nordic heritage” of Rome and frame it as those swarthy wops slathering over nordic goddesses since time immemorable. To your credit you recognized that Roman woman dying their hair in emulation of Germans isn’t very consistent with Rome being nordic, which eluded the author of that piece of shit article that Unz felt the need to consider a classic on this site, and Amren publishing it to begin with.
There were attempts in the 19th century to revive the ancient practice of tinting marble. John Gibson was the main enthusiast. Fortunately it never really caught on.
http://art-now-and-then.blogspot.com/2017/08/john-gibson.html?m=1
Homer’s heroes were burnt on a funeral pyre. Wouldn’t be much DNA to analyze. If society was stratified and some classes buried their dead then that may skew the outcome. Methinks I’ll wait for a larger sample size.
This is a fantastic comment.
A good reference is the Nio one sees guarding Japanese Buddhist temples. They were originally Heracles and Boreas, brought to India by Alexander, and carried by Buddhists to Japan in their current form. At some temples the statues are bare wood or bronze and at some they’re brightly painted. (Usually red.) Generally whoever runs the temple decides.
Most on this blog are familiar with Orwell’s quote, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
This nonsense on Greco-Roman history is a perfect example of that playing out. The good whites were caught flatfooted by the supposedly ignorant bad whites resorting to history for their cause. That cannot be allowed.
There’s a conspiracy theory that George Lucas, who is simultaneously a big film preservation advocate and infamous for re-editing his own movies, was messing with Star Wars re-issues in order to shock complacent young people into valuing film preservation.
Yeah, like the nouveau riche of Saudi Arabia– most notably Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi, who in 1978 had all those stark-white classical statues around his newly-purchased Beverly Hills mansion/love-shack properly painted, including pubes. He also installed a lot of erotic art inside, perhaps inspired by those famous Etruscan wall-paintings.
For what it’s worth, my 1946 (yes, 72 years ago) Encyclopaedia Brittanica states, in the authoritative voice of contributor George Jack, that the ancient Greeks painted their sculptures, and colored them in other ways (e.g., gilding portions of bronzes). See the “Sculpture Technique” article at page 217 of volume 20 (SARS to SORC), which gives an extended discussion. To be so surprised, that fellow Mark Abbe must have slept through a lot of his classes and avoided the literature of his chosen field pretty assiduously.
Yeah, that’s why Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida, because he was secretly Otto von Bismarck. Or maybe the Greeks and Romans came up with a lot of concepts that were useful to us, and were also more accessible than comparable Chinese innovations.
Brilliant!
There was a major difference between the Turkish Persian and Arab treatment of black slaves.
The Turks and Persians only took already castrated and healed black men who did a lot more than run the harems.
The black woman sex serviced the Turk and Persian men. They weren’t supposed to get pregnant. If they did it was abortion or killing the baby when it was born. They made sure no mulatto babies survived.
The Arabs were happy to let the black babies live and bought intact black African men who had their own children.
The Taureg and other Arabs who lived in the south where African slaves were cheap changed their race from White Caucasian to black African in a few hundred years. Same with the people of Sudan and Chad
Islam from the beginning forbade killing newborns. The Arabs followed that rule. The Persians and Turks didn’t
Eunuchs were very very expensive unaffordable by any but the very rich.
The Turkish empire was run by European slaves acquired as young children and well trained.
Leonard Pitts openly wept after reading the latest bit of gibberish that was written by his biggest fan.
Darn it! Here is the link!
Yeah, like the nouveau riche of Saudi Arabia, most notably Sheik Mohammed al-Fassi, who in 1978 had all those stark-white classical statues around his newly-purchased Beverly Hills mansion/love-shack properly painted, including pubes. He also installed a lot of erotic art inside, perhaps inspired by those famous Etruscan wall-paintings.
Vivien Leigh has been dead and buried half a century now.
OT
tweet
The haunting words of Christine Blasey Ford from her testimony on Capitol Hill are showing up in various spots on the campus of Yale Law School as anger over Brett Kavanaugh is still raw:
I think I remember painting the statues from my first year high school western civilization class.
Journalism is always so breathless. I’ve just discovered something!!!!!!
In summer almost every California newspaper used to have gasp!! Horrors!! Asian women don’t like to get tan!!!! Can women of color be racist that they don’t want to tan??? They even sometimes carry parasols to avoid the sun
Or Mexican men like to go to the park and play soccer on weekends. Isn’t that fascinating I’m so smart and intellectual and cultural aware I’ve noticed Mexicans playing soccer !!!!!!
At least they don’t write articles about black women’s hair any more. That stopped around 2010 Maybe Michelle Obama told them it was none of their business
No one has yet countered this afro-centrist/diversity revisionist history with the following obvious point:
Blacks in America have zero claim on the accomplishments of Egypt, Greece, or Rome.
Why?
Simple. Google the phrase “where were slaves in the U.S. taken from”? You’ll find a list of countries today that correspond to where American black slaves came from. All of which are in sub-Saharan West Africa.
Next, use google maps to get the distance from these countries to Cairo, Rome, and Athens.
Then do the same thing from Cairo, Rome, and Athens to places like Paris, Madrid, London, Berlin, and even further places like Dublin and Stockholm.
You’ll find something amazing: almost all of the European white cities are geographically closer to Cairo, Rome, and Athens than the West African countries black slaves were from.
And then you remember that there is actual evidence of trade between the ancient near East and the far reaches of Europe, however limited. And how there is no evidence of trade or communication or any relationship between Cairo, Rome, and Athens and the black slave countries.
And how there was a giant impassible desert—-the Sahara—between the ancient near east and sub-Saharan West Africa.
Basically, blacks in America can in no way make a claim to Egyptian, Roman, and Greek accomplishments as “theirs” and not whiteys, because whitey was actually physically closer and in contact with those places, and thus is much more likely to have Egyptian, Greek, and Roman blood than any sub-Saharan black is.
