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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me a lot of how we've discovered that dinosaurs had feathers.

I wonder how long this imagery will take to come into public consciousness, both painted sculptures and feathered dinosaurs. Popular culture doesn't seem to be catching on, the new Jurassic Park movies still have scaly dinosaurs and I expect that any new Ancient Greek or Roman movies will have white statues. I think it makes people uncomfortable to discover that they've been visualising something wrong their whole life.

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There was an off hand remark in Jurassic World about how the dinosaurs are genetically engineered to look like the public expects them to look, rather than how they would naturally look.

Well, certainly this has been known for quite awhile and hasn't really caught on as far as I know. I mean, people who care are fully aware, but I'm sure you're right that any new scene depicting ancient Greece will have plenty of white marble. File it under Reality is Unrealistic. [1]

(Offhand I bet part of the issue is that the general culture probably doesn't make much distinction between classical statues and Renaissance or neoclassical statues and carvings, despite the couple millennia of separation. And obviously the Renaissance statues were not painted.)

[1] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealityIsUnrealis...

I wonder whether Renaissance statues were unpainted also due to influence from the "white" Greek statues.

Renaissance artists had plenty of chances to use colour in buildings and on canvas, maybe they wanted some contrast to that?

Yes, definitely, both during the Renaissance and the Neoclassical eras. Works that would have been considered unfinished in the Classical era were appreciated in later periods for representing pure figures without the need for ostentation. Well, that and the Classical sculpture was pretty darned good.

Also, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AluminumChristmas...

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