Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth
Abstract: It is by now well documented both that classical sculpture was originally polychromic and that this fact has been systematically suppressed in Western art since the Renaissance. The artificial whiteness of classical sculpture fits within a tradition of presenting false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that codes all idealised bodies as white, young, and hetero-normative. Those from outside these parameters – particularly that of whiteness, which is visually exploited through sculpture - are explicitly excluded, with the result that in reception, the truth of their bodies is removed from or re-coded within their mythologies, to better align with the faulty narrative they now exist within. This in turn destabilises their context as figures in myth and undermines the significance of modern marginal identities as creators or experiencers of those mythologies, whose inheritance is denied through the denial of the marginal in ancient mythology. In this paper, through the example of receptions of the Farnese Hercules, I explore why colour and its lack have been weaponised as a way for Western culture to claim an inheritance from the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how this is perpetuated in modern classical reception.
Citation: Hinds, Aimee. “Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth.” The Jugaad Project, 23 Jun. 2020, thejugaadproject.pub/hercules-in-white-classical-reception-art-and-myth [date of access]
Introduction
‘[S]avage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; [. . .] people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence’ (Goethe, 1840: 55). These words from the poet Goethe on the perceived vulgarity of vivid colours underline the understanding - perpetuated since the nineteenth-century, although with much earlier roots - that colour was not a common feature of Greco-Roman art. They also reveal the racist foundations of such beliefs, and their links to the colourful worlds outside of “Western civilisation” [i]. The conclusion Goethe implies - that a love of muted colours indicated sophistication or superiority - is especially troubling, and points to the connection between the denial of polychromy in Greco-Roman art, and the promotion of the supremacy of “Western culture”. While this has been well documented and explored in recent discourse [ii], in this article I focus on the significance of whiteness in classical reception in art, and, using an intersectional feminist framework to consider the significance of class and gender as well as race, explore why whiteness is still reproduced in classically inspired art.
Colour and Culture
Before discussing the ways that whiteness manifests in Western art through classical reception, let us first consider why white - as or as opposed to colour - might be regarded as superior, even without reference to racial categories. Neither the denigration nor the celebration of colour is unique to any particular society or culture. Colour has been both a marker of sophistication and of lower-class tastelessness, in different cultures over different geographical regions and time periods [iii]. Producing colour pigment (and bleaching, either to produce white as a colour in its own right or as a base for other pigment) has historically been difficult and expensive, especially before the introduction of synthetic dyes and paints, with the result that colour often ends up as the exclusive preserve of the elite. Inevitably, like most things enjoyed by the elite classes, colour has always trickled down to the lower classes. Despite the cost, the production of colour pigments was considered repulsive (for example, the fulling of wool involved urine during the Roman period) and a job for the lower classes. Thus, when colour was in fashion, it was expensive and exclusive; when out, it was disdained and perceived as cheap, with the associations of colour production further vilifying it (Finlay 2007: 397). This vacillation of colour’s fortunes has led the elite classes to tread a line between rich brightness and, if not whiteness, then at least natural neutrality; ‘civilised’ people avoided brightness and lived with muted palettes which became associated with refinement and taste (Blasczyk, 2014: 205).
Whether protected or reviled, colour is crucial in most cultures, both ancient and modern, and its use denotes a desire to colour-code to cause or maintain social divides (Finley 2007: 398). Colour-coding is often class based – the elite as consumers versus the poor as producers - although another obvious example of modern social colour-coding is the division of pink and blue as gendered colours. Modern social colour-coding also applies to race, clear in our naming of racial categories by colour. This is in one sense obvious, as when we talk about racial difference what we often mean is visual difference [iv]. An example of social colour-coding by race is in colourism within cultural or ethnic groups, often driven by the presence of (or desire to fit into) a socially White category (Rockquemore and Brunsma, 2010: 162); this can be seen in the inherent colourism which drives the skin lightening industry, a widespread problem in the global South (Glenn, 2008).