Someone needs to point out this fact and hammer it home: whitey has a greater claim to Mediterranean and New East accomplishments than any American black slave descendant. Full stop. Blacks have zero claim to those accomplishments because they are neither related by blood nor by culture or trade to them, while whitey is.
That’ll put a damper on this blackwashing of history.
‘…Colors weren’t mixed on the pallete and then applied as a uniform glaze but rather to create the impression of a muted color, the complement was put down as a brush stroke right next to the color to which it was the complement and the eye mixed the light from across the room…’
Somebody demonstrated this doesn’t happen at all.
Modern people are so used to lack of color with white beige and gray interiors every where, offices homes hotels public buildings and women in black pants and white top uniform that we are so unused to color that color seems shocking to us.
Even European furniture stores seem strange to Americans because of the colors. That was one of the first things I noticed my first trip to Europe that began in Germany. Furniture store windows, hotels, homes with furniture in real colors.
‘Greece not so much. The Turks destroyed it.’
Greece was definitely ancient history by the time the Turks showed up.
I’m not talking about the general influence classical Greece and Rome have had throughout history on Europe, but the particular German experience over the past couple centuries.
https://www.historytoday.com/helen-roche/germanys-tyranny-over-greece
Two thousand years of the Catholic church educating every child who went to school in Latin and Greek languages, philosophy, and history, and teaching them Classical logic, rhetoric, geometry, astronomy, artistic techniques, etc., and you think this is all 19th Century German nationalism.
Seriously, buddy boy, lying that badly exposes you right away. Try a more subtle approach that is directly contradicted by all of Western history.
The Brits were very Greek-worshipping too. The Italians and French favored the Romans.
Virtually nobody in Western Europe could read Ancient Greek in, say, 1000 AD. Much of Aristotle was recovered around, I dunno, 1100 and then much of Plato in the 1400s. It’s not that they were unknown, it’s they tended to be known second hand, through Cicero and other Latins.
Virtually nobody in Western Europe could read Ancient Greek in, say, 1000 AD. Much of Aristotle was recovered around, I dunno, 1100 and then much of Plato in the 1400s. It’s not that they were unknown, it’s they tended to be known second hand, through Cicero and other Latins.
” I find it impossible to believe the Greeks and Romans wouldn’t want to take advantage of the way light reflects off marble and can make it seem to glow”
That’s right. For example, to keep a blue sky luminous, you must paint thinly to allow the light to go through the blue pigment, bounce off the pure white ground underneath and back through the blue topcoat.
One reason skies in old oil paintings look so dead is because they were often painted over a muted, tinted ground. The other reason is that linseed oil darkens with age, turns amber, which, mixed with blue results in an olive color. And too, the old masters didn’t have access to our modern bright blue colors. Most common were fugitive pigments that changed color with age. The best was ground up Lapis Lazuli, which is, of course, a semi-precious gem. So if a client wanted the best, he ordered–and paid for–Lapis.
Early tempura paintings were applied on a pure white gesso ground. To this day they shine when viewed next to an oil painting from the same era. (Tempura was pigment mixed with egg yolk as the medium) ((protein is a very durable long-chain molecule))
The church read some kind of Greek. Many of the scrolls in the library of Alexandra were transferred to the Vatican library over the centuries before it was finally destroyed about 900AD
Don’t forget St Katharine’s monastery in Egypt and the other monasteries in Syria. That’s where the real treasures were.
I think that’s right. I seem to recall hearing about painted statues back then.
Grazie.
If someone came to the USA with no knowledge of its history, they might be tempted to believe that inhabitants of Maine 500 years ago looked like its inhabitants of today. Yet we know this is not the case because of our historical record.
The concept that a particular people have not continuously occupied a piece of land is not hard for people to understand as noted in the above example. And it seems to provide the anti-whites with endless joy to speculate how Europe had non-whites running around even during the classical period. It serves as a way to stick it to whites, I guess.
However, I’ve noticed that many have a hard time applying this concept to the continent of Africa, or parts of Asia like the Levant. They take a look around and see dark people and assume it has always been that way since time immemorial. So they claim North African Romans as “blacks” and feign ignorance that any other people might have populated those areas centuries ago.
Yet from the example in Maine we know an area’s population can be transformed dramatically in a short period of time. It’s funny how people can understand this, but won’t believe it has happened in Africa.
Interesting Talk page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Recovery_of_Aristotle##
Vivien Leigh’s photos when she was working in England show her as much more beautiful than she was in Gone With The Wind. Dark hair’s boring But combine black hair with white skin big eyes and perfect features the effect is glorious
The straight-jacket keeps him from typing with his fingers.
That’s a-maze-ing.
Very interesting and helpful; thanks.
What makes you think the old aristocratic families had such bad taste they liked mud colors instead of clear bright colors?
For a long time the Irish schools and certain parts of Italy were the only ones teaching Greek in the early medieval Latin world.
Another and much graver factor in the earlier medieval period was simply the lack of texts. Rome was pretty much wasted in the centuries following the fall of the Western Empire and all the other great cultural centers were in the East, except that some work was starting to be done in Seville. Well, that was a wash.
As Steve notes above, the study of Greek is more recent in the West than Latin, which was a direct inheritance through the Church. Our conception of classical Greece is largely derived from relatively recent scholarship – over the past few centuries, and much of it from Germany.
At any rate, we’re not talking about schoolboy Latin and Greek here, which consisted of endless drilling and rote memorization and was regarded as drudgery and hated and soon forgotten by most schoolboys after finishing school.
I wish I could remember where I read this. I guess the only evidence would be the figures of the statues themselves. Tall and angular or short and squat? The fig leaves have covered up the other evidence.
Actually there are a lot of countries in Europe where their histories are intertwined and there is this this love hate thing going on. The French and the English or the Italians and Germans are good examples. Rome was sacked in about 400 BC by the Brenner and the Romans were acutely aware of it their entire history. They were also unable to conquer the Germans even though they were right next door and tried several times. They were the barbarians and the Romans absolutely despised the Celts and their propaganda reflected that.
