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Test: GRE Verbal
"Developments in Understanding Ancient Greek Art" by Will Floyd
Most people imagine stark white temples and plain marble statues as the ideal of ancient Greek art. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the ancient Greeks lavished their statues, sculptures, and buildings with bright colors. The common misconception of plainly adorned Hellenic art can be blamed on the ancient Greeks’ biggest proponents in history. Enlightenment-era classicists eagerly visited ancient ruins in the eighteenth century and saw artifacts that had been weathered to plain white stone through decades of neglect. By the time nineteenth-century archaeologists found proof that the Parthenon and images of the Gods were meant to be in vivid hues, eminent scholars in Europe refused to countenance that pure white marble was not antiquity’s aesthetic paradigm. Widespread acknowledgement of the ancient Greeks’ adoration of bright colors only came in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as scientific tests proved ancient statuary and buildings had once been covered in polychrome paint.
| 1. | The author's argument is best summarized as __________. |
a true understanding of Greek art acknowledges their use of color
twenty-first-century scientific tests will solve all disputes about the ancient world
the Greeks were poor artists who have been overrated in history
plain white marble is the ideal color for sculpture
Enlightenment-era classicists knew nothing about art
