Illustration: Greek Ornament, from Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.
Owen Jones was always passionately interested in new formulas and ideas concerning the history of decoration, ornamentation and the use colour played within each cultural format. Admittedly, although well intentioned he was not always as accurate with the facts as we are used to today. However, he was working with sometimes sketchy information that was available to him in the middle of the nineteenth century. He did pursue some particularly bold ideas of his own which for their time were relatively radical and did not always sit well with the critics and experts of the day.
One of these ideas was the concept of colour within the classical Greek world. Jones was convinced that Greek sculpture and architecture resembled the painted ceramics and mosaics of the period, as well as deriving colour palettes from neighbouring older cultures such as the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians. He was not convinced that the cold white marble that was the accepted norm of the modern European use of the classical template was indeed the correct one. He felt that his contemporaries were doing the ancient Greeks an injustice by imposing their own aesthetics on a culture that was both vibrant and independent and had no need to be remembered as a stodgy imitation of that of modern Europeans.
Illustration: Greek Ornament, from Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.
The debate was not of Jones making as it had been rumbling away since the eighteenth century, but a long line of critics and antiquarians were devoted to the concept of the purity of classical Greece for a number of reasons, not all of them being artistic, scholarly or aesthetic. Modern Europeans had commandeered the Greek culture as the forerunner of their own; they saw themselves as sole inheritors in fact, strongly implying that they were the true inheritors of the classical world, rather than being derived, as they truly were, from various nomadic and semi-nomadic bands that wandered across Europe at the end of the Roman Empire.
It was the perceived barbarity of the vibrant colours that really horrified critics. The painstakingly slow build up of the myth that modern Europeans were the apex of classical Greek culture, seemed to be threatened by the concept of the questioning of the ancient cultures use of vibrant colour in its art and architecture. If it could be proved that classical Greece was just as loud, vibrant and colourful as its contemporary neighbours, then there would no myth that Europeans were formed from a higher ordered culture, higher than those of their contemporary neighbours in Africa and Asia, which would give them no legitimacy to rule over others. This does not mean to say an argument over colour use in ancient Greece directly called into question the European colonial empires. However, it was one of the factors that questioned the legitimacy of the European belief in their own superiority, and perhaps more importantly how then others would perhaps judge that legitimacy, hence the aggressive opposition to the colour of theories of men like Owen Jones.
It was the perceived barbarity of the vibrant colours that really horrified critics. The painstakingly slow build up of the myth that modern Europeans were the apex of classical Greek culture, seemed to be threatened by the concept of the questioning of the ancient cultures use of vibrant colour in its art and architecture. If it could be proved that classical Greece was just as loud, vibrant and colourful as its contemporary neighbours, then there would no myth that Europeans were formed from a higher ordered culture, higher than those of their contemporary neighbours in Africa and Asia, which would give them no legitimacy to rule over others. This does not mean to say an argument over colour use in ancient Greece directly called into question the European colonial empires. However, it was one of the factors that questioned the legitimacy of the European belief in their own superiority, and perhaps more importantly how then others would perhaps judge that legitimacy, hence the aggressive opposition to the colour of theories of men like Owen Jones.
Illustration: Greek Ornament, from Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.
However, Jones was so convinced that he was right that when the Crystal Palace was moved and refurbished after the Great Exhibition of 1851, he arranged for the Greek Court to use a full colour palette to represent the true nature of Greece, rather than that of the white marble favoured by the classically trained sculptors and architects of the nineteenth century.
The re-imagined Greek Court caused such a furore amongst most of the critics and experts of the day that Jones had to publish a public apology in book form. However, he only apologised for perhaps getting some of the colour combinations wrong, as he was working from supposition gained from classical Greek ceramic work and comparisons with other cultures that were contemporary with the period. He remained adamant that he was right to colour marble and not to leave it as an aesthetic white, and he produced written examples of Greek marble that still retained some of their vivid painted surface as evidence that he was correct in his assumption.
When Jones published his Grammar of Ornament in 1856, two years after his An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court in the Crystal Palace, he was much more circumspect about colour ranges. Although he still firmly believed that a whole range of colours from bright to muted were used in the classical Greek world, as he explained in the text that went with the colour design plates for the chapter on Greek Ornament in his The Grammar of Ornament, he toned down the combinations and range of colours as can be seen in the illustrations shown in this article. However, the last plate shown here does give an impression of what Jones was trying to convey in his argument.
Illustration: Greek Ornament, from Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.
The fact that today we are fully aware of the rich and often garish colour combinations that were used on classical Greek sculpture and architecture, even though still today many would rather that the true colours of the Greek world had never been found, puts an end to the misconception both conscious and unconscious, of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fantasy of a subtle, dignified, scholarly and largely modern European concept of the ancient Greek world. It was early activists like Jones, who argued for a Greek world that was just as vibrant, loud and extravagant as any of the other cultures of the period. He helped to alleviate, at least a little of the pomposity that the classical Greeks, who would probably never have recognised themselves through the eyes of many Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have had to endure and still probably do to this day. It is still the accepted belief among many of European descent, that they are the inheritors of classical Greece. The fact that they have no more legitimacy than the various people and cultures of North Africa and the Middle East, who could also claim to be inheritors of the classical world, says much perhaps about some of the underlying complex needs of Europeans.
Illustration: Greek Ornament, from Owen Jones The Grammar of Ornament, 1856.
The Grammar of Ornament: All 100 Color Plates from the Folio Edition of the Great Victorian Sourcebook of Historic Design (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
The Grammar of Ornament
Grammar of Ornament: A Monumental Work of Art
An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court in the Crystal Palace: With Arguments by G. H. Lewes and W. Watkiss Lloyd, an Extract from the Report of ... to Examine the Elgin Marbles in 1836
The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi
Ancient Greek Designs (Dover Pictorial Archive Series)
Prayers in Stone: Greek Architectural Sculpture (c. 600-100 B.C.E.) (Sather Classical Lectures)
The Origins of the Greek Architectural Orders
Hope's Greek and Roman Designs CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art)
Ancient Greek Art (Art in History/2nd Edition)
Pictorial Narrative in Ancient Greek Art (Cambridge Studies in Classical Art and Iconography)
Ancient Greek Art (Art in History)
Early Hellenistic Portraiture: Image, Style, Context
The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (Yale Russian and East European Studies)
The History Of Ancient Art Among The Greeks (1850)