Lincoln Memorial.jpg
Old money families in the U.S. tend to like old things with faded colors they inherited.
The color palettes used in black and white films were specifically chosen for how they would look in black and white. “Colorizing” them is an act of vandalism.
As if.
To err is human I guess.
It’s thought that Queen Katherine brought a black or mulatto to England servant when she first arrived in England to marry Henry’s brother. Queen Elizabeth issued an expulsion order to blacks.
At any rate the vast majority of Tudor Era period pieces had no black people. I was thinking more post 1600s.
That’s fascinating. Nice reminder of how professional writers used to write.
There’s a word that it’s not considered polite to use.
It’s got an N in it… there’s an I, too… and a G… actually I’m pretty sure there’s another G… and it ends in ‘ER‘.
Point is, you can’t just go around chucking “GINGER” about – i.e.,
Only a ginger can call another ginger Ginger.
Plus, ‘ginger‘ is too good for ‘em. (I’m not anti-bloodnut: some of my best friends are disabled).
In Straya a ginger is properly referred to as a “ranga” (some dummies spell it ‘ranger’, but that’s silly because it invites the uninitiated to pronounce it ‘rain-ja’, when it should be ‘rang-a’).
The Fall of Constantinople meant a flood of ancient Greek (and Hebrew) reading scholars West providing one of the sparks of the Reformation.
Dude’s laid the mascara on a bit thick…
But this lady? Dayum!
Ho-hum, Hitler is the measure of all things. What a dreary religion.
Philhellenism is dog bites man for any thoughtful person over the last 25 centuries. But of course Cpl. Schicklgruber must command the entirety of everyone’s attention. Never again! can anyone dare to tear our gaze away from the great man lest the Cossacks ride again.
That’s your Prussian schooling speaking, but there are American traditions that long predate its ill-fated late 19th Century adoption on these shores. Both our civic and spiritual traditions draw heavily on understandings of Greek myth, philosophy, science, and history that have little to do with German fads.
To conflate the (especially American) Right with much at all German is to (usually willfully and maliciously) misunderstand it.
There’s a little quirk of cultures nearer to the equator. The have a tendency to love really bright colors. This is because strong colors look good in very bright sunlight. Weaker colors look better in environments closer to the poles where the skies are cloudier and everything is darker. This is the sort of thing you become aware of if you do a lot of photography.
Yes, the colors on Greeks statues were probably as garish as the Greeks could make them. Why? Because in strong Greek sunlight out of doors, they didn’t look so velvet Elvis. You need to see them in their natural environment to make any judgment calls about them.
Since the original film is not altered and can still be accessed, I think this argument is horseshit.
Colorizing old films is in principle a good idea since it makes them easier to watch for more people. In practice, the colorizing in the 80s wasn’t very good, and now that the idea is in bad odor, it may be a long time before it becomes something anyone wants to do again.
An example of the Turner method:
A sampling of Hollywood reaction:
Why not colorize “Some Like It Hot?” Billy Wilder wanted to make it in color, but couldn’t figure out how to make the makeup on Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag not look ghastly in color, so it was switched to black and white at the last moment. And it’s not like a film noir where B&W fits the story because it’s always raining on the detective in a trench coat, it’s set at a resort hotel in Florida in 1927. It was always supposed to be colorful.
There are probably ten more old classic B&W movies that the director really wanted to shoot in color. Don’t do “Citizen Kaine,” do Fred Astaire’s “Top Hat.” Most of the Astaire movies that people see these days are his later ones in color, which are fine, but he might have been an even better dancer when he was younger in his B&W days.
It’s hard for young people to watch old B&W movies these days. So, colorize one W.C. Fields movie (probably “The Bank Dick”), one Marx Brothers movie, and so forth.
How many major movie stars in history don’t have a major movie in color?
The Sultan of Brunei has a house near me (in England), the rumour is that he brings all his prostitutes there for a good seeing to.
As for Greek States being painted: I learned this from Egon Friedell (Cultural history of the modern times, Chapter about Winckelmann) who wrote it in 1927 as a fact well known.
The Greco-semite thesis is interesting. It doesn’t explain (a) why Greeks and Semites spoke completely different languages, (b) why the prevalent Jews were so antagonistic against Greek culture.
This last point has an important implication for modern protestant theology. This theology is mostly Judaizing and extremely antagonistic against the Greek influence in early Chistian theology. They always maintain that the old, “uncorrupted” Jewish terminology is much better (well, not “clearer” – they can hardly pretend that!)
In North Africa, Sub-Saharan admixture ranges from 0 to 30%, with 20% being typical. Egypt today has about 20% : Roman Egypt had around 10%. Yemen today, 30%.
Typically lower in endogamous groups: Lower in Copts than the rest of Egypt, low in Jews from the Middle East, low in the Druze, and I would guess, low in Alawites.
Average for the Middle East as a whole: maybe 5%, mostly maternal ancestry.
It was tried by a curator at the BM in the ’30s, I believe. Got his chaps to have a crack at scrubbing all the muck off the Elgin Marbles with wire brushes and buckets of warm bleach solution or the like. I didn’t credit it until I ran my fingers over a horsehead (after-hours, visiting a friend in the conservation labs who gave me a tour). You could feel the striations left by the steel bristles.
And yes, I don’t know anyone, apart from museum directors, who doesn’t think the whole lot should be carted right back to Athens in the morning.
Inasmuch as there seems to be a divorce case afoot and modern divorce dangles cash and prize incentives for whatever concocted scandal the soon-to-be-ex can come up with, probably.
” what’s more the practice of painting statues continued well into the middle ages….”
And in fact to the present day, in nearly all Catholic churches
Last summer I went to a Catholic church in Little Italy in Manhattan and they had lots of painted statues. (I guessed this was the church where Martin Scorsese was an altar boy, but it turned out to be a half mile south.)
“Every girl I grew up with was terrified of being too pale.”
