3) The Washington Monument is topped with Reynolds WrapĪt the very top, you can see the capstone to the Washington Monument - basically a bunch of Hershey's Kisses wrappers. Over time, the wallpaper only got tackier: one traveler reported that in hotels and dining rooms across the country, bored patrons enjoyed drawing tiny speech bubbles next to the people's heads. Other popular (tasteless) wallpapers included "Adventures of China," "Indian Hunts," and "Savages of the Pacific Ocean." Takeaway point: from the 1800s on, rich people were gluing giant pictures to their wall (and they were pictures that we'd probably call racist today).
The French were the only craftsmen able to make these sophisticated panoramas, and that kept them in high demand. As recalled in Wallpaper in America: From the Seventeenth Century to World War I, French scenic wallpapers were very trendy in the 1800s. Jackson was never a particularly classy guy - when he got to the White House, he displayed a 1,400-pound cheese wheel in the entrance hall - but he wasn't alone in his wallpaper obsession. Other wallpapers included "savages of the pacific ocean" Thanks to the multiple sets of Telemachus wallpaper displayed in the mansion, everyone who entered the home got to stare at people wearing togas. The wallpaper was designed by a French firm and cost about $40 a set (not cheap for the time, but also not a one-of-a-kind masterpiece). They depict the journey of Telemachus as he searched for his father, Ulysses, which means Jackson and his family spent all day staring at various pictures of Greek people. Wallpaper doesn't have to be tacky, but when it's a mural depicting ancient Greece, the word "tasteful" does not apply.Īt the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's Nashville estate, the walls are still covered in a version of the Telemachus wallpaper he bought in 1836.
Postcard of the inside of The Hermitage, The Portal to Texas History 2) There were so many wallpaper murals - including in Andrew Jackson's house It took so long because preconceptions made it harder to break away and realize the truth: the Greeks were tacky. Though there have long been pockets of scholars who believed in painted sculptures, technology since the 1980s has helped it become more universally embraced. Scholars began to develop a belief that the "ideal" statue was unpainted, and that led some to overlook textual and physical evidence of paint. From textual evidence, like contemporary poetry, we know the Greeks believed wiping the paint from a statue was akin to defacing it.Ĭoincidentally, it's the garish nature of the painted statues that led scholars to ignore color for so long. In addition, color had the artistic benefit of helping distinguish shapes and different figures more easily (which was important if you had a bunch of sculptures in a row). So why did the Greeks paint their statues? As described in The Color of Life: Polychromy in Sculpture from Antiquity to the Present, the Greeks believed their gods were larger than life, so it made sense that their sculptures should be adorned with the brightest colors available. bright.Īn archer, repainted to reflect the original tacky coloring.
#Greek statues full
In the exhibition "Gods in Color," archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann has made it his mission to restore the full color versions of ancient statues. But what most people don't realize is that in their own day, these statues were covered in tacky paint.Īs Smithsonian magazine reported in depth, researchers have used ultraviolet light and microscopic examination to uncover the original colors of Greek statues, and they believe they were very bright (and very tacky). We imagine Greek sculpture as we see it today: perfect marble bodies, blemished only by time. This is a reconstruction of what a Greek sculpture probably looked like. It turns out the pinnacle of civilization was pretty tacky. 1) Greeks slapped paint on their marble sculptures Yes, tackiness is subjective, but these examples show that everybody in the past - including the elites - were occasionally trashy. The past is as quiet and cool to the touch as a marble statue, while the present is loud and slightly sticky.īut the truth is that just like today, the world never had good taste. History is supposed to be classy: there's a reason antiques are so expensive.
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