Greek art, as we know today, was multicolored and variegated: but the myth of its whiteness dates back to Antiquity itself. P. Jockey traces the colorful history of this myth and its aesthetic, moral and ideological implications.
“ You are true, pure, perfect ; your marble has no stains “. In 1876, Ernest Renan addressed this Prayer on the Acropolis to a Greece that is still ideal, symbolized by the immaculate whiteness of its temples. Ignoring the testimonies of archaeologists and travelers as well as the outrages of time and men suffered by the Parthenon, this statement “ mystical » (p. 218) de-historicizes the ancient monument in order to better annex it to the Western cultural heritage – that of a France, an England, or a Germany which then seeks dreamed origins in the great Athens of Pericles.
However, this cult of a Greece “ pure » was in no way invented in the modern era, as the latest work by Philippe Jockey powerfully demonstrates, which, while giving pride of place to these fantasies of whiteness conveyed by neoclassical ideology and its later variations, proposes to go back to Greco-Roman antiquity to understand the origins of this denial of color yet so essential to Hellenic culture: Philippe Jockey explains in particular the religious, political and anthropological value of the harmonious combination of colors (poikilia harmonia) in ancient Greece (p. 17). At a time when major exhibitions and several important studies, including certain works by Jockey himself, are trying to reveal to the general public that the poikilia (in Greek variegation or variegation) was at the heart of the arts and the city in ancient Greece, The Myth of White Greece presents itself as a journey, both geographical and chronological, through “ places of white memory » (p. 189), so many milestones in the construction of this myth of a spotless Greece, freed from all the stains of otherness.
White imperialism
If the work opens with an exploration of the multiple facets of Greek polychrome culture, it is to better underline the irony and the contradiction of its later discolorations: for example, this white that the Greeks associated with the incompleteness of statues or even the beauty of women more than of warriors is, from Roman times, paradoxically established as a dominant color, symbol of virtus imperial. Jockey illustrates this articulation between power and whiteness on an aesthetic, ethical and political level. In support of his demonstration, always very informed, he deciphers the biased reception of certain key works (including the Laocoon, the Apollo of Belvedere, the Portland vase or the Diadumenus) as well as the numerous founding texts of this ideology absolute white, from Pline to Winckelmann.
All these quotations further reveal to the reader that the myth of White Greece is above all a matter of words, of a word certainly “ depoliticized » (Barthes, cited p.13) but nevertheless ideologically charged and which will continue to become radicalized through contact with the Other, as in 1492, when the West discovered colors “ primitives » of the New World.
This word therefore replaces the matter pigmentary, with barbaric variegation which does not fit with the ancient ideals of which the West has set itself up as guarantor. And yet the bleaching business initiated in Rome and actively pursued from the High Middle Ages and especially the Quattrocento uses numerous bleaching techniques to achieve its ends. Jockey devotes beautiful pages to these impeccable marmoreal copies which were for a long time preferred to Greek models because their reproduction – whether plaster casts, sketches or later black and white photographs – very opportunely dispossessed the original of its polychrome aura.
The author thus analyzes the multiple artistic forms in which this ideal of ancient whiteness was “ incarnated » (but without the incarnate) over the centuries, while inviting its reader to immerse themselves in often forgotten texts such as those of Cyriaque of Ancona or Maxime Collignon, or on the contrary well known but usefully revisited from the angle of this “ leukomania » Western, such as Travel to Greece (1811) by Chateaubriand.
Chromatic resistors
However, the work also echoes these polychrome persistences which mark the history of the reception of ancient culture, showing that color always emerges when we try to erase it too vigorously. These resistances are those of another Greece, overflowing the borders of “ miracle » Athenian celebrated by Renan – like the statue of Diana found in Pompeii in 1760 and whose various shades embarrassed Wincklemann.
But it is above all XIXe century that the confrontation between chromophiles and chromophobes was the most heated. During this pivotal period, the myth of White Greece was put to the test due to the proliferation of archaeological evidence attesting to the Hellenes’ taste for shimmering colors, whether in the multicolored decorations of the pediments of the temples or even the Tanagras, polychrome statuettes discovered in Boeotia in the 1870s. The Franco-German archaeologist J.I. Hittorff was one of these ardent defenders of color who destabilized the dreams of whiteness of his contemporaries in a colonial context where the ideological divide between the Western white man and the Others — whether they are yellow or black to use Gobineau’s racial categories — tended to become exacerbated. These tensions crystallized in what Jockey very aptly calls the “ Parthenon paradox » (p. 175), which then became the object of conflicting reappropriations, both by the proponents of whiteness and by those of polychromy.
Neither the archaeologists nor the anthropologists of the end of the XIXe century could not, however, convince the most chromophobe conservatives, and fantasies of whiteness persisted into the following century, with an obvious radicalization in the interwar period which saw new avatars of this dictatorship of white impose themselves, through the writings by Charles Maurras or the films of Leni Riefenstahl, in homage to the new “ hero » Aryans.
Desires for whiteness ?
Although completely operational overall, this binary system opposing the colorless to the variegated could nevertheless be nuanced, once it is applied to more ambiguous objects, notably literary ones. This is the case, for example, of Théophile Gautier, whom Jockey curiously establishes as the heir of Renan’s white and conservative mysticism. His Enamels and Cameos, published in 1852, however, cannot be read solely from the Manichean angle of the opposition of ideal whiteness / barbaric oriental polychromy. Jockey also recognizes that in this author the marble often tends to come back to life, to tinge with “ pink tones ” her “ implacable whiteness » (p. 224), thus replaying the myth of Pygmalion who experienced in the second half of the XIXe century an unprecedented fortune, in poetry as in painting. We find these fantasies of “ incarnation ” In “ Arria Marcella » (1852), where Octavian’s desire comes to animate the marmoreal imprint of a breast, against a backdrop of Pompeian polychrome decoration. Likewise, is not the oriental and Dionysian foot of the mummy in one of his Egyptian short stories confused with “ a fragment of an ancient Venus » ? His “ beautiful fawn and red shades » as well as the smells of myrrh which accompany the dance, do they not evoke these agalma, “ polychrome boxes » (p. 19) which the Greeks made an offering to the gods ? It is also enough to reread Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) to understand what this “ retrospective love » marble could be disturbing, like the sleeping hermaphrodite in the Louvre which inspired several of Gautier’s writings.
Whiteness, including that of the purest Paros marble, far from always being “ dominant, » could therefore sometimes prove to be the support of secret and subversive fantasies. Jockey partly alludes to this when he analyzes the repressed homoeroticism of a Montherlant admiring the skin “ diaphanous like Paros » of an Olympian boxer (p. 262). But at XIXe century, other much less conservative writers, like Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde, had already tried an even more daring deviation from this too Apollonian whiteness, a deviation whose origins they had found… in Winckelmann ! Furthermore, Wilde was a great fan of homoerotic photographs (although in black and white) by Wilhelm von Gloeden and his cousin Wilhelm von Plüschow representing young, dark-haired Sicilian ephebes in poses from the antique. The sculptural imagination and photographic discoloration take nothing away from the powers of desire here…
These few remarks cannot, however, call into question the originality of the words of Philippe Jockey who in this book offers us a fascinating journey through several centuries of monochrome Western Hellenomania.