I can’t. Every single sentence in this could not be more wrong if the author deliberately set out to be the wrongest person in wrongville. I just.
I don’t care what else might be useful in this book, if your introduction is as fundamentally incorrect as this, the reliability of everything else you’ve ever said and that your editor has ever touched is immediately thrown into question.
I… that is… such bullshit. Wool and silk are arguably the easiest fibers to dye. Cotton’s a stone bitch to color. (Let’s not even get into ‘change clothes irregularly’, that’s bullshit too.)
I know, right?? Protein fibres suck up dye like no-one’s business; it’s cellulose that hates it.
And as for the others… linen bedsheets, bitch. And linen and silk woven so finely as to be practically transparent. And I’d like to take my records of inventories with 100+ linen shifts for one person, because of multiple-changes-per-day, and shove them up his grant.
It’s like he assumes that without cotton we also wouldn’t have, like, modern inventions and techniques? “Wool is hard to clean” I mean yeah you have to use Woolite on the gentle cycle and air dry but that’s not that much harder than using normal detergent
wool being excellent to dye is its other great selling poin besides warmth- which is why ‘black sheep’ became a derogatory term, as black wool could not be dyed and thus was worth less as it would only ever be dark grey
historical perspective on the fabric alternate reality he proposes- linen was durable but not easy to dye, but you largely didnt care as it was undergarments or bedsheets where you wont be publicly showing off the linens- who other then nobility cares if their bedsheets are vibrantly colored? the reason you wore linen undergarments is that they breathe and protect you from any itchyness (wool that had been properly treated by a fuller {one of the worst jobs in history} would not have been very itchy either) of thick wool clothings and to keep you from getting sweaty or stinky, not to show off your bright red skivvies. linen is still freaking awesome, its comfortable, durable, breathes. i wish i had linen undies instead of cotton ones that get stretched out and threadbare after a few months. i wish i had linen and wool shirt options instead of only paper thin cotton shirts
the statement that sheep would require all the land ever- the deal with livestock through human history is that not all land is created equal, and livestock is how you used the areas that were sub-par. the fertile land you farmed crops, but there is far far more land thats unsuited for vegetables but grows grass just fine, as we cant eat the grass we set out animals like cows and sheep that CAN eat the grass and let them go wild chewin their cud and poopin on the ground while the humans are busy ploughing and harvesting on the more valuable land; allowing the ungulates to convert that grass into usable products like wool, cheese, meat, leather. there’s reasons some areas are covered with sheep and cows EVEN TODAY- either its not usable as croplands or the population nearby is so low that you couldn’t effectively organize labor to exploit farming. new zealand and australia have absurd numbers of sheep for this reason- the land is either too sparse, hilly, or remote, but wool can be exported for profit just fine. however areas like iowa and california have very few sheep as the land is better suited for grain and seasonal vegetables and using it for grazing would be less effective
further the statement that wool and linen are more labor intensive then cotton- theres a reason the cotton industry historically relied on slavery when wool and linen were historically a cottage industry people did in their spare time while being a full time farmer. you let a sheep out on the lawn to do its own thing, it grows the wool, once a year you shave it and spin it into thread- it produces more sheep and tasty mutton as well. linnen is made from flax plants, which are harvested with a sickle and then left in some water to rot for a week, split open, and the fibers inside spun into thread- teams up well with beekeeping as flax produces huge fields of beautiful flowers. in both the hard work is done by animals and a pond, not human hands. cotton however required you to not only plant it but spend time to pick individual bolls off of the flowering buds after it went to seed in the summer sun one at a time instead of mowing with a scythe like flax in an afternoon, which then had to have someone pick all the seeds out of each boll individually before spinning, theres no side product and it depletes the soil like a sonovabitch
pictured- super easy, giving a sheep a haircut would be so much worse right? im sure the man on a horse with a whip and gun is there to make sure everyone is having a good time
and finally the primary dumb part of the highlighted segment- the
assumption that if cotton didnt exist you would sleep on a pile of
straw. what? is this talking today or talking medieval times again? flipping NEOLITHIC folks were bright enough to lay a blanket on top of their straw pile before they took a nap on it. even back
when straw beds were common you didnt lay on the straw, the straw was a
filling for a leather or canvas bag so that you didnt get poked, and even then chances are pretty good you stuffed your bed with
feathers because if theres something an agrarian society has more then
enough of its poultry. if you are talking today i challenge you to go to
a matress store and find a cotton filled bed- theyre filled with
springs or foam, and for all points and purposes the foam is just a high
tech version of straw that doesn’t rot. that, and any modern mattress
is synthetic fiber to combat body odor and sweat absorption
this is not how beds work
these pre-cotton folk seem to be pretty comfortable, even if they hadnt invented perspective yet. as there is no crown im pretty sure they werent importing their fabrics from india or egypt
oh, look, pre-cotton comfortable underwear, soft sheets, and a bed that looks excessively comfortable with no straw or furs in sight
a world without cotton isnt a world without soap either jackass
and here’s a reproduction of the statue with the colors restored
i honestly think that what we consider the height of sculpture in all of Western civilization being essentially the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit to be evidence of the potential merit of found art
“I tried coloring it and then I ruined it”
And you know what the funniest part is? The paint didn’t just wear off over time. A bunch of asshole British historians back in the Victorian era actually went around scrubbing the remaining paint off of Greek and Roman statues – often destroying the fine details of the carving in the process – because the bright colours didn’t fit the dignified image they wished to present of the the cultures they claimed to be heirs to. This process also removed visible evidence of the fact that at least some of the statues thus stripped of paint had originally depicted non-white individuals.
