Transcript
Sarah Lepinski: I’m Sarah Lepinski. I’m an associate curator here in the Department of Greek and Roman Art at The Metropolitan Museum.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta: And I’m Dan-el Padilla Peralta, I’m an associate professor of classics at Princeton University.
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Lepinski: So I’ve been doing a lot of work on polychromy, on color, on ancient sculpture. It encompasses pigments and different materials that highlighted different features in color. And as a part of that, I’ve always been sort of curious about these very, very white works of art in our collection.
A lot of the marble sculptures, when you see them in museum galleries, are devoid of the surface treatments that they once had primarily because these materials are ephemeral and they degrade over time. And so, you no longer have the ability to access them with the eyes that we have to see that the eyes were once painted and the eyelashes once painted and cheeks and skin flush with color.
This portrait of Caligula, which is a bust, entered the collection in 1914. And we think it’s from Rome or the vicinity of Rome. And, in many ways, it reflects the aesthetic preferences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and that is one that was inherited from the Renaissance that really valued whiteness in ancient art and in ancient sculpture in particular. This is the way that most people still receive ancient Greek and Roman art and sculpture in particular. It’s how they see the ancient Greeks and Romans culturally. And those of us who work on this know very well that it’s more complex than that.
Padilla Peralta: It can be difficult given its current presentation as this white marbled object to visualize the Roman world in all of its resplendently colorful glory. And part of the challenge there becomes, especially for those of us who have been trying to think about the interaction of developments in the formation of taste with developments in the formation of ideas of race, to avoid practicing the semi-conscious assignment of white as color, and then vaulting from color whiteness as a racial property to the Roman world. And so this, I think, becomes one of the more urgent tasks of presenting that material in a responsible and ethically rigorous way.
Lepinski: The emperor Caligula had a very short reign in the first century, AD—he only reigned for four years. We don’t see any visible pigment left on this portrait bust of Caligula, but we know from other examples that exist in other collections at least a sense of what they looked like in antiquity and how there’s so many disconnects between what we know of him and his self-portrayal. And that’s part of the point, right? His Imperial portraits were, as a rule, really used to express the emperor’s sense of himself and the way he wanted to be perceived, and not necessarily the way he in fact looked in reality.
Padilla Peralta: Yeah, I mean that disconnect comes out in these very tangible ways, and in the piece at The Met. So, one of the aspects of the piece that got me to thinking is the attention paid to the hair and to the hairline. We have reports in the literary tradition that, contrary to what you might see here, Caligula did not have a lot of hair and was kind of irritable about this.
The emperors are idealized bodies. They have idealized faces and that ideal is inflected with a racializing visual register. And this is an invitation for us to reflect on how the racial codes of the Roman Mediterranean differ substantively from the racial formations of the early modern and contemporary moment, but also how they intersect in particular ways.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this passage from a Roman novel, Petronius’s Satyrica, that was composed, we think, within a few decades of Caligula’s reign. So this is a scene in the Satyrica where the characters Eumolpus, Giton and Encolpius are trying to strategize about how to disguise themselves. They’re in a bit of a tough bind. They’re trying to escape their enemies. They’re on a boat. They’ve realized that all their enemies are around them and they begin to dream up some stratagems. Encolpius goes first and he says—and I’m using Max Goldman’s translation:
“Consider the plan I’ve discovered. Eumolpus certainly has some ink. Let’s change our skin color from hair to nails with this paint, in the guise of Ethiopian slaves, we will cheerfully serve you without painful fetters. We will fool our enemies with a change of skin color.”
And here’s Giton’s reply: “Oh, really? Why not also circumcise us so that we can seem to be Jews? Pierce our ears so that we imitate Arabs? And whiten our faces with chalk so he thinks that we’re citizens of Gaul? As if color alone could hide our looks. Many aspects must correspond in a unity of order for the deceit to work. Come then, could we also fill out our lips with a hideous swelling? Could we also twist our hair into curls with an iron? Could we also cut our forehead with scars? Could we make our legs bow out?” So on....
So, this passage for me is striking because, as the passage makes clear, skin color is only one vector for racial differentiation and racial assignments. There are other things that also form part of the economy of racialization in this period. And it is with this and similar passages in mind that we can revisit the work of polychromy and thinking more carefully about racial assignments and their visual reception.
Lepinski: It’s so fascinating, as you’re discussing the specific features and the plurality with which to understand and to frame the racialization. When you start to think about the color, the color white is really a challenge to contemporary academic approaches to identifying and interpreting and reconstructing.
Padilla Peralta: This is a great entry point into the complexity of racial assignments in antiquity and our sort of contemporary reception and contestation of this. The work of several generations of scholars on ancient race has really emphasized that if we are looking in Greek and Latin literature of the early Empire for an indexing of Whiteness as we understand it to the bodies and figures of Romans, we will not find it because what one might translate as ‘white’ really is something like olive brown—that’s what we’re talking about here.
Brownness on a gradient, not whiteness on a gradient. And moving from one to the other opens up possibilities for re-imagining what these folks looked like. But I think more meaningfully understanding the richness of Roman understandings of color and skin gradients in a way that would depart rather substantively from sort of modern and contemporary conventional characterizations of whiteness, brownness and so on. So how do you get folks to think about that actively?
Lepinski: I think that’s the core of the concern here in discussing what’s omitted and what’s absent. And even in archeology, when you excavate a work of art, very seldom does it have the color. There are the amazing circumstances when they do and you have the opportunity to study and learn more. But in terms of actively collecting for whiteness, we have many stories in the history of archeology where our sculpture were coming up with color and it was perceived and received as shocking but taken as a reality. And then there are counter descriptions of early excavations where there was active resistance to the fact that color existed.
But certainly there comes a point where white sculpture is what is wanted and sought after for collections of all types and that the color is overlooked and it takes significant amount of time for scholarship to resurrect the idea that color existed in ancient sculpture. And that’s still, it’s still ongoing. With the public perception being that white marble encapsulates Greek and Roman antiquity.
Padilla Peralta: We have a responsibility as stewards of this material to make it clear to audiences what substantively underpins some of the visceral reactions that they have as a way of countering and neutralizing this default pervasive assumption that the bodies and the representational practices linked to the depiction of the body in ancient Greek and Roman settings were harmoniously aligned with some ideal of whiteness.
There would really need to be a sort of concerted emphasis on the part of all responsible stakeholders here, right? Like we’re thinking, you know, museums, we’re thinking university institutions, we’re thinking teaching at all levels on showing off just how capacious the Roman world is. And that’s exactly the kind of labor that could bear really lasting fruit.
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