Despite the obvious connection between race and social colour-coding, it is the division of colour by class which informs the related idea that the pure whiteness of classical sculpture proves the superiority of “Western culture”, illustrating the relevance of intersectional theory in considering this issue. Contrast the words of Goethe - espousing the idea that colour is for children, the working classes and other people considered inferior - with the visual worlds of the people with whom the European colonial powers were coming into contact with since the eighteenth-century, many of them countries that were being exploited for the raw materials from which those vivid colours originate (Finlay, 2007: 398); even now, bright colours are often Western visual shorthand for the East. For example, in Islamic West Asia from the medieval period, colour was highly prized almost without exception, due in part to the artistic motifs developed in response to the prohibition on depicting the human form, and in part because of the concentration of raw materials, such as the highly valued ultramarine made from lapis lazuli from Afghanistan (Finlay, 2007: 414-5). In the West, colour may be inherent and unavoidable, but it has to an extent been considered foreign (Batchelor 2000: 22).
So, where “Western civilisation” has considered classical sculptural whiteness proof of its own superiority, the reality of colour-coding undermines rather than proves this belief, which is largely based on the faulty notion that colour is a primary feature of ‘inferior’ cultures. The idea of classical sculptural whiteness is largely based on the influential work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a German art historian and archaeologist who espoused the idea that Greco-Roman sculpture was not painted [v]. Although certain categories within the wider corpus of surviving Greco-Roman art is undeniably polychromatic – painting and mosaics, for example – the damage done to sculpture and architecture by weather and time enabled doubt to be cast on their original state, no doubt aided by the assumption that the materials utilised to create such objects would be considered too precious to cover with paint [vi]. Winkelmann’s schema was based on his belief that the Greeks were the first to illustrate artistic Beauty, arguing that the climate in fifth to fourth-century BC Athens allowed the reality of Greek life and art to meet the ideal in the form of aesthetically perfect sculpture (Bindman, 2002: 81). The prioritising of Beauty in the discourse around these sculptures has the potential to reduce them from their social, cultural and/or religious functions and is what allows them to become admired as art objects, and is what allows them to become admired as art objects, valued only for their aesthetic qualities.
The dismissal of these objects as (primarily) ritually or religiously significant also allows them to be considered without colour. Colour-coding is important in in religious contexts, whether it be ritually or socially efficacious and symbolic; for example, in Hinduism, the colour blue is associated with infinity, and so deities such as Krishna, Vishnu, Shiva, and Rama are often depicted with blue skin (St Clair, 2016: 204), while in Christianity, the Virgin Mary is often shown wearing blue, an association which grew up during the Renaissance as artists exploited the scarcity of ultramarine as a material exceptional enough to depict the mother of Christ (St Clair, 2016: 184-5). Colour was equally important in Greco-Roman religious contexts; Brinkmann’s study of the original colour of the Peplos Kore, a sculpture dating to 530 BC found on the Athenian Acropolis, has revealed that the garment she wears is probably not a peplos, but an ependytes, a tunic representative of divine power, and leading to the conclusion that the statue is probably of Artemis (Neer, 2010: 119). Polychromy has not only revealed that the statue represents a divinity – inferred but not definitive from its findspot – but has narrowed its identity to a near certainty, clearly illustrating the importance of colour-coding in distinguishing deities in a Greek context.
Figure 1: The Peplos Kore (ca 530 BC, now stands in the Akropolis Museum in Athens). Plaster cast and reconstruction. Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology. Photo by Zde. CC BY-SA 4.
Winckelmann also believed that Beauty was to be found in whiteness (he was not the only one, as Batchelor [2000] demonstrates). Thus, Winckelmann and his contemporaries came to the conclusion that the Greeks and Romans would not be so vulgar as to paint their statues, and that the pure white of Greek sculpture was representative of the philosophical triumph of mind over body, an idea predicated on Winckelmann’s conflation of reality and the ideal in Greek art. The quality of the whiteness of these sculptures is irrelevant to those who would deny their ancient colour; as Batchelor points out, it is abstracted whiteness for which subjective terms such as ‘purity’ can be used, for the specific white or plural whites is a colour like any other (2000: 13). It is this fallacious, general white vision of the classical world upon which “Western culture” has built its foundations, and so, for the West (and its scholars) to accept the proliferation of colour in ancient Greece and ancient Rome is to de-familiarise them – to denounce them, almost – as close relations of “Western civilisation”, and just perhaps, to admit that the West is not as civilised as it would like us to believe.
