Another Set Of Botch Jobs

What is it about elderly Catholic priests and their congregations?

St George Was In Need Of Some TLC ....

Perhaps its just lack of funds, but it seems as though they all fancy themselves as art restorers.

Colouring The Past Again

Some of my most popular posts are on the subject of the colourful past our ancestors lived in ...

'Alexander' Sarcophagus - Constantinople
(Not His, But Actually One Of His Generals)

It wasn't the white aesthete look, that the Renaissance artists sought to imitate, when they copied what they thought were original marble statues of antiquity .... they weren't aware of the fact that originally these were coloured. This view that white marble was the ideal condition, led to sculptures actually being cleaned of paint remnants when pulled from the ground.

Colouring The Past

I have posted before on the colour of the past. How we are completely wrong to think that the ancient world was a monochrome of white or dark marbles, but in fact was a riot of colours everywhere the ancients looked. Of course bronze was already around .......

Giant Bronze Statue Athena - Acropolis - Pheidias

But recent discoveries have show exactly how much colourising went on - not just of cult images, but of the statues seen daily on the streets and the buildings.

Colouring The Past

Alexander Gardner was a Scots immigrant to the US in 1856 who was on hand to photograph the US Civil war .... what struck me from his collection of pictures, was that in November 1860 he took the first photograph of the then President elect, Abraham Lincoln. I have taken the liberty of cleaning it up (the original can be seen here).

President elect Abraham Lincoln - Nov 1860.

Although after I cleaned it up, it looked OK ...