In the UK at least that was a class thing. In Victorian times and before, a tan was a low-class signifier (“she works in the fields!”) and women took great care to expose as little skin as possible.
From the 30s onwards and especially the 50s (the “jet-set” era) a tan became an upper-class signifier (“she holidays abroad!”) and women wanted one.
Now at least in the UK (among natives) the pendulum’s swinging back to pale (Helena Bonham Carter style), as ever the underclass developed over the last 40 years are the last to catch on, and are the only customers for tanning salons.
@Steve – the Madonna in my picture is in Thailand, slightly more garish than in my local UK Catholic church but not much. Catholic culture is pretty global/universal – catholic in fact.
((protein is a very durable long-chain molecule))
Proteins are the Jews of paint ; Is that your point?
I wanted to write the same ( but you said it better anyway). These colourings are atrocious, not at all like on surviving paintings of later ages. Natural blondes/redheads/brunettes have different shades throughout their hair, skin has different tones throughout the body. The irises are not one solid colour either. The Greeks made lifelike images of perfect humans. Why would they not do the same in colouring? Hope someone will do justice to these statues and their creators by painting them as actual beautiful humans.
Because nothing says “Swarthy Peoples” like strawberry-blonde hair.
That’s a shame. [/jerry.seinfeld]
To be on the safe side, try post-1700′s.
It can be thought is a euphemism for “no proof exists, but since it’s modern PC to think it, we’ll go with it to stay relevant.” This is similar to Spike Lee and other prominent blacks who insist that HOF NY RF Babe Ruth had a black parent and was himself mulatto (or at least a quarter black). No evidence for the assertion, but hey, let’s go with it, specially since in 2018land, its perfectly acceptable to make such asinine statements and no proof to back it up. Cause after all, whitey sucks.
Uh, you’re not black, per chance, are you? What’s with this fetish among otherwise normal white people to incessantly join in the chorus of Black Liberation Theology to colorize the Caucasian past?
Again. There were no blacks at all during Tudor times in England. Why would there have been? England by boat to Sub-Saharan Africa is thousands of miles away, and the Portuguese had only relatively recently discovered sailing past the horn of Africa in the 15th century (as Portugal and Spain were big into the slave trade). At that time, England was not a major player in the slave trade, and thus had no incentive to sail to Africa.
Ergo, no blacks.
I know, it is hard to imagine world history continuing on as before without blacks involved in some way. How did that happen, how did that occur?
Yeah: preposterous. As I had remembered and as my wife with the doctorate in art history just confirmed, certainly by the 1980s that was common knowledge conveyed in textbooks for undergraduate survey classes.
“ambushed by color”… Gawd, such writing.
I think this is what you are referring to :
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/once-banished-controversial-race-exhibit-resurfaces-at-chicago-museum
I think your’s is a balanced and well reasoned comment. As you say, the finds by German archaeologists such as Schliemann and discoveries by philologists about the Indo-European languages etc. revived an interest in Classicism in Germany which transmuted into a cult. Even the script writers for Indiana Jones agree with you, which is why Jones is always stumbling over Nazis digging up some secret to world domination over in the Middle East or Egypt while on his adventures.
I think what the other commenters are objecting to is slightly beside the point. They’re saying that Britain’s and America’s upper classes were steeped in Classicism because they were educated in that tradition, had copied the architecture in their public buildings and sculpture etc. (Having said that, it is doubtful whether the average yeoman American of 1830 had any more awareness of ancient Athenian scholars and statesmen than does a follower of twitter today.)
But as I say, these are beside the point. You’re not saying that the English and Americans weren’t also interested in Classical Greece. You’re only pointing out that the Germans turned the results of their historical research into something of a cult which has resurfaced today in the Alt Right’s resurrection of certain thinkers who and themes which resonated with the followers of Nazism. There’s a difference.
What’s probably in play here is that the commenters who disagree with you don’t want the Alt Right movement tarred with the same brush as was used on the Nazis.
Don’t forget the clear-coat. Athena really pops in candy-apple.
Informed comment. I don’t see the “Hitler as a measure of all things” in what you wrote at all. Someone didn’t read carefully.
You don’t know tacky .
According to Herodotus, 5.5% of Egyptian kings up to his day were Ethiopian, which as I recall is somewhat close to the percentage of Black African genes in Egyptians today.
Herodotus also discusses the mixed race populations between the areas controlled by Ethiopians and Egyptions.
and
Peter Jackson just had his guys go over Great War footage. He had voices and sound effects dubbed in as well. The results seem remarkable from the bits I’ve seen. It was recently released under the title, “They Shall Not Grow Old” in England as part of the centenary commemoration of the armistice.
I’m very much looking forward to seeing it.
Steve,
If this is true, doesn’t it support these critics’ view that the portrayel of classical antiquity has indeed been “whitewashed”?
Citation?
Actually, the more educated an American is, the more likely he or she is a NPC. The people who question more what they hear in the official narratives tend to be less educated and use personal experience. The education system teaches people that only stupid, bigots don’t buy the narratives pushed by the elite. Mindlessly believing the narratives gives high IQ educated people a sense of superiority and status.
You’ve hit on the volkerwanderung’s real weapon, THOTs.
“Schatzi, if you really liebst mich, then you’d prove it by sacking Rome.”
Aw, come on, New Yorker. You don’t need to hedge. Go ahead and say it! The sculptures had black faces! Greeks were persons of color who migrated to Hellas after building the pyramids and settling North America.
Hey, isn’t that what happened to Matt Yglesias back in 2011?
“Although there is a persistent, racist preference for lighter skin over darker skin in the contemporary world, the ancient Greeks considered darker skin” for men to be “more beautiful and a sign of physical and moral superiority.”
But of course, preferring darker skin was not racist like the racist preference for lighter skin.
I suspect they didn’t have the pigment technology to get the subtle tones. Or if they had they technology, it was too expensive to use it much, or to apply it.
Muhammad Ali used that term to refer to his (mustachioed) self during a sparring session in the documentary “Muhammed and Larry.”