Racialising Bodies
It is clear, then, why it is artistically important to intersect whiteness by class, gender or ethnicity. What about race, if this is not what sculptural whiteness refers to? The consistent whiteness we now perceive in ancient Greco-Roman sculpture is, via Winckelmann’s schema, deeply situated in the scientific racism espoused during the eighteenth-century [vii] and informed by decades of othering the non-White body in the name of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, itself building upon centuries of racist colourism against non-White people (Osei-Tutu, 2010: 100-1). By the nineteenth-century, bodies were as well socially colour-coded as any other object.
To understand this phenomenon, it is important to first consider ‘Whiteness’ as a racial and social category. While race is a biological falsity, this should not allow for obscuring of its social reality (Headley, 2004: 90). Disregarding an essentialist view of Whiteness allows for fluidity in its definition; while Whiteness is exclusionary, the assimilation of certain ethnic groups into the category of Whiteness (Frankenberg, 1993: 11-2) proves its – admittedly limited – adjustability. As I mention above, the defining factor of racial difference is often visual difference (this is usually the insurmountable hurdle for entry into the category of Whiteness), and thus I define Whiteness as a social category that is enforced through the visual. The White body is the standard against which every other body is measured and Othered (Puwar, 2004); indeed, ‘Whiteness’ is only given meaning by the existence of the Other (Frankenberg, 1993: 16-7). Whiteness enjoys a measure of invisibility that allows White bodies to be taken for granted (Azzarito, Simon and Marttinen, 2017: 636); thus, the non-White body remains the only site of active colour-coding. The normativity of Whiteness creates the fallacy of a power balance between Whiteness and non-Whiteness (the asymmetry of this power is what allows Whiteness to become socially normative in the first place [Headley, 2004: 94]) through the idea of ‘colour-blindness’[viii], a concept only made possible by the de-racialisation of Whiteness (Headley, 2004: 96).
In the case of white classical sculpture – racialised through the meeting of art and racism with the White body – the invisibility and normativity of Whiteness ensures that analysis can bypass any exploration of the physicality of the body itself. In the specific case of Hercules, being sculpturally embodied as White clothes him with a respectability that would be impossible if his body – the body dictated by his mythology – is Black.
In a recent interview, cultural theorist Paul Gilroy stated, ‘blackness is the body but whiteness is the mind’ (Gilroy et al. 2019:179). Gilroy is referring to the perceived impossibility of being a Black intellectual in modern discourse due to the dichotomist nature of racism, but here it serves the same point, problematising the attempt to hide Whiteness as a physical bodily experience behind the standardisation of Whiteness as an intellectual experience (therefore normalising both White modes of thought and the invisibility of racial Whiteness). In the conversation about Greco-Roman art, elite disdain for vividness causes this attempt to keep Whiteness invisible to be paradoxical, because the sculptural body is only object. The denial of colour in the sculptures, then, becomes shorthand for the claim that the white body represents the mind and thus, despite its actual reality through metaphorical representation in white, the (fictitious) White body remains invisible. Meanwhile, the hyper-visible non-White body is not represented because, unable to hide in metaphor, it is considered unintellectual; the bodies of working-class people, disabled people, and to some extent, women, are also hyper-visible for the same reason. It should be noted that white sculptures are not representations of the colourless body (‘colour-blind’ versions that could be any body), but through the deliberate lack of colour and the idealised form, are representative of the normative body, that is the White body, as well as the able body, and the elite body. Crucially, when we think of classical sculpture in colour, the barring of the non-White body de-centres those who have created the original sculptures, as, regardless of their racial coding, they are coded as ethnically non-White through their alignment with colour.
When colour, especially on figurative sculpture – regardless of implied visual race or ethnicity – is recreated or re-enacted, it triggers the above issue (the body as Black) and threatens the invisibility of Whiteness. To admit that ancient sculpture was polychrome is to question the superiority of the mind, to undermine the reality of the ideal, and to bring into being the fact that Whiteness is as much a social, racial category as non-Whiteness, and that Whiteness is neither innate nor natural. The physically coloured body of the statue (illustrated beautifully by the ‘Gods in Color’ exhibitions), even though it may be racially coded as White, shakes the foundations of Western social ideology of Whiteness as the invisible default against which everything else is categorised and judged, because it takes the body from being an allegorical form to a physical reality. Thus, the viewer is forced to confront the fact that Whiteness is not the norm.
Hercules and Myth in Technicolour
The invisibility of Whiteness in classical sculpture is obviously relevant in ancient sculpture and the academic application of the study of polychromy, but it is also highly significant in reception. When artists ignore colour in classically inspired pieces, they perpetuate these issues.
