WHITE OR COLORED?

[Tarbicus]

Fair comment, Tarbicus,...........up to a point!
Neither ancient egyptian culture nor ( I think) Sri Lankan/Indian culture is the same as Roman...

TheBuddha statues are Indin, Sri Lankan, and Chinese, which covers two continents and are done in a very traditional style going back further than the Renaissance or Pegaso.

and I notice you didn't mention the Pompeii painting earlier in the thread.
You have to look at contemporary Roman Art to judge 'style'.

Just as real people's clothing wasn't 'highlighted' in reality in that painting, nor their bodies, it's safe to assume that neither was the statue.

Certainly it is possible your point is quite correct - other cultures used a 'flat' style of painting on 3D sculptures - but you simply cannot compare, in terms of artistic sophistication, crude Egyptian painting/sculpture with Classical Greek/Roman.

I believe I can, as I've pointed out that decorating statues is an entirely different thing to a flat painting, where the painting does not have the benefit of the sun and other actual light to make a subject look natural. The pigments when investigated using the latest techniques reveal nothing about shading which, IMHO, would surely be visible anyway, as a darker pigment is different to a lighter pigment.

In fact, in one sense, your point argues against you - the Egyptian statues look like Egyptian paintings -stiff and flat, and similar in style.
Isn't it likely therefore that Roman statues were painted in styles contemporary with paintings of the period ???

No, and the theories that Roman sculpture was highlighted is purely based on a modern mindset and assumptions, just as Hyland's theories on Roman cavalry riding ignore other cultures and evidence more akin to Roman riding practices, only taking into account techniques based on riding with stirrups.

Not only was Rome a past culture, it's also a very foreign land often with modern views forced on it. A different people with different gods, economy, culture, attitudes, beliefs, technology, etc, etc. Sometimes I think they may just as well have been from Mars (no pun intended :wink: ).

If evidence turned up on a statue to say there was shading then fine, or in some primary source's description saying clearly it was done. But until then, the only bona fide reconstructions using scientific methods show them to have been flat painted. The rest is wishful thinking, I think, and explains more about Hollywood than the ancients.