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PickledSpace56 OP t1_je433iq wrote

Reply to comment by bastardlyann in eli5 why ancient historical buildings haven’t been kept up? Why are buildings like the Parthenon and the Colosseum in such disrepair? Greece and Rome/Italy have existed the entire time? by PickledSpace56

Just people doing people things. It’d have been magnificent to restore the building and repaint and keep the sculptures and artifacts there. Of course even since then there was two world wars and man it’s just tough.

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BRXF1 t1_je4ko87 wrote

There's constant restoration work happening in the Parthenon but it's slow moving because restoring something ancient while preserving it and not destroying anything else is hard, meticulous work.

At the moment they're literally piecing together rock fragments to reconstruct the original pieces and where that is impossible they're building new ones from marble which is very similar to the one used in the original construction.

Here's an article from 2019 with some pictures.

Edit: Also, keep in mind that while the Greek identity has existed for thousands of years it has morphed and shifted and evolved. Athens itself has been conquered and administered by a number of empires, and does not have a continuous history as a major city or capital. Cities rise and fall and in the early 1800s Athens had a population of five thousand (yes, thousand) people. It was a forgotten backwater.

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BaBaFiCo t1_je47kqc wrote

We've shifted away from restoration, which was more popular in previous eras, to preservation.

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Graega t1_je4ap68 wrote

Besides, if you repainted everything Greek to the colors they actually were, your eyes would bleed. I imagine ancient Greece was less Houses of the Holy and more my nephew with a box of crayons and no supervision.

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szabiy t1_je73jb3 wrote

The weird crayon like coloured facsimiles we see as examples are based on historians colouring statue copies with flat colours matched to minute remnants of original paint—not artists, and especially not artists with any sort of proper clue about the intricacies of the original paintwork, being allowed to make stuff up. They extract a flake of red from the groove of a cloak, that's the 'crayon' they get to use for the cloak in their reconstruction.

AFAIK there's no extant statue paint job preserved well enough for us to get a decent clue at how the statues may have been originally shaded, blended, hatched, textured, and patterned by contemporary top artists, or to confirm they weren't. It's kind of a big deal we know they were painted at all.

I guess I'm trying to say, don't be too bummed out, we don't have enough proof the ancient artists had paint game as weak as our non artist archaeologists.

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valeyard89 t1_je8uoep wrote

Our first guest speaker comes from the year 400 BC, a time when most of the world looked like the cover of the Led Zeppelin album, Houses of the Holy.

We were there. There were many steps and columns. It was most tranquil.

He is sometimes known as the father of modern thought. He was the teacher of Plato, who was in turn the teacher of Aristotle, and like Ozzy Osbourne, was repeatedly accused of corruption of the young.

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