Figure 2: Farnese Hercules (National Archaeological Museum of Naples). Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. CC BY 2.5
The figure of Hercules presents an interesting case study, through the example of the Farnese Hercules. This particular sculpture can be currently found in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, but there are many versions of the same type (known as the Weary Hercules – the Farnese is named after the family that excavated it), which depict the hero Hercules leaning on his lion-skin draped club. The image has remained popular and inspired many versions across the last two millennia. The Farnese Hercules is a 3.17-metre-tall Roman sculpture dating from the third-century AD, found at the Baths of Caracalla in 1546. Found without legs and missing his left hand and forearm, the sculpture was restored in the sixteenth-century (the original legs were later found, and reintegrated into the sculpture in the late eighteenth-century).
While the Farnese Hercules is Roman in origin, it follows the style of earlier Greek versions, and is believed to have been enlarged from a Greek bronze original by the sculptor Lysippus. Other Greek versions of the type include one discovered in a first-century BC shipwreck in southern Greece, and the Hercules on the second-century BC Telephus Frieze on the Pergamum Altar.
The enduring popularity of the image of this monumental work has ensured it remains a source of inspiration for modern artists. However, while versions of the sculpture have explored the issues around the supremacy of Greek art as an artistic category and about the use of marble over other materials (some of which I explore below), the body itself has remained the same – white, male, and able-bodied.
In Greco-Roman mythology, Hercules (as he was known to the Romans), or Heracles (his Greek moniker), was the ultimate strong-man: an embodiment of masculine physicality, described by Burkert as ‘the incarnation of the beautiful victory’ (1979: 78). Hercules is an ambivalent figure in Greco-Roman mythology and religion, due to his status as both hero and god, categories across which he sits uneasily as the child of a divine father and mortal mother (Stafford, 2012: 172). While Hercules’ physicality and strength are what is prized in most representations spanning literature, art and religion, his intellectualism is relatively restricted to his schooling in virtue (Xen., Mem. 2.1.21-2.1.34) and the cunning he must deploy to complete his famous labours, for example, diverting the rivers to clean the Augean stables (Apollod., Bibl. 2. 89). Hercules’ adventures generally see him relying on his strength, or otherwise employing the help of others where his own might is not enough.
Into the Roman period, evidence of Hercules’ even stronger association with pure physicality is seen through his appropriation by the emperor Commodus, who portrayed himself as Hercules through portraiture. Commodus’ bust as Hercules not only reflects notions of conquest and rulership, but also of immortality and divinity (D’Ambra, 1998: 111). It is worth noting that Commodus’ appropriation of the ultra-masculine Hercules defined him as categorically different from his father, Marcus Aurelius, who was known for his keen interest in philosophy.
An easy argument for the inappropriateness of sculptural white to represent Hercules can be made through reference to ancient art. Apart from the paint that would have originally adorned marble versions, earlier bronze versions (which may or may not have also been painted) are, through the inherent colour of bronze, not imbued with the same connotations as white marble. In any case, other artistic mediums highlight that Hercules is not considered conceptually white – see, for example, the c.530 BC Caeretan hydria depicting Hercules fighting the Egyptian king Busiris, on which Hercules is very conspicuously black, even against figures who are actually Black (not all figures on this pot are black, highlighting the significance of the colour as regards Hercules); if nothing else, this highlights the difference between ancient Mediterranean conceptualisations of social colour-coding and modern race categorisation.
A statue of Hercules like the Farnese Hercules can be argued to be an exercise in pure form, but it cannot be used to argue for the intellectualism of white marble if one has any concept of the mythology of Hercules. An insistence on classical sculptural whiteness for Hercules is to deny this mythology with its attendant ritual and religious significance, and to thus disallow the ownership of Hercules by the Greeks and Romans. As well as Egypt, Hercules also has strong links to other cultures on the periphery of the Greco-Roman world, including India, Scythia, and Persia, via both his lineage and his famous labours [ix]. So, it is already surprising, given the proliferation of colours in the non-Western cultures that Hercules is associated with, as well as the conventions of Greek art which saw masculinity depicted through dark skin (as opposed to pale femininity) [x], that Hercules is not associated sculpturally with colour today.
