The Importance of Restoring Color to Ancient Art

In this helpful article, Sarah Bond reminds us that the white sculptures from the Greco-Roman period that we usually see in museums reflect the fact that they have lost their colors over the centuries since their creation, and the whiteness of the statuary has played a role in racist arguments. The discussion is helpful both as a reminder of what these art works would have looked like in their ancient settings and as a reminder of how depictions of the ancient world are used to serve ideological interests.

Sarah Bond, "Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color"

You may also be interested in reading about how the alt-right has reacted to her work, with death threats: "Classicist Receives Death Threats from Alt-Right over Art Historical Essay."

We understand that the way we reconstruct the ancient contexts in which texts were articulated governs the way we read the texts themselves. Some of us (giving away our ages) grew up in the time of black-and-white television, and know how transformative it was when color TV was invented. Some might have been tempted to imagine that early Christians (and their non-Christian neighbors) grew up in aesthetically dull contexts dominated by monochrome (white) artwork, and perhaps even think that whiteness was a cultural value at the time. We know, rather, that the world they lived in and their depictions of it were as colorful as the world in which we live. What implications might this have for kinds of paratextual materials included in our Bibles or study Bibles?