The Color of Life: A Preview
Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present at the Getty
"The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present" at the Getty Villa explores painted sculpture's neglected history in Western art.
Painted statuary from ancient to modern times is the subject of The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present at Malibu, California's Getty Villa (March 6-June 23, 2008).
The exhibition displays 43 works from 22 public and private collections, covering nearly five millennia of painted figural sculpture and beginning in the ancient Mediterranean. Known artists represented include El Greco (ca. 1541-1614), Sir John Gibson (1790-1866), Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier (1827-1905), Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), Duane Hanson (1925-1996) and John De Andrea (b. 1941).
Polychromy and Its History
Decorating art in many colors is called polychromy, a term derived from the Greek "poly" (many) and "chroma" (color). While many sculptors in the history of Western art were fond of leaving their works unadulterated by paint, others considered their statues finished only after the application of pigments and tints to their statues' surfaces. The Color of Life... addresses this often neglected subject. The painted sculptures on view are made from acrylic resins, marble, metal, mixed media, papier-mâché, wood, terracotta, wax and wood.
Ancient sculptors' patrons expected their commissions of human and divine beings to be as lifelike as possible. This meant that a statue's anatomical features, garments and accessories had to be painted. The discovery of antique marble works such as the Laocoön in 1506 and Apollo Belvedere in 1509, both colorless, misled Renaissance artists and their benefactors into believing that unpainted stone and metal sculpture was preferred in earlier times. Later European sculptors perpetuated this myth as monochromatic statuary flourished in Neoclassical Europe. From 1750 through most of the 19th Century, painted sculpture was regarded as offensive and in poor taste.
The Color of Life...
Part of the Getty Villa's exhibition brings together older sculptures with their modern experimental reconstructions in an attempt to approximate what these works may have looked like when originally painted. One such pair is the Dying Gaul (1887) by Giovanni Lugini and Leopoldo Malpieri, a plaster cast of a Roman marble copy of a lost 3rd-century B.C. Greek bronze by Epigonos, and John De Andrea's colored polyvinyl sculpture of the same name (1984). Also on display is Augustus of Prima Porta (2003) by Luciano Ermo, Andrea Felice and Stefano Spada, a colorful recreation of the Vatican's classical Roman sculpture (1st Century A.D.) that to this day retains traces of its ancient polychromy.
Also on view are Epimetheus and Pandora (ca. 1600), two rare wooden statuettes carved by Cretan Mannerist El Greco (ca. 1541-1614). The slightly restored pair, painted naturalistically in oils, was last seen in an exhibition of the artist's works at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and London's National Gallery (2003-2004). They have since undergone conservation and analysis at Madrid's Museo Nacional del Prado. One nude figure from classical Greek mythology represents the first woman whom Zeus entrusted with a box of the world's evils; the other is her husband, the brother of the god Prometheus. Their elongated torsos and narrow hips are similar to those in El Greco's apocalyptic The Opening of the Fifth Seal (1608-1614). The statues demonstrate how the painted and monochromatic traditions of sculpture coexisted for millennia.
Sources:
- Brinkmann, Vincenz and Raimund Wünsche (eds.). Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity (exh. cat.). Munich: Stiftung Archäologie and Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, 2007.
- Davies, David (ed.), et al. El Greco (exh. cat). London: National Gallery Company Ltd., 236-237.
- Panzarelli, Roberta (ed.), et al. The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present (exh. cat.). J. Paul Getty Publications, 2008.
- The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art (exh. cat.). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982, 57-65, 208-209.
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