Or perhaps not. To associate Hercules with colour is to allow these marginal cultures to claim him, to give up a little piece of the inheritance that “Western civilisation” claims from ancient Greece, and to admit that this particular part never really belonged entirely to the West. Hercules’ mythology and his ancient cultural context both illustrate that he can only be White if he is taken out of context.
Hercules in White
Sculptures of Hercules, both ancient and modern, raise the issue again of the idealised body and the suppression of difference. Unpainted sculptures do more than represent Whiteness – they are idealised by the standards of their ancient creators, and those receptions which utilise ancient sculpture with an uncritical eye become highly exclusionary on the grounds of class, age, size, sex, gender and disability. In Hercules’ case, idealism is to be expected, given his divine status. The belief that whiteness in sculpture is preferable because the unpainted marble allows one to easily see and admire the form of the body further pushes the agenda of idealised perfection, erroneously allowed by Winckelmann’s pairing of idealism and realism to be a version of once attainable Beauty. While two of the receptions of the Farnese Hercules I will now discuss, by Matthew Darbyshire and Jeff Koons, have dealt with ideas about class and elitism in the arts, their agenda is about intellectualism in the artistic academy, and so this form of critique underscores issues around the White body.
Figure 3: Matthew Darbyshire, Hercules, 2014, Polystyrene, 124 x 51.1 x 41.7 inches, 315 x 130 x 106 cm. Courtesy Matthew Darbyshire and Herald St, London. Photo by Andy Keate.
Matthew Darbyshire’s Hercules (2014) is a direct response to the Farnese Hercules, almost identical in dimensions, but fabricated from thickly layered hand-cut polystyrene. While one of Darbyshire’s objectives with the piece was to undermine the perception of the superiority of marble (in which, I think, he succeeds), his choice of polystyrene was due to its property of pristine whiteness (Cahill, 2014). Jeff Koons’ own version, Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules) (2013), which again reflects the proportions of the Roman marble, is the same bright, unblemished white as Darbyshire’s Hercules. In this piece, part of a series of sculptures which similarly take inspiration from classical marble sculpture, Hercules is merely a stand for the glass gazing ball balanced on his shoulder. Like Darbyshire, Koons is making a statement about the veneration of marble. By replacing marble with plaster and adding the glass gazing ball, reminiscent of popular American garden ornaments, Koons de-stabilises the Greco-Roman artistic Hercules. Also, like Darbyshire, Koons’ failure to address the whiteness of his sculptures only perpetuates the notion that whiteness is their proper state. Even the language used to describe these works propagates this myth – Darbyshire himself describes his desire to achieve the pure whiteness of marble with polystyrene, and the Guggenheim Bilbao describes Koon’s Gazing Ball pieces as ‘glow[ing] with supernatural perfection’. Both artists reduce Hercules from allegorical body to art object, more so even than Winckelmann’s eighteenth-century categorisations. As pieces which question the assumed intellectualism in classical art, the Hercules of Darbyshire and Koons is supposed to be purely physical, but they bypass the white body as White body as surely as any neoclassical re-presentation of ancient sculpture does.
Figure 4: Jeff Koons, Gazing Ball (Farnese Hercules), 2013, plaster and glass, 128 1/2 x 67 x 48 5/8 inches, 326.4 x 170.2 x 123.5 cm, © Jeff Koons.
Koon’s use of plaster might parody the use of marble, but it also allows for an uncomfortable bridging between ancient sculpture and modern reception through the plaster casts which brought Greco-Roman sculpture to a wide audience from the eighteenth-century onwards. A false replication is created through the plaster casts of original works which have replaced marble as the material through which we engage with these objects, and have become works of art in their own right [xi]; therefore, the use of plaster by modern artists who seek inspiration from the ancient world, far from being progressive, only serves the structures through which Greco-Roman sculpture has come to be considered the artistic bedrock of “White Western culture”. While the use of plaster allows for cheap and easy replication (including for painting, as in the Gods in Color exhibition), its own elevation to an art object means we have lost an appreciation for how the original painted marble sculptures would have been treated. While Koons and Darbyshire’s works are both fabricated from cheap materials, their status as art – in the modern sense, where gallery exhibition generally prohibits any engagement from the viewer beyond looking - means that they are not physically engaged with in the same way as a painted piece of marble (that may be the focus of religious or ritual attention) and needs constant care and maintenance to keep it looking its best. The whiteness of these sculptures is crucial for them to be recognisably a part of the classical tradition, because of the removal of their other key element, the marble which imbues their classical counterparts with their whiteness in the first place [xi].
