What Do We Want from Antiquity? (750 words)

Our nation turns its lonely eyes to Rome.

I could, I suppose, start this off with another complaint about the state of the world today, except that’s how we got into this state. People wishing for a past that never existed. - A Christmas Movie a Day

Why can’t life look like the ancient marble statues? We encounter these glorious objects and we recognize our own experience in them—a distilled and idealized version of our experience anyway, if only our lives weren’t so messy and mundane. If only the world hadn’t descended as it has.

Right now the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth has a remarkable exhibition¹ of Roman sculptures that presents them in a way I’ve never seen before. Each one has an accompanying line drawing with shaded areas that show what is original; what is ancient but not original to the sculpture; and what is “modern” (which could mean a restoration carved during the Renaissance). The drawings clearly show how we get a Roman torso with an ancient head from another statue stuck on, a Renaissance arm, and 19th-century additions “in the style of.”

You stand there, looking back and forth between the marble perfection and the shaded drawing, and you realize that these figures we imagine to be wholly authentic are pastiches, cobbled together from broken bits over centuries of tinkering, adding, and—in the case of Renaissance artisans—scraping off any residual paint.

Because we know the statues were originally painted, we’ve all heard that. We know that the people who made these things had no interest in plain stone. But we still believe, reflexively, in the authenticity of the white marble. When we see the occasional digital re-creations showing the statues brightly painted—and there is a video at the Kimbell showing just that—they look garish, ridiculous.² These days, museums have whole conservation departments that specialize in cleaning paintings and restoring bronze patinas. But we never repaint the old marble statues. A replica maybe, like the giant Pallas Athena in the Nashville Parthenon. But never the original.

Except, the Kimbell exhibition shows plainly, there is no such thing as the original. Details of the poses, the hand gestures and objects held, have been guessed at in the subsequent centuries. In a few cases, marble critters have even been added to the base. In short: these statues look nothing like their ancient originals, no matter how much we unconsciously project a sense of noble, unified authenticity onto them. And of course, the same is true of our understanding of Rome itself.

Since the Renaissance, we’ve looked back on the Roman Empire, compressed and distantly visible on the far shore of the centuries we call Dark. The story goes that Rome shone; Rome fell; the lights went out; and Florence switched them back on. Suddenly, artists remembered how to depict muscles.

This compulsion to partition history—and art history—into simplified chunks of Antiquity-Medieval-Modern is understandable, given our species’ hardwiring to pattern-seek. We organize history into eras, and eras into life cycles with births and deaths. We cheer for the rise; we bemoan the fall. In the United States, we project ourselves onto Rome’s bell curve of glory and decay, and the decline we fear we’re experiencing is reflected in Rome’s own fall from grace from a rational republic to a decadent, brutal empire of conquest.

But of course the lived experience was not so neatly segmented; was not segmented at all! The roughly 76 generations since the rise of Rome represent a continuum of humanity, of civilizations and cultures shifting and overlapping each other like ocean waves. The exhibition at the Kimbell is a metaphor for how pieced-together our understanding of history really is, how it is all but impossible to know in our bones what life was like back then.

Except that we do—we do know in our bones. Because of course, their concerns were our concerns. The jockeying for position through wealth or intelligence or beauty or force, the existential wondering about our purpose, the cosmos, and most of all: the reason for the existence of suffering. We tell ourselves that all this hideous suffering around us is a symptom of the broken present, that it wasn’t always this way. But it was. The Romans themselves looked back to a more noble time. That’s what their own mythology, their stories about the Greeks, are all about.

What if we reverse our gaze and imagine two millennia into the future, imagine people looking back on this time, on us, as some Eden? And even more incredibly, what if those future-people are right? What if this is an Eden? What if it is always an Eden, always has been and always will be, if only we can see it?

1. Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection is on view at the Kimbell Art Museum through January 25, 2026.

2. In a fascinating article recently published by Works in Progress, Ralph S. Weir posits that contemporary renderings of repainted ancient statues get it horribly wrong. He says it’s like trying to recreate the Mona Lisa from a few bits of residual pigment on an empty canvas.