Ancient artworks are seen in a garish new light in a New York show

Ancient sculpture, the 19th-century aesthete Walter Pater wrote, “threw itself upon pure form”. Glorying in the physical proportions of the human body rather than expressions of inner torment or status-boosting plumage, it relied for its impact on “a little of suggested motion, and much of pure light on its gleaming surfaces”. What, then, to make of Chroma, the Metropolitan Museum’s astonishing and deeply unsettling exhibition that makes nonsense of Pater’s ode to purity?

That serene and elegantly proportioned statue of Venus, remote, staring back through the centuries with her empty eyes? That wrestler, the male embodiment of anatomical beauty, rendered with cool serenity? Those bleached temples with columns and pediments stoically unadorned, the essence of democracy manifest in the clarity of their lines? Fantasy, as it turns out, or at best a misunderstanding. All that bony marble and travertine once throbbed with colour — not muted, earthy colours, either, but bright tones and clashing patterns. Sculptures and buildings in the ancient world were decorated like ice cream cakes.

Chroma dispenses once and for all with the myth of classical antiquity’s ghostly pallor, an association that has endured long past the realisation that it was wrong. Pliny the Elder described the colourising techniques of his time, a process depicted on the surface of pottery. The first archaeologists found traces of pigment on many of their finds, and the Met’s show includes a 1919 watercolour of the recently excavated reliefs from the Acropolis, capturing old hues before they flaked away in the sun and air.

The polychromy of antiquity was obvious; ignoring it required an effort of self-deception that generations of painters, sculptors, poets, experts and collectors willingly undertook. From the Renaissance on, sophisticates were awed by what Pater called “the image of a man as he springs from the sleep of nature, his white light taking no colour from any one-sided experience. He is characterless, so far as character involves subjection to the accidental influences of life”. Classical sculpture, in this view, rose above messy contingencies, presenting humanity with a distilled image of its own ideal.

The Met attempts to show us what Apollonian worshippers missed. The museum has sprinkled 17 recent reconstructions around the Greek and Roman galleries like Easter eggs, lurking among the originals. A team of Frankfurt-based researchers, Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann and her husband Vinzenz Brinkmann, who have been recreating antique sculptures since the 1990s, fabricated the forms using a 3D printer, then sprayed on layers of marble stucco, and finished them with pigments reproduced from surviving specks and spectroscopic analysis.

For this exhibition, they have juxtaposed a sixth-century BCE sphinx in the Met’s collection with a version kitted out in rainbow splendour. Where the weathered original wears a demure smile and an air of otherworldliness, the new one leers with brown eyes and a pink, rictus-like grin. Gilded feathers, a red-and-blue bodice and a blue-tipped tail complete the ensemble. Most disturbing of all is the waxy hue of the skin, each cheek enlivened by a rosy flush.

Elsewhere in the galleries, a fifth-century BCE Trojan archer squats in boldly patterned leggings and a female figure appears shrink-wrapped in a gauzy green mantle, a wisp of fabric so translucent we can we see the pink of her dress beneath. These feats of illusionism are so meticulous that they edge close to the quasi-verisimilitude of a wax museum.

How can the ancients, those arbiters of refined taste, have made their artwork so . . . vulgar?

Even eerier are several bronze reconstructions of naked athletes and warriors with gemstones for eyes, copper lips and silver teeth. Red-tinted metal alloys define cuts on a boxer’s shoulder, arm and thigh, and artificial patinas produce a violet bruise. The colourisation is less disconcerting here, perhaps because the bronze, being dark, already feels expressive.

Even with all this scholarship and technology, it’s not easy to dislodge 2,000 years of wishful error. When you come upon these revisionist exemplars, you may have the epiphany the exhibition hopes to provoke, or you may react with scorn and disbelief. How can the ancients, those arbiters of refined taste, have made their artwork so . . . vulgar? Surely we are looking at a distortion, a betrayal, or at the very least a mistake? Maybe some flaw in execution — the way pigment binds to the stucco skin or the over-even way it is applied — would strike an ancient as tacky, too, no more than a cartoonish spray-on version of an exquisitely layered art.

In my confusion, I’m reminded of the first, appalled reactions to the cleaning and restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in the 1980s. Writing in the New York Review of Books in 1993, British art historian Charles Hope wrote that “the frescoes create a decidedly disagreeable impression: the colours are gaudy, so that the costumes tend to overwhelm the faces and limbs, the figures look crude and often flat . . . Restrained grandeur has been replaced by garish confusion. Talking to friends, I find that my unease is widely shared.”

The latest parade of flashy interlopers seems likely to shock even those who already knew that the ancient world teemed with flamboyant decoration. We can continue to hope that the Brinkmanns got it wrong, or that in the humid air of ancient Athens, the sculptures weathered so quickly that few people ever saw, much less adored, their initial out-of-the-workshop sheen. But we may also have to recognise that posterity gave the Greeks credit for a delicacy that was actually the product of slow erosion and long-term decay. We may have to make our peace with the idea that those who dwelled in the cradle of western civilisation were a lot like us degraded moderns: turned on by colours, flash and lurid realism.

And yet a misconception can still be valid. Even if you accept Chroma as the definitive proof, the courtroom revelation that closes the case, that is still not enough to overturn 2,000 years of western interpretation and inspiration. Without this particular misreading or distortion, there would be no Michelangelo’s milky “David”, Soane would never have fashioned his solemn Bank of England, the Lincoln Memorial would not glow virtuously across the Tidal Basin, and Le Corbusier might never have found his way from Rome’s ruins to neoclassical modernism. Yes, the real Praxiteles might have relished the Missoni palette or shared a taste for Trumpian glitter. Even so, we’ll take our antiquities plain, thank you, the way they were never meant to be seen.

To March 26 2023, metmuseum.org