2024-04-25
The exhibition ''Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color'' is a must-see for all art lovers visiting New York in the near future. The exhibition will feature seventeen reconstructions of colourful ancient sculptures.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's temporary exhibition challenges the myth of the minimalism of ancient sculpture. In the exhibition, the viewer will see reconstructions made on the basis of scientific and archaeological research by Met staff and the ''Liebieghaus Polychrome Research Project''. Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann and Vinzenz Brinkmann, leaders in the field of ancient polychrome research, were responsible for making the colour reconstructions. On the Met website, you can read what tests were used in the course of the work, these included scanning electron microscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and gas chromatography.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to see in colour the Cycladic idols, bronzes from Riace, the sarcophagus of Alexander the Great and the bust of Julius Caesar, among others. The exhibition opened on 5 July this year and will run until 26 March 2023. The organizers are encouraging visitors to download the dedicated app ''The Chroma AR''. The app allows visitors to compare the original with the reconstruction on a smartphone screen.
Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, German researchers, began their adventure with coloured reconstructions as early as the 1980s. Then as students at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, today as originators of the travelling exhibition ''Gods in Color'', they have contributed to the popularization of knowledge about polychrome ancient sculpture. Interestingly, some of the scientific community working on the subject express concern about the accuracy of the reconstructions (in the sense that some elements of them are based on guesswork). They point out that the research of the German pair of researchers is only one voice in the debate.