Book Review: The Color of Life

Roberta Panzanelli, Eike D. Schmidt, Kenneth Lapatin (ed.), The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum: The Getty Research Institute, 2008.

[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

The first decade of the twenty-first century represents the latest phase in a long series of periodic attempts by classical art historians stretching back to the late eighteenth century to convince the world that Greek and Roman marble sculpture was, on the whole, originally coloured. Since 2003, high-profile exhibitions of painted Greek and Roman casts, painstakingly studied and reconstructed by experts from across Europe, have made their rounds across more than ten international venues, attracting extensive media coverage and sparking a renewed interest in sculptural polychromy in both popular and academic circles.1 This truly international initiative has been the first major exhibition of the subject in over a century, setting the scene for a number of important projects addressing the archaeological identification and reconstruction of pigments, as well as the art-historical importance of colour on ancient sculpture.2 This is not to say that sculptural polychromy has had the last word: the provocative exhibitions have met with some stubborn resistance, and the exhibits themselves attest as much to the limitations of our knowledge and understanding about sculptural polychromy as they do to the fact that colour on sculpture completely transforms the artifact on artistic, iconographic and psychological grounds.3

The present volume, produced to accompany a homonymous exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2008, represents the most successful and compelling effort yet to put sculptural polychromy on the map. Unlike the other exhibitions, 'The Color of Life' juxtaposed many of the painted classical reconstructions to a wide variety of medieval and modern polychrome sculptures, and so integrated different strands of art-historical research that had previously, on the whole, been kept separate. Panzanelli's volume is an extraordinary tour de force of colour in western sculpture from Old Kingdom Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, through to medieval Europe and the modern world. Typically of Getty publications, it is beautifully illustrated with nearly two hundred illustrations (mostly in colour), providing - at a very reasonable price - some of the best images publicly available for the study of polychrome sculpture.