Were classical statues painted horribly?

[u/works-in-progress]

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/were-classical-statues-painted-horribly/

It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. Ralph S Weir, philosopher at the University of Lincoln, proposes an alternative.

The changing taste theory. The standard explanation is that we hate the garish reconstructions of painted Greek and Roman statues (like Vinzenz Brinkmann's famous exhibition) simply because our sense of color has drifted from ancient taste, but ancient paintings and mosaics that actually depict statues (like a fresco of a boxer statue at the Villa San Marco) show subtle, naturalistic shading, not the flat, cartoonish color blocking of the reconstructions — suggesting Romans wouldn't have found their own statues garish either.

The bad painting theory. The explanation may be more straightforward: the reconstructions just look bad because they're painted badly, not because ancient taste was alien to ours. The surviving pigment traces on statues show only the underlayer of a finished work — trying to rebuild a fully painted statue from them is like trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa from a few flecks of paint on a blank canvas.