Black Hercules: Towards an Intersectional Approach
While explicit artistic classical receptions of the Farnese Hercules have not reckoned with the problem of sculptural whiteness, another work by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe begins to re-address the issue. Mapplethorpe’s nude photography takes clear inspiration from classical sculpture, but it is his images of the actor and dancer Derrick Cross that concern me here. Mapplethorpe was inspired by the same homoerotic idea of the inherent Beauty of the body’s form that so enthused Winckelmann, and did in fact photograph Greek and Roman sculptures, as well as real people. The difference here is in Mapplethorpe’s choice of model, for Derrick Cross was Black. While Mapplethorpe’s use of Black models has been criticised for their one-dimensional sexuality (Pilgrim, 2001: 92), in terms of classical reception they are interesting in their dismissal of the racist structures that have driven sculptural whiteness. This dismissal highlights the presumption of racial Whiteness in sculptural whiteness. In one particular image, Cross is photographed from behind, legs apart. The image cuts off both head and feet, and the viewer is confronted with Cross’ muscled back, buttocks and legs. The photograph is highly reminiscent of Hendrick Goltzius’ 1617 engraving of the back of the Farnese Hercules. While Mapplethorpe’s concern with the form means that the idealism of ancient sculpture is still not being undermined, his use of a Black model as a Herculean form was radical in itself.
Figure 5: Robert Mapplethorpe, Derrick Cross, 1983, Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 inches, 50.8 x 40.7 cm. Image courtesy The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.
Mapplethorpe’s images of Cross are not intersectional – they do not visually address the problematic promotion of the idealised, youthful body [xii] - but they illustrate that the image of Hercules drawn from the ancient world can be re-interpreted in ways which bypass the neo-classical image of white sculpture and show that a path towards intersectionality in artistic reception is possible. Even without considering gender (which has been done; see Helen Chadwick’s photograph series Labours I-X), it is possible to bring colour back to Hercules in more ways than one.
Conclusion
While the significance of colour to Greco-Roman culture can neither be ignored nor understated, the controversy of polychromy comes about only because of the involvement of bodies, bodies that can feasibly represent our own. Rarely is the proliferation of colour mentioned negatively even in discussions about classical painting; mosaics, frescoes and pottery are frequently praised and celebrated for the artists’ use and application of colour. In many cases colour helps us to decode these images culturally, for example, in cases where bodies are coloured to represent social status or gender rather than race. Despite there being little evidence to support the notion that polychromy was used to represent bodies with any more racialised diversity than wall paintings – arguably, given that classical sculpture is overwhelmingly representative of a small number of idealised bodies, the evidence points in the opposite direction – it is in sculpture where the social, cultural, ritual or mythological importance of colour as part of the sculpture as an artefact of a formerly living culture is entirely ignored in favour of modern racist agendas. The restoration of colour, therefore, can aid our re-evaluation of the significance of ancient objects we now see only as art, and re-invigorate classical receptions to begin to question and break down the white supremacist structures in the West which have perpetuated the myth of the superiority of Whiteness in the first place.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Dr. Urmila Mohan, to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback, to Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy and Professor Sharon L. James for their encouragement and expert advice, and to Professor Sarah Bond for her continued support.
References
Apollodorus (trans. R. Scott Smith and S. M. Trzaskoma, 2007). ‘Bibliotheca’, in R. Scott Smith and S. M. Trzaskoma (eds.) Apollodorus’ Library and Hyginus’ Fabulae: Two Handbooks of Greek Mythology. Hackett.
Appiah, K. A. (2018). The Lies That Bind. W.W. Norton.
Arrian (trans. C. Sydnor Roy, 2013). ‘Indica’ [excerpted], in R. F. Kennedy, C. S. Roy and M. L. Goldman (eds.) Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World. Hackett, pp. 281-88.
Azzarito L., Simon M. and Marttinen R., (2017) ‘‘Up against Whiteness’: rethinking race and the body in a global era’, in Sport, Education and Society, 22:5, pp. 635-657.
Batchelor, D. (2000) Chromophobia. Reaktion Books.
Beard, M. (2008). The Parthenon. Profile Books.