1. How could an art *grad student* not know that Greek statues were painted in color? As Steve noted, that was common knowledge a long time ago.
2. It’s pretty sad/hilarious how literally people are taking the terms “white” and “black.” The idea that admiring the white statues is akin to admiring the white race, or that calling someone “black-hearted” is a dig at black people, is simply ludicrous.
3. After studying Ancient Greek culture a bit, I was surprised at how many blondes, redheads, and light eyes were present. I assumed the ancient Greeks were all olive-skinned, black-haired, dark brown-eyed.
The current thinking is that they were not portraits from life in that by the time you commissioned one the subject was by definition dead – these were substitutes for the earlier tradition of mummy masks (think King Tut). The subjects are shockingly young reflecting the low life expectancy of the period (and I think they have found that the portraits match the age at death of the mummies that they were attached to – OTOH portraits of Roman emperors were standardized at the beginning of their rule and did not age as the Emperor himself aged).
I think they were custom painted and not totally off the shelf (or else you would see repeats and you don’t) . They were dashed off quickly (but skillfully) using a lot of conventions but with details filled in so that the portrait bore a general resemblance to the deceased at least as far as hair color and texture, facial hair, etc. went (and with the clothing & jewelry mostly imaginary). By the time the portrait artist viewed the mummy of the deceased (if at all) , he/she no longer looked much like themselves in better days anyway. So they are sort of like the sketches that police artists produce today.
When we were in Greece a few years ago, our tour guides (throughout the country) stated, without much fanfare, that most of the the statues and buildings we were seeing had originally been painted. It was something that many tourists didn’t know, but seemed to be common and long held knowledge among guides.
The partial Minoan structures recreated by archaeologist Arthur Evans on Crete had dark paint on the columns, and I believe those were done 100 years ago or more. His recreations have been criticized for accuracy, and I understand Minoan culture isn’t Classical culture, but the Minoans had an enormous impact on the Classical Greeks, and the paint isn’t a matter of dispute. As I recall, the Minoans would also paint all males in pictures an exaggerated dark color to represent the amount of time they spent outside working. The females were painted a lighter more natural shade.
The guides’ matter of fact statement that the statues were painted, is a far cry from the author’s “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture.” I saw this article at it’s source just before I saw Steve’s blog, and down at the bottom of the page was a pop up ad for the New Yorker that said something like ‘fight fake news with real news.’ LOL!
Even a casual reading of ancient sources turns up all sorts of passages like these. These classicists know it. They are lying willfully.
A “working” or more like “virtue signaling” and “resume building” vacation, huh? I’m sure it sounds good for the guys if the chicks are into it. The lodging’s gotta be cheap. Seeing that “house” there, even inept SWAs could put another one together in a few days. That gives half a week left for hiking around the jungle, hoping to impress the chicks without getting cannibalized.
In Rob Roy, one of the nobles, the Duke of Montrose, has a little black boy in livery. Possibly not historically accurate, but it still feels plausible, since you get the idea it is something a fop would have.
More nonsense about the Roman North Africans being negroes because AFRICA! I see. I think they prefer not to understand about the Sahara because it allows blacks to culturally appropriate Caucasian achievements. They oughta be a bit nicer to us white boys instead of pushing for our genocide. Without us who’s going to do all the achievements for them to take credit for?
Harold Lloyd.
I had to chuckle one time when I heard a white Puerto Rican complaining that my white European American ancestors were the one who raped and pillaged across Puerto Rico. They did it to us! Good luck finding an ancestor of mine who ever set foot there but it’s clear she is a direct descendant of the conquistadors who actually did.
For myself, I like his hair.
So just who is doing the abusing?
Name some names.
Realize that they are your enemies. They want to cause you pain.
Ignore them. As long as you can.
See. No more pain.
All the quoted and cited paragraphs in the Akashic record cannot undo the central error which I have already described.
“White supremacists” cannot have a fixation on Museum Island, and one meaningfully distinct from that of European cultural tradition, if they do not exist. I see nothing supremacist in Hamilton or Kitto and nothing Prussian about the European traditions and conventions originating in the Peloponnese.
Seriously, the only way for the NY whites to absolve themselves of all their white supremacy, is to resign from their jobs en mass. Leave them to deserving people of color.
This is especially true of white females who have job slots that rightfully should go to REAL minorities.
Only by moving to live in a shack in the hinterlands can they ever achieve redemption.
Maccabees, maybe?
Yes, that’s exactly right.
I went to a Catholic high school where I took Latin and Greek, and to a college with a Great Books core curriculum. The traditional Catholic, scholastic, and Enlightenment/Classical Liberal approaches and interpretations of the Classics are quite different from the modern right wing interpretation which as you note derives from German scholarship.
One has to muse on what decades of books really will need burning when the time comes. 1960-2040?
One down, hopefully it’ll end with that. And then …
I didn’t have “Prussian schooling”. I went to a Catholic high school where I took Latin and Greek, and a college with a Great Books core curriculum. It would be absurd to deny the general influence of the Classical world on all aspects of Western culture. It’s so prevalent, it doesn’t even have to be pointed out. It’s the water we swim in. That’s not the point here.
In Olde England the number of blacks was not zero but it was a statistical zero. There were a handful that made it to the UK here and there but you might see one once in a lifetime (or maybe if you were in a big port city once a year).
If you did manage to see a black person, he sure as hell wasn’t a duke.
My father said that before he saw the American GI’s in Germany after the war, the number of black people he had seen in the flesh in his lifetime up until that point was 1 – there was a black guy in some traveling circus that came to town. He said that people were going up to the guy and rubbing his skin to see if the color would rub off.
Rather like the physically unfavoured (if white) Jesuit at my prep school who one day told us fifteen year olds with sound and fury in his voice that we weren’t white, by God, we were pink!
The idea being, I suppose, that we were “coloureds” too.
It would seem that New York is just one big mental institution for communist nut-jobs.
You don’t give them enough credit. They were likely more intelligent ( on average) than today’s Europians.
