The True Colours of the Ancient World

A When we picture the statues of ancient Greece and Rome, we almost invariably imagine them as we see them in museums today: gleaming figures of pure white marble, their smooth surfaces bare of any colour. This image is so familiar that it has come to seem natural, even inevitable, as though the ancients had deliberately chosen the cool, pale austerity of unpainted stone. For centuries, white marble has been regarded as the very essence of classical beauty, and generations of visitors have admired the dignified pallor of the ancient gods and heroes ranged along the galleries. The idea of white marble has shaped not only how we look at the past but also how later artists and architects have worked, inspiring countless pale monuments and public buildings intended to echo the supposed purity of the classical world.

B The reality, however, was strikingly different. Far from being left plain, the statues and temples of the ancient world were originally painted in vivid, even gaudy colours. Skin was tinted, hair was gilded or coloured, and garments were picked out in bright reds, blues, greens and yellows, often with elaborate patterns. Eyes were painted so that the figures seemed to gaze back at the viewer, and weapons and jewellery were highlighted in contrasting shades. A Greek temple, far from being a study in serene white, would have blazed with colour under the Mediterranean sun. The bare marble we admire today is not the original appearance of these works at all, but the accidental result of the passage of time.

C The colours vanished for a number of reasons. Exposed to wind, rain and sun over many centuries, the paint gradually weathered and flaked away. Statues that had been buried in the ground lost their pigment to the damp soil, and those that survived above ground were often scrubbed clean by later owners who valued the marble for its own sake. In some cases the very act of digging up and cleaning an ancient statue removed the last faint traces of the colour that had clung to it, so that the object emerged from the earth looking far whiter than it had ever been in antiquity.

D If the ancient world was so colourful, why has the myth of white marble proved so durable? Part of the answer lies in the way classical art was rediscovered and admired in later ages. When scholars and artists of the Renaissance and after came to study ancient sculpture, most of the surviving pieces had already lost their paint, and the bare white stone was all that could be seen. Influential writers praised this whiteness as the height of good taste, holding it up as a model of restraint and nobility, and their admiration hardened into a firm conviction that the ancients themselves had preferred pure, uncoloured marble. The prestige of white marble became so great that it shaped the taste of whole centuries.

E Modern science has been able to prove beyond doubt that the statues were painted, even when almost nothing remains visible to the naked eye. Under ultraviolet light, faint traces of pigment that survive in the tiny pits and crevices of the stone become detectable, and specialists can map where colours once lay. Shining light across a surface at a low, raking angle can reveal shadows left by patterns that have otherwise disappeared, while chemical analysis of the smallest specks of surviving pigment can identify the exact substances the ancient painters used. Piece by piece, researchers have been able to reconstruct how many famous statues would originally have looked.

F The results have not always been comfortable viewing. When scholars produce full-colour reconstructions of ancient statues, painted as the evidence suggests they once were, many people find them garish and even disturbing, so deeply ingrained is the expectation that classical art should be white. Some critics complain that the reconstructions look crude, though this may say more about modern taste than about ancient reality, and there is genuine debate about how accurate any particular reconstruction can be. What is no longer in doubt is the central fact: the serene white marbles that have shaped our idea of classical beauty are, in a sense, a historical accident, and the ancient world was a far more colourful place than we have long imagined.