The white lie we've been told about Roman statues
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jmMWohs1XM
When you think of the ancient world, you probably picture towering buildings of white marble, adorned with statues also made of white marble. You’re not alone — most people picture the same thing. But we’re all wrong. Ancient buildings and sculptures were actually really colorful. The Greeks and Romans painted their statues to resemble real bodies, and often gilded them so they shone like gods. So why is seemingly every museum on planet earth full of white marble sculptures? It’s partly an honest mistake. After the fall of Rome, ancient sculptures were buried or left out in the open air for hundreds of years. By the time the Renaissance began in the 1300s, their paint had faded away. As a result, the artists unearthing, and copying ancient art didn’t realize how colorful it was supposed to be. But white marble couldn’t have become the norm without some willful ignorance. Even though there was a bunch of evidence that ancient sculpture was painted, artists, art historians and the general public chose to disregard it. Western culture seemed to collectively accept that white marble was simply prettier. Today, art history is more concerned with accuracy than it is with what might look better. So teams of researchers use a combination of art and science to painstakingly create reconstructions of ancient statues, showing us the true colors of classical antiquity. Most of the reconstruction work shown in this video was done by the Polychromy Research Project, led by conservationists Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann. To see more of their work you can buy their book, “Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World”
The naked lady that changed the rules of art
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHKFK6_pepo
Western art followed the same rules for centuries. Until Olympia. Become a Video Lab member! http://bit.ly/video-lab For centuries, the art world was controlled by the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris. They dictated how art should look and had the power to make or break an artist’s career. Getting into their yearly exhibition, the Paris Salon, was like an express pass to success. But in the late 1800s, artists started to push back against the Academy’s rules, which changed the landscape of the art world forever. To learn more about Manet’s Olympia, listen to the ArtCurious Podcast’s episode about the painting: http://www.artcuriouspodcast.com/artc... Or read Charles Bernheimer’s “Manet's Olympia: The Figuration of Scandal”: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1773024 And if you want to learn more about Manet, the Impressionists, or just brush up on your art historical terms, check out The Oxford Companion to Western Art: https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/... Note: The headline for this video has been updated since publishing. Previous headline: The scandalous painting that helped create modern art Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out http://www.vox.com. Watch our full video catalog: http://goo.gl/IZONyE Follow Vox on Facebook: http://goo.gl/U2g06o Or Twitter: http://goo.gl/XFrZ5H Watch our full video catalog: http://goo.gl/IZONyE Follow Vox on Facebook: http://goo.gl/U2g06o Or Twitter: http://goo.gl/XFrZ5H