Theda Bara. Rudolf Valentino. Fatty Arbuckle. All the older silent era ones, which I guess would not be considered major now?
No no no.
The Arab house was a splendid Italianate mansion built in the early part of the twentieth century.
It was on Sunset, and as a boy I coveted it mightily.
The statues were part of the original design, and were chastely beautiful. Then along came an oil funded barbarian to ruin the effect – I seem to remember that it was the pubic hair only which had been picked out in startling black. Everyone was disgusted, and after years of fruitless bartering, the locals simply burnt the place down. The ruins stayed put for year, but are now replaced by a typical Beverly Hills MacMansion.
A story emblematic of our age.
It’s actually a step or two down from the top and falling, but too many of the top have found them useful so have egged them on instead of the usual frowning on declasse behavior and views.
This looks fantastic.
The music, by the way, is “Nimrod” from Sir Edward Elgar’s “Enigma” variations.
Unfortunately, they use a modern recording. They should have used Elgar’s own electrical recording, made in the late ’20′s. There have been advances in the restoration of early sound recordings with really amazing results. A guy named Andrew Rose is the great pioneer, here.
That may be. But their technologies were mostly, on a case by case basis, more rudimentary than what was available in the 16th century. And there’s a cumulative effect. It’s not just the technology of the pigment, but the technology of their packaging, their keeping, their transportation, the viability of their roads. I’m not an expert. But I have to imagine that even if the basic technology of the pigment was in existence, it had to be easier for a 16th century Venetian to have an order for a certain pigment be fulfilled successfully than an Ancient Greek.
Then why in God’s name are you trying to blame it on 19th Century Germans?
Three Cranes, Buffalo’s east side was home to Polonia. These Catholic Poles built beautiful churches, sometimes with in a half mile of each other. Today a fair number are converted to or are being converted to mosques. My wife and I passed St. Girard’s RC church at the corners of Bailey and Delevan. It has been stripped of it’s stained glass windows and a worker was mortaring in the inscription over the main entrance, which I recall was “Ad Altare Dei.”
Wasn’t “The Artist” done in B&W? Also, “Shindler’s List” was done in B&W. Black and White films occasionally still get made. Most of Billy Wilder’s films from 1942-66 were done in B&W. I just assumed that he preferred to work that way and not in color. But the real world, is always done in Color.
Not to mention the various filters one used when filming in black and white, in order to bring out various hues within black and white (and also perhaps to highlight a “grey” affect as well).
but if you point this out even to today’s whites, they’ll huff and sputter ‘But it COULD have happened. We don’t know for CERTAIN that they didn’t ever appear in Tudor England five hundred years ago.’
I mean, when imbeciles, dolts, and idiots don’t bother to learn actual historical facts, wishful thinking as well as an overall PC not wanting to hurt the feels of the Peoples of Color, and well, there you have it.
Shantavius was obviously in England all this time. After all, a cartoon on the BBC says that some ancient Roman legions appeared in England 2k yrs ago and so “obviously” that’s a fact, Jack, and there’s the truth, Ruth. Obviously it happened.
You would THINK that DNA would also settle it once and for all. But there you have it.
Perhaps the diocese is raising funds for their priests that have been charged with molestation of young boys. At one time during the Middle Ages, the Church owned around 30% of the total land in Western Europe. Now in North America various Catholic churches are being sold.
Must be raising the funds causing some of it, which is the elephant in the room.
Haha! Good one, and no, I am not ready for a good deal on a “pre-owned” statue only viewed by little old ladies on Sunday morning… well, not unless you give me a good deal on my Doctor Reverend Martin Luther King Junior, only been shot-blasted once, slightly soiled, as a trade-in.
What grit are you using, Pericles? Don’t go any further till you sort that out. I don’t think people will notice yet… except maybe some real artsy-fartsy types…
‘…More nonsense about the Roman North Africans being negroes because AFRICA!’
That always gets my goat. The Mediterranean is not a barrier, but a unifying marketplace and highway. The critical divide is the Sahara; north is part of the Mediterranean world, and hence civilization, south of it is ‘subsaharan Africa.’
This was even truer before the Islamic conquests — and still more true than now when much of Southern Europe — Spain, Sicily, the Balkans at various points — were Muslim.
Africa is a geographical reality. As a historical or demographic unity, though, it’s more of a canard. The important reality is the Mediterranean. Tunisia goes with Italy; ask the Romans and the Carthaginians. It does not go with Chad. Morocco-Spain — not Niger. Egypt-Syria — not Ethiopia. Etc. The last ruler of the Aviz dynasty of Portugal died in Morocco; no Moroccan ruler ever died in Niger that I know of.
The number of blacks in England prior to say, late 1600′s/early 1700′s was zero. Period. In other words before England started to emerge as the great naval power and before their colonial empire around the world.
Else cite your source that shows blacks living in England during the Norman conquest, Plantagenet, etc. I mean, if they were actually living there, don’t you think that Chaucer, Steven Langdon, and the various chronicles of the centuries would’ve made mention of it? Somewhere? Come on. But they don’t. Why is this suddenly now so controversial to point out? Do whites go around pointing out that tons of caucasians lived in Timbuktu one thousand yrs ago? Or in South Africa two thousand yrs ago?
Total hinky.
As Whorefinder said on this posting, something called the Sahara, and the fact that London was about a few thousand miles away. Since the jet didn’t exist back then, how exactly would they have gotten there? Really shouldn’t buy into Spike Lee and Genius Coates assertions that blacks were everywhere in all lands at all historical periods of time.
It’s time to call BS and rightfully demand the proof. Otherwise they’re full of it.
From The Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek:
The Portuguese mariners had been buying black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa from the mid-15th Century. A few would have been around the docks in London in Shakespeare’s time in the late 16th Century.
Every East Asian woman in Asia I’ve met is terrified of getting a suntan. Labels on bottles of moisturizer prominently advertise their SPF factor, even if they are not sunblock creams.