Bindman, D. (2002). Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. Reaktion Books.
Blaszczyk, R. L. (2014) ‘Chromophobia: The Design World’s Passion for Colour’, in Journal of Design History, 27:3, pp. 203-217.
Bond, S. (2017a) ‘Whitewashing Ancient Statues: Whiteness, Racism And Color In The Ancient World’, in Forbes. 27th April.
Bond, S. (2017b) ‘Why We Need to Start Seeing the Classical World in Color’, in Hyperallergic. 7th June.
Brandes, P. (2017) ‘Beauty as the Middle Between Two Extremes: Encountering the Aesthetics of Equilibrium in Winckelmann's Theory of Art’, in The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 92:2, pp. 143-154, DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2017.1297611
Burkert, W. (1979). Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. University of California Press.
Cahill, J. (2014) ‘‘Deliberate Clichés’: An Interview with Matthew Darbyshire’, in Apollo: The International Art Magazine.
Carpenter, T. H. (1991) Art and Myth in Ancient Greece. Thames and Hudson.
D’Ambra, E. (1998). Art & Identity in the Roman World. Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd.
Finlay, R. (2007). ‘Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Colour in World History’, in Journal of World History, 8:4, pp. 343-431.
Frankenberg, R. (1993). White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press.
Gilroy, P., Sandset, T., Bangstad, S., and Ringen Høibjerg, G. (2019) ‘A diagnosis of contemporary forms of racism, race and nationalism: a conversation with Professor Paul Gilroy’, in Cultural Studies, 33:2, pp. 173-197, DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2018.1546334
Glenn, E. N. (2008) ‘Yearning for Lightness: Transnational Circuits in the Marketing and Consumption of Skin Lighteners’, in Gender & Society, 22:3, pp. 281-302.
Goethe, J. W. von and Eastlake, C. Lock (1840) Goethe's theory of colours, tr. from the German. J. Murray.
Headley, C. (2004). ‘Delegitimizing the Normativity of “Whiteness”: A Critical Africana Philosophical Study of the Metaphoricity of “Whiteness”’, in G. Yancy (ed.) What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question. Routledge, pp. 87-106.
Herodotus (trans. A. D. Godley, 1920). The Histories. Harvard University Press.
Hitchens, C. (2008). The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification. Verso.
Jolivétte, A. (2010) ‘Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Approaches to Resistance and Social Justice’, in J. O. Adekunle and H. V. Williams (eds.) Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective. UPA, pp. 134-44.
Mylonopoulos, J. (2015). ‘Divine Images Versus Cult Images. An Endless Story about Theories, Methods, and Terminologies’, in Mylonopoulos, J. (ed.) Divine Images and Human Imaginations in Ancient Greece and Rome. Brill, pp. 1-20.
Neer, R. T. (2010). The Emergence of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture. University of Chicago Press,
Osei-Tutu, K. (2010) ‘Growth of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Racial Slavery in the New World’, in J. O. Adekunle and H. V. Williams (eds.) Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective. UPA, pp. 91-108.
Painter, N. I. (2017). The History of White People. W.W. Norton.
Pilgrim, A. N. (2001). ‘Performance and the Performative’, in Body & Society, 7:4, pp. 87-96.
Puwar, N. (2004). Space invaders. Race, gender and bodies out of place. Berg.
Rockquemore, K. A. and Brunsma, D. L. (2010) ‘Whiteness Reconstructed: Multiracial Identity as a Category of “New White”’, in J. O. Adekunle and H. V. Williams (eds.) Color Struck: Essays on Race and Ethnicity in Global Perspective. UPA, pp. 161-72.
Roymans, Nico (2009). ‘Hercules and the construction of a Batavian identity in the context of the Roman empire’, in N. Roymans and T. Derks (eds.) The Role of Power and Tradition. Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity. Amsterdam University Press. pp. 219–238.
St Clair, K. (2016). The Secret Lives of Colour. John Murray.
Stafford, E. (2012). Herakles. Routledge.
Talbot, M. (2018) The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture, in The New Yorker. 29th October.
Weller R.C. (2017) ‘‘Western’ and ‘White Civilization’: White Nationalism and Eurocentrism at the Crossroads’, in: Weller R. (eds) 21st-Century Narratives of World History. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 35-82.
