Unfeathered dinosaurs, drab pyramids and sepia-hued soldiers – why do we prefer the comforting falsehoods of a monochromatic past?
Over time, even the most vivid traces of our collective past can become faded. They get bleached by the sun, blotted by water damage, eroded by high winds.
That is, if they were colourful to start with. Sometimes these traces begin in monochrome, in the form of photographs or moving pictures. Either way, the past often seems grey and distant.
The 2018 release of Peter Jackson’s First World War documentary They Shall Not Grow Old was a potent reminder of what happens when we see the past not as a black-and-white abstraction, but as something as rich and colourful as the present moment.
The film covered a conflict that is still barely a century old. Yet the effect of seeing the soldiers of the Western Front in full colour, with enhanced audio, was profound.
Of course, what we saw in the movie wasn’t quite the ‘authentic’ past. It was an approximation, made possible by the magic of colourisation.
But still, Jackson’s film was a reminder that – when it comes to primary sources – much of our perception of the First World War is shaped by mute and disjointed sepia footage, often played back to us at uncanny speeds.
Jackson’s documentary closed the distance between the viewer and the Tommies of the early 20th century.
The gaslit grotto
This issue of ‘the faded past’ came to mind when I visited the Shell Grotto in Margate. This subterranean passageway is home to mosaics comprising 4.6M seashells.
The grotto is a uniquely intriguing location by virtue of its mystery. Both its date of construction and its purpose remain unknown.
But for this visitor, the most striking element is that the space no longer appears as it would have when it was opened to the public in 1838, just a few years after its discovery.
The catacombs were subsequently lit with gas lamps for nearly a century. This innovation left the mosaics covered in carbon deposits.
As a consequence, the Shell Grotto now looks like what might happen if you sentenced H R Giger to solitary confinement with an endless supply of seashells and a box of candles.
Statues of limitations
Most of the shells have lost their original colour in the damp conditions. So any effort to restore them to their original state would prove futile. Once cleaned, the shells would be left in an equally inauthentic variation of white.
Classical antiquity means ‘white marble,’ but the statues have simply lost their vibrant pigment over time
That cleaning effort would leave the mosaics in a similar state to the majority of surviving Greek and Roman statuary.
As the Smithsonian magazine has it, for many of us “classical antiquity means white marble”. In fact, the statues have simply lost their vibrant pigment over time.
The concept of ‘naturally coloured’ statuary as an ancient aesthetic was fixed during the Renaissance and “helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art.”
Surely this idea has bled (or bleached) its way into the modern approach to civic statuary.
Looking back even further, one can argue that this misperception of the colours of antiquity affects one of the most famous structures in human history: the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Castings and capstones
When most people think of the Great Pyramid in the time of the pharaohs, they probably imagine it looking roughly as it does today. That is: a brownish-yellow and slightly craggy marvel of masonry.
In fact, on completion it would have sported a smooth white limestone facade. As a consequence, the pyramid may have glowed in the midday sun – a powerful reminder that it was the tomb of Khufu, a god king on Earth.
In all likelihood, the structure was topped by an impressive pyramidion. Whether the capstone was gold, electrum, or something less glamorous, remains in dispute.
Over the years that pyramidion, along with the outer casing stones, was subject to robbery or removal. The Great Pyramid took on its characteristic modern appearance.
It seems likely that, if we were able to transport the pharaoh Khufu to modern day Cairo, his first response wouldn’t be, “wow, four and a half thousand years later, my tomb endures as the most impressive structure in the world.”
Rather he’d say something to the effect of “Hang on. Why is it brown? That’s not how it’s supposed to look. You’re supposed to be blinded by it.”
A never-ending story
Now, what if one went much, much further back in time – many millions of years – and compared the dinosaurs of the cretaceous period with those in the Jurassic Park movies?
The monochrome past is a comforting falsehood. It allows us to imagine that we inhabit an alternate reality different to both our recent and distant ancestors
The franchise has made gradual, grudging concessions to modern paleontological theory, but it still favours dinosaurs that are a bit brown and mostly unfeathered.
Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel hinted at an in-universe excuse for these liberties: these cloned creatures are engineered for the entertainment of modern audiences; they’re not ‘real’ dinosaurs. But it’s a distinction that’s probably lost on the majority of impressionable viewers.
I understand why many people don’t really want to adjust to seeing feathered dinosaurs in tropical tones, or experience Greek statues in garish hues. But there is something mumpsimus-like about sticking with the drab colours of half-remembered history.
Approaching the past in this way seems like a highly effective strategy for keeping history’s commonalities and complexities at arm’s length.
Ultimately, the monochrome past is a comforting falsehood. It allows us to imagine that we’re profoundly different to both our recent and our distant ancestors. We almost feel we inhabit an alternate reality.
Better instead to embrace these fresh discoveries and vivid new visions. They remind us that our lifetime – through an unending chain of ancestors – is contiguous with the carnage of Flanders, the flourishing of classical antiquity and even the majesty of the pharaohs.
