3-Week SASA Reading Group: True Colors: Reading the Ancient Mediterranean Through Color

Previous participation and previous knowledge not required.

In Margaret Talbot's 2018 New Yorker article "The Myth of Whiteness in Ancient Sculpture", scholars such as Vinzenz Brinkmann and Mark Abbe consider the whitewashing of history through ancient sculptures. For Abbe, the idea the ancient disdained bright color "is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in this history of Western Art." Brinkmann takes it a step further saying that "it was time to reject major misunderstandings by proving that European antiquity was not white, but colorful and diverse." By examining the sculptures in light of their polychromatic past, newer discovering are starting to percolate and museums now readily embrace what the sculptures and monuments may have looked like through colored projections. In this instance the subject of color from a literary text and image been considered significantly in the last decade. This course will take the subject of color to the next generation of study by comparing and contrasting what is seen in literature and in image from a historical experience. The participants, in addition, through this new type of format will communicate and talk openly about this subject. This course encourages participants to actively read, engage, and critique the ancient sources and the thoughts generated in the class. Ancient color was a subject that was recognized, but not until recently as an active course that would have been considered ancillary. I hope that participants will gain an appreciation of how the study of color was developed, created, envisioned, worn and described by the ancients and their epigraphic inscriptions. 

3-Week Text-In-Translation Reading Group

Mondays at 6 PM Eastern Time

Start date: January 9th 

End date: January 23rd 

MUST RSVP TO GET THE ZOOM LINK. The same link will be used for all 3 sessions.