Whenever you look at a Roman statue with a bare marble face, you’re looking at the face of imperialist historical revisionism.
(The missing noses on a lot of Egyptian statues are a similar deal. It’s not that the ancient Egyptians made statues with strangely fragile noses. Many Victorian archaeologists had a habit of chipping the noses off of the statues they brought back, then claiming that they’d found them that way – because with the noses intact, it was too obvious that the statues were meant to depict individuals of black African descent.)
There’s a lot of good academic discussion about chromophobia in modern Western aesthetics and how it links to colonialism.
a couple of general points:
1) the reason the reconstructions here look like “the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit” is because they’re reconstructions. this is not actually what these statues looked like, and in my opinion they do roman art a massive disservice. the reason they look so “gaudy” (which is actually the exact same colonial attitude that led directly to the literal whitewashing of graeco-roman art, nice, very nice) is because the colours have been applied flat, with no shading or blending to give the impression of shadow. looking at contemporary roman portraiture, it’s clear that they did actually have quite a sophisticated grasp of shading and colouring, and to imagine that they would just suddenly forget how to do the dark bits when they were painting on stone is ludicrous. for context, this is a portrait of paquius proculo, a fresco from pompeii, dating from around 20-30AD, ten years earlier than that bust of caligula:
(also of interest in this regard are the fayum mummy portraits, dating from the second century AD; again, although they are of varying quality, the best of them demonstrate a clear understanding of shading. for example:
and, to be honest: do you really think a civilisation that produced this
just, what, didn’t get paint? these reconstructions are laughable, not because they’re colourful but because they’re presenting an incredibly sophisticated culture as unable to understand simple artistic concepts; something that i think itself contributes to the idea of colourfully painted statues being ‘silly’ and ‘gaudy’, which again is an incredibly colonially-influenced idea.
2) the reason graeco-roman statues are often missing the noses is because most excavated statues are generally missing the noses. they are fragile. the head of a statue is basically a football with details; the nose is the only protruding part and is comparatively narrow and thin (as opposed to, say, an arm or leg, which takes more force to break off but is still very much detachable, c.f the venus di milo) and is very, very easy to break off. although i am absolutely the last person to deny the racism that has been present in classics, the noses thing is really not a great example.
Many sculptures from antiquity were defaced during the early Christian period. During riots, Christian mobs would smash the noses off of ‘pagan’ sculptures, as they usually depicted pagan gods, or emperors, and depending on the sect, any depiction of a person could be considered ‘graven’.
The hotbed of Christian zealotry was Egypt. Throughout its time as a Roman, and then ‘Byzantine’ province during its early Christian history, the province proved practically unmanageable due to its Christian theological riots, with the majority of the population not following Constantinople’s doctrine and theological orders.
This Roman bust of Germanicus at the British Museum was defaced – nose smashed off – during a riot that would have taken place in late antiquity in Egypt, so, 400-500AD [also, note the cross etched into forehead]
Probably the most known example of this is the destruction of the Alexandrian Serapeum, a vast temple complex in Alexandria, Christian mobs tore the temple apart, destroying and looting, tearing it down brick by brick.
Another example, outside of Egypt, is the Nika Revolts in Constantinople. On its creation as a co-capital of the Roman Empire, an unfathomable amount of art and sculpture was brought to adorn the New Rome, and during the revolt, for the most part this cream of the classical crop was destroyed, again, by theological mobs.
After Egypt’s conquest during the Arab-Islamic conquests, this practice would have continued. In fact, theologically, many of Egypt’s Christian sects were more in line with Islamic theology than what became mainstream Christianity in both ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Catholic’ doctrine.
Basically, if you want to know what happened to sculptures from antiquity, Abrahamic faiths happened to them. We divorce classical and ancient sculptures from their meaning – we see them as history or art, but to the new faiths, they were graven images, they were pagan, and they were destroyed or defaced.
I like this version of the thread. It has actual history in it not just “Victorian assholes” did it (which this thread also seems to be the only thing I ever see about Victorians removing paint from statues).
Wanderings and Perigrinations 