For some reason, we tend to see the past as bland and washed out. This isn't just a matter of saying, "Oh, life was simpler then." I mean, literally, we remove all color and taste from it. We confuse our our visual represenentations of the past as monochromatic and sepia-tinted with the past actually having been dull and tasteless.

Consider classical sculpture. White marble right? More like Las Vegas neon.

The Venus of Milo or the Dying Gaul may come to mind when we think about ancient sculpture. Those famous pieces conform to the classical ideal of beauty, the ascendancy of form enhanced by the pure translucence of white marble. An ascetic aesthetic, practiced by sober and tasteful Greek and Roman sculptors who flourished more than two millenniums ago.

Apparently, though, that's not exactly how it was.

According to the curators of an exhibit at the Vatican Museum, that idea of perfect austere beauty is ours, not that of the ancients, who evidently preferred a vivid palette of electric yellows and blues, vibrant reds and bright greens to decorate sculptures, tombs and even the walls of ordinary buildings in Athens and Rome. [via BookofJoe, cite: WaPo]

(Interestingly, this leads to Mussolini's "gigantic, snow-white muscleman sculptures")

We do something similar with our notions of medieval food, which looks more like TV dinners of the 1950s than what people actually ate "during that long, dark period of history between the fall of the Roman Empire (fifth century) and the Renaissance (15th century)."

Medieval chefs used spices as enthusiastically as the boy bands of today use hair products. Yes, medieval chefs did serve plain roasted meats, but they also served many meat dishes that featured thick, gooey sauces very heavily flavored with ingredients like ginger, sugar, vinegar, wine, raisins, mace, cloves, cumin, cardamom, cinnamon, pepper, and honey. "Mawmenny," a typical dish, consisted of ground beef, pork, or mutton boiled in wine, which was then served in a wine-based sauce thickened with pounded chicken and almonds, then flavored with cloves, sugar, and more almonds (this time fried), and then festively colored with an indigo or red dye. Medieval food, in fact, was not unlike Indian food of today: sweet and acidic flavors combined, spices used by the handful. If anything, the concentrated, bold flavors would overwhelm the modern palate. [cite: Slate]

This makes sense -- explorers from Europe made highly dangerous voyages all in search of spices. And while our high school history teachers preferred to emphasize the utilitarian aspect of these spices -- their ability to help preserve food -- they would have clearly been tastable, if only as a side effect. For some reason we want to assume that humbler times meant less spicy ones, even though the food we eat at medieval theme restaurants is high cuisine, not low.

Here's one more -- a white Christmas, and in particular, a white baby Jesus:

[t]he earliest representations of Jesus, Mary, and Christ's disciples appear in the catacombs of Rome, where the first Christians, known as Essenes buried their dead. All of these portrayals picture a dark-skinned Messiah. In addition, during the time of Roman Emperor Justinian II, the Empire minted a gold coin that pictured Jesus. This coin, which today can be viewed in the British Museum, shows a man with clearly non-white facial features and tightly curled hair, consistent with the description of Christ offered in the Book of Revelations, wherein it is noted that Jesus had hair like wool, feet the color of burnt brass, and resembled jasper and sardine stones: both of which were brown in color. [cite: Tim Wise]

I'm running out of steam here, so I'll let you speculate on your own as to why we might want to literally bleach the past. Is this driven by evolution in film technology? A puritan association of color with sin and with the past with virtue? An assumption, grounded in the 1950s, that the past looked ... like the 1950s, but in togas? Am I mixing things by providing non parallel examples here? Does the Jesus example not fit? Is this 3 points making a trend? Whaddyall think? There's more than enough intellectual historians (and historians) on this blog to make a real good old fashioned mess out of this topic.

Ennis posted this on December 23, 2004
It is filed under Culture

It is also indexed with the following tags: Art | Sculpture | History | Food | Religion | Race & Ethnicity | Jesus Christ | Color |