The New Yorker has always been more snobbish than accessible or interesting, with enough exceptions to keep the ambitious guessing.
So you’re determined to continue to call stupid and nasty people elite? I don’t follow.
Your view of the modern right wing is profoundly shuttered. A few dorks online does not constitute even a strain within the right wing let alone the whole of it. Are you intentionally echoing progtard smears? Don’t you understand that the institutions that formed you were a product of that same right wing you now so casually defame?
No, not just the upper classes (not that there was a proper upper class in early America) but the shopkeepers and yes many yeomen as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyceum_movement
But now we’ve found them out – they were Nazis all along!
The article is just another in a long line of articles trying and failing to rewrite European history much like tv shows try writing us out of our own histories ( Mark Collett has a video on YT about that ) having said that msm is in decline and is increasingly irrelevent. The legacy media and their talking heads no longer control the discourse.
So you’re determined to continue to call stupid and nasty people elite? I don’t follow.
No, it’s that I insist there is such a thing as legitimately elite scholars and academics but they’re not the ones being thrust upon us right now. We’re living in a civilisational low-point but that doesn’t mean an elite cannot exist, shouldn’t exist or never did exist.
The Romans called the Germans “barbarians” yet they despised the Celts?? Why didn’t they despise the Germans or call that Celts “barbarians”? Why did they despise the Celts?
It’s not remarkable if it’s fake (dubbed in).
No, I’m a Ph.D. medievalist, and Steve is actually right. Hardly any learned people during most of the Middle Ages knew Greek or had any access to Greek texts, unless they existed in Latin translations. It wasn’t that they weren’t interested in classical civilization and its gods and myths, but they knew them mostly via Roman authors such as Virgil and Statius writing in Latin. Same with Plato. Neoplatonic philosophy permeated early Christian theology, but Aristotle was virtually unknown, except as a logician. Aristotle arrived in the West only during the twelfth century, via Arabic translations that made their way into Islamic Spain and were eventually translated into Latin. It wasn’t until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, sending large numbers of learned Byzantine refugees into Western Europe that Greek came to be widely taught and Homer, for example, read for the first time in the West. And only in the late 18th century did the idea begin to become widespread that the Roman artists and writers were just pale imitators of superior Greek artists and writers.
They are lying willfully.
Lying about what?
Even the script writers for Indiana Jones agree with you, which is why Jones is always stumbling over Nazis digging up some secret to world domination over in the Middle East or Egypt while on his adventures.
Yes, Jewish fantasist storytellers are excellent authorities!
It was the German art historian Winkelmann in the 18th century who pounded home the idea that the Greek sculptors were better than the Roman sculptors. Strikingly, 15th-17th century Italian sculptors Donatello, Michelangelo and Bernini had done just fine with mostly Roman sculptures to learn from.
I think that Anonymous is talking about a small, crazy subset of people who insist that the ancient Greeks (and the ancient Romans, too) were actually Germanics of some sort who had little racially in common with modern-day Greeks and Italians. Aren’t there some articles here on Unz to that effect? These people are the straw men whom the new “woke” attuned classicists such as Donna Zuckerberg like to knock down, in the process tarring everyone of a conservative bent as a white supremacists.
The idea that until the woke pointed it out yesterday, people didn’t know that the ancients painted their statues is another straw man. I remember reading in my high school ancient-history textbook (that was back when ancient history was taught in high school) that we would probably find the Parthenon and its statues garish if we time-traveled back to ancient Athens. (Of course those statues looked nothing like the hideous plaster “reproductions” that the woke are foisting on us these days to teach us some sort of lesson about supposed ancient racial diversity. )
Probably because the 19th-century Germans had a huge influence on classical scholarship. They tended to exalt the classical Greeks of the fifth century over the Romans and even over the Hellenistic world.
When I was a child, we’d go on family drives along Sunset Boulevard to admire the huge houses and envy their wealthy owners. Now, you can’t see any Sunset Boulevard mansions, old or new, because all the richies have planted concealing hedges to hide them. That part of Sunset is an allee between walls of green. Atherton, the redoubt of Silicon Valley moguls, is the same: all walls of green hiding the mansions. This obviously indicates a huge cultural change: Back then, rich people liked to show off their houses and perfectly manicured lawns and gardens. It was part of a more egalitarian culture, in which the rich were richer but not unlike the rest of us. Now, they’re feudal lords separating themselves from the peasants.
So true! I so indoctrinated in the view that Roman sculptors were no more than hack copyists of supposedly superior (but now lost) Greek originals, that when I visited an exhibition of Roman sculpture (I think at the National Gallery) a few years ago, I was shocked at how beautiful and finely made it was–and how expressive of artistic orginality. I now refuse to believe that there was a lost Greek original behind many of those statues.
Also Michelangelo and Bernini seemed to be just fine with the idea that the Roman statues that inspired them happened to be white for whatever reason.
And we don’t even know whether the ancient Greeks and Romans really painted all their statues, whose fine marble is beautiful in its own right. I think it was Mary Beard (an irritating liberal but an excellent classicist) who pointed out that one of the Roman poets (Horace? Ovid?) compared the skin of his lady-love to white “Parian” marble statuary, indicating that there was an ancient taste for unpainted marble that renders some of the new woke theorizing about painted statues historically inaccurate.
Yes, but instead of saying a small, crazy sub(?)set of people he says “the right.” That set may say they’re right, but that’s principally because those they’re reacting to say they’re left, often for branding purposes with little or any substance.
This overrates the importance of scholarship. The substrate of Greek influence in Anglo-American culture was already huge.
Dumb people believe A. Smart people believe B.
Really smart people believe A.
…
I agree that truly dumb kids won’t look things up on their own. They’ll just believe A because it’s what they feel in their gut. The numbskulls/”smart” will believe it when the teacher says B. The really smart kids will look it up themselves, and believe A.
Yo, I can not disagree with you. Thank you for the reply
If every Latin rite priest around the world still began Mass with “Introibo ad altare Dei”, then it is Islam which would be in retreat, not Christendom.
