Yes, the suggestion that they're trolling goes too far.

However, I did a tiny bit of investigating, and according to this write-up it does seem like Brinkmann presents his work as resembling the originals

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors-1788...

But they still don't add anything without direct evidence - where there's evidence in later statues for more subtle colouring, they include that.

The problem is that there is no "missing data" color, so that discipline would default to marble white, which is just as made up as the rest.

I think the Augustus statue is a good example of that: Part of the garish effect comes from the contrast between the painted and nonpainted areas. The marble of his face and harness work well if everything is marble - but in contrast to the strong colors of the rest, the face suddenly seems sickly pale and the harness becomes "skin-colored". The result is a "plastic" or "uncanny valley" effect.

If the entire statue were painted, the effect would be weaker.

They're making it up no matter what they do, since we don't know how these things were originally painted and have no way of knowing. They should just present the reconstructions as interpretations and actually try to do a good job painting them. I agree with the article that what they're doing now is harmful to the public understanding.

That is how scholarship works. It’s like a math proof: they’re interested in proving the base case. If someone else wants to do more speculative work to theorize what a well-painted version would look like, that would be super cool, but it wouldn’t be scholarship.

I would be curious to know if the treatment of statues in terms of "making them ugly and ridiculous to the point of being insulting" is roughly uniform across the different historical cultures being treated to this "reconstruction" procedure.

i.e. is there evidence that there is comfort in trolling using Roman or Greek vs Assyrian, Nubian etc. Or do they just like to make everything bright and blocky.

This is crucial. From the article:

>As a result, we internalized a deep-seated attachment to an unblemished white image of Greek and Roman art. We became, to use David Bachelor’s term, chromo­phobes. It is this accidental association between Greek and Roman art and pristine white marble, we are told, that accounts for the displeasure we feel when we see the statues restored to color.

And there's indeed been quite a bit of push-back since the story first broke. Unspoken is the reason. Primacy bias is probably a part of it, but what really accounts for the intensity of the attachment to the idea of white marble finishes? I'm sure you can imagine.

>Bond told me that she’d been moved to write her essays when a racist group, Identity Evropa, started putting up posters on college campuses, including Iowa’s, that presented classical white marble statues as emblems of white nationalism. After the publication of her essays, she received a stream of hate messages online. She is not the only classicist who has been targeted by the so-called alt-right. Some white supremacists have been drawn to classical studies out of a desire to affirm what they imagine to be an unblemished lineage of white Western culture extending back to ancient Greece. When they are told that their understanding of classical history is flawed, they often get testy.

https://archive.is/qTreQ#selection-1695.0-1695.693

So, yes, it was important to categorically falsify the notion that the statues, frescoes, etc., were unpainted. Anything that left it open would have been something for the worst sorts of people to latch onto. Now that that's out of the way, possibly even more accurate explanations can be given the time of day, instead of being stuck having to hash out, "Oh, but were they even colored at all?"