Xenophon (trans. E. C. Marchant, 1923) Memorabilia and Oeconomicus. Heinemann (Loeb Classical Library).
Endnotes
[i] “Western culture”, “Western civilisation”, and the “West”, are all expressions of a constructed social group identity predicated upon colonialization and the existence of an ‘Other’. The concept of “Western civilisation” is often conflated with “European civilisation” and “Whiteness” as a racial category; here, I use these terms to refer to areas in which Whiteness provides the normative social and cultural standard. For a fuller discussion, see Appiah, 2018; Frankenberg, 1993; and Weller, 2017.
[i] See Painter, 2017 and Bond, 2017a; 2017b for the links between white supremacy and whiteness in Greco-Roman art.
[iii] It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss all the time and places in which colour has been the focus of extreme love or hate; see Batchelor 2000 for further discussion of chromophobia in Western culture.
[iv] Visual difference as opposed to cultural difference, which might require a period of close interaction between groups before differences become apparent. Jolivétte (2010: 138) questions the racial category of Whiteness along with the methodology behind the perceived shift in ethnicity for ethnic Europeans who become White Americans; Rockquemore and Brunsma (2010: 161-2) cite Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s triple-tiered hierarchy of race in America.
[v] Winckelmann, 1764 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. Winckelmann did not deny the existence of painted sculpture, but identified it with the Etruscans. While he was not necessarily personally averse to the idea – scholarship of his not published until the twenty-first century shows that he had re-thought his categorisations before he died. The divide between the colourful Etruscans and white marble Greece is still obvious in museums today, and a recent trip to the British Museum illustrated for me that the Etruscans are Othered as foreign by their liberal use of colour, while the Greek and Roman sculptural antiquities are not generally interpreted as objects that might once have looked very different.
[vi] The value of the material for sculpture does sometimes feed into the idea that there is no need for paint, but this is to do with its own natural qualities, rather than the desire not to cover an expensive substance with one which modern eyes may consider to be of less visual appeal or less worth. For example, Mylonopoulos highlights the flesh-like qualities of Pentelic marble (2015: 2).
[vii] Examples of this include Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1735) and Blumbach’s On the Natural Variety of Humankind (1775).
[viii] Colour-blindness in this context refers to the idea of ‘not seeing race’, creating a false equivalence between races and promoting a sameness that dismisses historic power imbalances.
[ix] Herodotus identifies Hercules as an Egyptian (2.43); he is descended from Perseus – for whom Herodotus identifies both Egyptian and Persian links (2.91; 6.54) – and the Aethiopian princess, Andromeda. His labours took him widely around the known world, and in fact several ancient authors get muddled trying to reconcile the well-travelled man of the world with the home-grown Hercules; for example, Arr. Indica 8.4-9.
Hercules’ links to marginal cultures with in the Roman empire also led to syncretism with local deities; see, for example, Roymans (2009: 241-250) on the Batavians and the cult of Hercules Magusanus, where votive images retain Hercules’ famous lionskin, club, and/or apples of the Hesperides.
[x] Colour-coding to denote gender-based attributes is especially important for figures such as Hercules, who, despite his reputation as a strongman, was not generally represented in Archaic or Classical Greek art as being any more remarkable physically than a normal man (Carpenter, 1991: 118).
[xi] Both artists use plaster to confer the sought-after whiteness. Given the links between Whiteness and Greco-Roman sculpture, a more insidious implication is that through the use of white plaster, early archaeologists at Pompeii have conferred ethnic and racial assumptions on the real bodies they have replaced. The elevation of plaster simulacra to art means that in the Pompeiian plaster casts, which are stand-ins for real, once live bodies, and in modern artistic reception, inappropriate parallels are drawn between the once-living bodies of real people, modern art objects, and votive or religious sculpture. Entire museums have grown up around plaster simulacra of sculptures, for example, the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology houses over 450 plaster casts of original works that are for the most part unpainted.
[xii] While Cross appears as the picture of youth and health, he was in fact suffering from AIDS, as was Robert Mapplethorpe. So it is difficult to say here that Mapplethorpe is entirely promoting the idealised form in everything but whiteness; however, the fact remains that without this context, the visual representation illustrated here conforms largely to classical sculptural ideals, and indeed Mapplethorpe’s other works, both of real people and statuary, underline the point that he was not out to create works that were subversive in this particular way.
