A World in Color: Seeing and Experiencing Colors in Ancient Times

Filtered through the lens of western aesthetics, history books often describe the past in black and white. Scholars even receive death threats for asserting that marble statues were not pristine white in antiquity. But imagining the ancient world in all its colors is to see a fuller picture of the art, fashion, values, and struggles of the past. This class investigates the meaning of color as a culturally mediated and charged phenomenon, using not just art historical approaches, but contemporary critical theory, linguistics, and economics.