I went with my friend Michael to the MFA the day before yesterday.  There was nothing pressing we needed to see, but since we are neighbors now and live a hop, skip, and jump (really just a hop and a skip) from the museum, we've decided to make a habit of dropping in.  Michael is a retired architect and always has some interesting observations on form.  And I like all the naked Greek sculptures and what-not.

Sculpturewise, Michael has two faves that we always stop and visit: a pair of exquisite Chinese Buddhas.  We circled the swishy one —Guanyin, Bodhisattva of Compassion —


—   and Michael pointed out the remnants of gilding and bright red pigment on the back of its elaborately embossed, flowing gown. 

"I shudder to think what it looked like right off the lot," he mused.

There was actually a show a couple of years ago at Harvard that took the stoic Greek sculptures we all know and love and presented them as they more than likely were in antiquity — garishly painted — more like something you'd see at Carnival in Rio or Gay Pride in NYC than anything at the modern Acropolis... 


Art mavens were duly scandalized. "I would not go as far as my travel companion and say that I am sorry that I ever saw the exhibition," art historian Gary Schwartz wrote. "But it comes close."

He goes on:

I have known for a long time that much if not all ancient statuary was originally colored, and the idea pleased me. It introduced a thrilling twist into the history of art appreciation. How ironic that the very qualities for which ancient statuary was admired were alien to the original conception of the works. The coolness and purity of Greek sculpture, its idealization of the nude human body, its respect for the stone from which it is carved, its less-is-more subtlety, were sheer projections of latter-day art lovers that never existed in the minds of its makers.

As appealing as the idea may have been, confrontation with the real thing was a jolt.

Yeah.  Reality bites, dunnit?  But if technicolor antiquity is ruined forever for those of us used to black-and-white, Schwartz has an idea how the colorized version can be made palatable for future generations...

It may be impossible for me to accommodate my expectations of classical art to the historical reality, but my grandchildren may be luckier. Colorized Greek statues look like nothing so much as avatars in a top-end computer game. With luck, this could bring them closer to kids. If the creators of the Battle of the gods and the giants would have felt more akin to George Lucas than to Michelangelo, then they will be more accessible and more exciting to young people who are introduced to them in color.

I don't know why I'm not personally traumatized by all of this, but I suspect it's because I'm fairly sure the treasures of antiquity on display in the world's great museums aren't about to be colorized, so we're safe from original intent, and can enjoy the fruits of our fantasies of antiquity without the rude intrusion of reality.

For me the beauty of what remains so far outstrips the original there is no need to qualify it — it is the essence of the ruined thing we've fallen in love with — it is what remains that shines through.  It is the whole story, and not just the beginning, that matters, that awes and inspires.  Think of Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo...

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

It is inarguably true that what Rilke describes — and its impact on him and on us — cannot be found here:


I don't have much sympathy for those who can't handle the truth, which has its place in the whole scheme of things, but which can be dealt with in any number of ways aside from whinging and whining about it.  When you stop and think about it, our cherished illusions about the culture that produced these glitzy mannequins are odd and unsavory anyway, and the fact that they have persisted is a tribute to the power of a stunted imagination.

How much of history and human nature would you have to stubbornly ignore to believe that all of ancient Greece —  a big, gay, pantheistic orgy — would be peopled by stone-faced philosophers in drab frocks, living in monochrome, and speaking the dead languages of high school classics courses?

I dunno.  I have to say I felt the same way, sort of, at James Cameron's Avatar, which I saw with a friend last weekend.  While the flora and fauna of the world of Pandora were certainly richly imagined, there was something missing.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I was perusing the Oceanic Art exhibition at the MFA with Michael and came across a craggy statue of what was supposedly some great horned god, which the catalog described as having "the implication of genitals."

Great Scott, that's it!  Here you had these warrior savages — ten feet tall and all sweaty sinew and muscle!  In loincloths!  In 3-D!  3-D LOINCLOTHS!  And not even the implication of genitals! 

Look, I'm not talking hentai here, just a reasonable implication would have helped me suspend my disbelief.  Did they have retractable penises, or what?

Even Disney's Aladdin had a little something going on...


Let's just say the implication was conspicuous by its absence.  It was sort of a dis-implication.  But let me clear this up right now: it is not normal to not have genitals.  I think we're sending the wrong message here. 

You know, I've been looking at the marketing for Avatar, and a big ol' bulge under the loincloth would have been just the thing for this McDonald's tie-in. 


I mean, what's under the loincloth?  A Big Mac, of course!  Num num num num...

You know the producers were just dying to get some product-placement in there.  But why McDonald's?  Why not Trojan?  Fuck like an Avatar!

I mean, even our founding fathers were not such prudes.  There's more than an implication of genitals in this portrait of our founder, wouldn't you say?...


I mean, that's a full-on vagina! 

No, old Washington had some junk in his trunk.  Granted, he was no Napoleon...


But few of us are.

Look.  Point is: a little dick never hurt anyone.  The thing can be taken to extremes, is all I'm saying.  A few years ago, as reported in the Austin Chronicle, Emanuel Leutze's famous 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware caused quite a stir when Guy Sims, the superintendent of schools of Muscogee County, Georgia, began to fret that the red fob on Washington's pocket watch "might be misapprehended as the rosy tip of Washington's genitalia."

Sims had teachers' aides spend two weeks re-painting by hand more than 2,300 fifth-grade textbooks to eliminate the offending detail. 'I know what it is and I know what it is supposed to be,' said Sims. 'But I also know fifth-grade students and how they might react to it.' The school officials of neighboring Cobb County were not so delicate — they simply ripped the offending page out of all their textbooks.

By the time the books reached Texas [two years later], the publishers had apparently gotten the message from Georgia. Of the three books, only Prentice Hall's faithfully reproduces Leutze's original, watch fob and all. The Glencoe/McGraw-Hill text darkens and distorts the colors of the original to the point that all small details are rendered invisible — avoiding all danger of 'wondrous revelation.' Holt's Call to Freedom is the most deceptive: It prints and represents as Leutze's painting what is in fact an inferior, highlighted copy painted by his student Eastman Johnson for the purpose of making engravings — and thus eliminating all ornamental details like watch fobs.

A much more obvious solution:


Num num num...