New exhibition "Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in July.
The exhibition presents new discoveries of surviving ancient color on artworks in The Met’s world-class collection and explores the artistic practices and materials used in ancient polychromy. Highlighting cutting-edge scientific methods used to identify ancient color, Chroma examines how color helped convey meaning in antiquity, and how ancient polychromy has been viewed and understood in later periods.
The exhibition will feature a series of reconstructions of ancient sculptures in colour by Prof. Dr. V. Brinkmann, Head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, and Dr. U. Koch-Brinkmann, and introduces a new reconstruction of The Met’s Archaic-period Sphinx finial, completed by the Liebieghaus team in collaboration with the Met's Departments of Greek and Roman Art, Objects Conservation, Scientific Research and Imaging. Presented alongside original Greek and Roman works representing similar subjects, the reconstructions are the result of a wide array of analytical techniques, including 3D imaging and rigorous art historical research.
Opens on 5 July, 2022 (until 26 March, 2023).
More information here.
Reconstruction of marble finial in the form of a sphinx (detail), 2022. 3D print in polymethyl metacrylate, natural pigments in egg tempera, gilded copper, gilded tin. Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung (Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Project), Frankfurt am Main; original: Greece, ca. 530 B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (11.185d, x).
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color is curated by the Department of Greek and Roman Art’s Seán Hemingway, John A. and Carole O. Moran Curator in Charge, and Sarah Lepinski, Associate Curator, together with Vinzenz Brinkmann, Head of the Department of Antiquity at the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection in Frankfurt. Technical and scientific work was conducted by The Met's departments of Objects Conservation, Scientific Research, and Imaging in collaboration with the curators, including Lisa Pilosi, Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge, De Abramitis, Conservator, Department of Objects Conservation; Marco Leona, David H. Koch Scientist in Charge, Federico Carò, Research Scientist and Elena Basso, Associate Research Scientist, Department of Scientific Research; Scott Geffert, General Manager, Imaging and Jesse Ng, Imaging Specialist, and the Imaging Department team.
Added: 25/05/2022.