Coloring Greek and Roman Antiquity: Mosaics, Paintings and Sculptures

Classical antiquity has reached us bleached white, but that's an accident of weathered marble and a centuries-old scholarly bias — the Greeks and Romans actually lived in a world saturated with pigment, and this course rebuilds that lost visual culture through frescoes, mosaics, vase painting, and the polychromy that once coated their statues. You'll work through case studies from Aegean wall paintings to the villas of Pompeii, write take-home midterm and final analyses, and present on scholarly articles examining how new imaging technologies are recovering color traces invisible to the naked eye. It's a useful complement to the broader Greek and Roman art surveys, training you to read material evidence critically rather than trusting the inherited image of a marble-white antiquity.