The fact that the man usurping St. Peter’s Chair has just “canonised” the perpetrator of this gigantic evil tells us that there will be no revival of the cornerstone of the West anytime soon.
Michelangelo and Bernini were geniuses — they copied, if at all, only at the very beginning of their careers.
No longer fledglings, they soared higher than most anybody before or since.
I have no doubt that they could spot the difference between a Roman copy and a Greek original from a mile away.
I have no doubt either that some Roman sculptors were better than others, but nothing ever produced by that great imperial race comes anywhere near the sublimity of, say, the Riace Warriors.
From the Greeks we got thought, from the Romans order, and from Christ the reason to care about any of it.
St. Johns College in either Annapolis or Santa Fe, or Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai?
Or is there another one I’ve overlooked?
It ends by saying “One night only. October 16″.
Fat lot of good that does us.
And which group believes C?
Around the 1440′s yes, Spain and Portugal began to sail around the horn of Africa, and the beginnings of their New World empires, slave trade, etc.
That still does not automatically equate to slaves being sold throughout Western Europe. That’s a major jump in logic to assume. Especially as slavery wasn’t a thing in late Middle Ages England. Certainly during the time of Henry VIII, (a reign that is widely, exhaustively covered by historians for centuries now) would make clear mention of it if indeed a number of them were residing in England. And the English during this time were very zenophobic toward outsiders (the French especially, Papal legates, and foreigners in general). So there’d clearly be a specific mention made of it if such numbers did exist. Otherwise, it’s best to ask for the proof or go with the standard explanation: No Persons of Color resided in England at all prior to around ca. 1660′s-1680′s.
In Spain/Portugal they were mainly used for slaves, until later in the 15th/early 16th century and then they were shipped off to the New World to work as slaves. There’d be no use for them in England as officially, slavery wasn’t in use by that time.
Here’s the thing. The Islamic empire (mainly Arabia) had been purchasing black slaves since around the middle/late ninth century, they’d bring them across the Sahara to serve mainly as eunuchs. By this same logic, the Christian Crusaders ca.1100-1291 would’ve purchased a few of them as curiosity items to take back home to their Western European kingdoms. But there’s no record of that occurring. Is there? It’s just as likely that the crusading knights would’ve seen the eunuchs in slave markets in the lands that they temporarily conquered and resided. No actual proof of them taking any home to show their subjects. Maybe there is, but certainly the official court records would show it.
This is similar to Marco Polo’s travels. Wouldn’t one think that Polo and his family would’ve had the foresight to bring back a few of the Chinese peoples that he met? To show to the Venetian court.
More and more I’m thinking its time to ask for the proof, before Genius Coates and Liberation Theory a la George Jefferson vs Archie Bunker “Jesus was black, you know”, just overtake the public school system. Again, it’s best to ask to see the proof. Otherwise, in public education, anything goes. (e.g. 2018land Hamilton being reconned as dark skinned Latino/mulatto/partial black.) After all, if no one presents the proof, then anything goes.
But I go with the Sagan quote “Exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence.”
You really think they would be scared of pedophiles and people wearing skirts. Perhaps Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gracia, Solus Christus, and Soli Deo Gloria would help the modern would be Christian soldiers vs the rising tide of Islam.
Last Real Calvinist would probably understand.
And in 1516, Erasmus brought out his Greek Translation of the New Testament, and from there the Protestant Reformation was born.
’tis probably Katharine’s influence that caused this Wikipedia quotation:
In 1502, Spain, Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros had put together a team of Spanish translators to create a Compilation of a Bible in four languages, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin. Translators for Greek were commissioned from Greece itself and worked closely with prestigious Latinists and thalamic scholars. Cardinal Cisneros’s team completed and printed the full new testament, including the Greek translation, in 1514. To do so they developed specific types to print Greek. Cisneros informed Erasmus of the works going on in Spain and may have sent a printed version of the New Testament to him. However, the Spanish team wanted the entire Bible to be released as one single work and withdrew from publication.
The information and the delay allowed Erasmus to request a “Publication Privilege” of four years for the Greek New Testament to ensure that his work would be published first. He obtained it in 1516 from both Pope Leo X, to whom he’d dedicate his work, and Emperor Maximilian I. Erasmus’s ‘ Greek New Testament to be published first, in 1516, forcing the Spanish team of Cisneros to wait until 1520 to publish their Complutensian Polyglot.[34][35]
The Riace Bronzes now share, with Da Vinci’s Last Supper & Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, the distinction that you can only see them by appointment, after a few minutes in a decontamination chamber.
The whole experience is pretty awesome.
The effeminate modernist clergy you rightly deplore were the very ones to see to the destruction of the Church’s traditional liturgical forms.
The old Church was the Church of the Crusades, up to and including that of Franco against the godless Left.
Such a Church most certainly did scare the daylights out of Islam.
Why? Because it had defeated them, and was ready, need be, to do it again.
Today the “Church” preaches surrender, and deserves the scorn you heap upon it.
One preacher you might respect is named Steven Anderson of Faithful Word in Tempe. He’s on Youtube, and doesn’t mince words, much less observe the niceties of PCness. I would hasten to add that the old Church, much less the new Church, never really focused on the preaching of the Word, (sermons, or homilies). That’s always been a Protestant thing. Words to live by and understand the Bible has always been a Reformation thing and not a Church thing. If you want Christian Soldiers to be better informed, educated, and understand the existential threats before them in the post-modern world, then they’d better have words to live by from the pulpit. But that’s never really been a thing in Catholicism. At least not since the days of Chrysostom and Augustine (ca.1500 yrs ago). So the laity deserves what it gets as they don’t have any official chancels to complain, and perhaps wouldn’t know that they’re missing out on something they’ve never had in the first place (indepth biblical exegesis on the Scriptures on weekly basis). Rosary and Transubstantion, yes. Preaching of the Bible, absolutely not. That’s more of a Protestant thing.