Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was once colorful, vibrantly painted, and lavishly adorned with detailed ornamentation. Chroma: ancient sculpture in color reveals the colorful background of polychromy – meaning “many colors” in Greek – and features new discoveries of surviving ancient colors on artwork from the Met’s world-class collection. Exploring the practices and materials used in ancient polychromy, the exhibition highlights cutting-edge scientific methods used to identify ancient color and examines how color helped convey meaning in antiquity, and how ancient polychromy was seen and understood in later periods.
The exhibition presents a series of reconstructions of ancient sculptures in color by Prof. Dr. V. Brinkmann, head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, and Dr. U. Koch-Brinkmann, and presents a new reconstruction of the archaic of the Met – flagship of the period Sphinx, produced by the Liebieghaus team in collaboration with the Met. Presented alongside original Greek and Roman works depicting similar subjects, the reconstructions are the result of a wide range of analytical techniques, including 3D imagery and rigorous art historical research. Polychromy is an important area of study for the Met, and the museum has a long history of investigating, preserving and presenting original manifestations of color in ancient statuary.
The exhibition is made possible by the Aretê/Betsy and Ed Cohen Foundation.
Additional support is provided by Mary Jaharis and Cathrin M. Stickney and Mark P. Gorenberg.
This exhibition is organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt am Main.
