Vinzenz Brinkmann, a German archaeologist, was closely examining an ancient Greek sculpture's surface in the early 1980s in an effort to find any indication of tool marks. He never found what he was looking for because, like Italian Renaissance artists, Greek sculptors were so skilled that they seldom left a trace of their own work, but he did find signs of paint.

Russell Sturgis, an American art critic who visited Athens to see the excavation of an antique statue close to the Acropolis, made a comparable finding almost exactly a century earlier. To his amazement, the statue didn't resemble those seen in museums in the least. This one was covered in brittle dabs of red, black, and green color, in contrast to those, which are as white as the marble they are made of.

The discovery by Sturgis and Brinkmann that ancient Greek statues were originally painted with a palette as vibrant and colorful as Vincent van Gogh's and that their iconic modern monochromatic appearance is really just the result of the passage of time is still not widely known outside of academic circles.

Harlequins and emperors

Brinkmann replicated Greek and Roman sculptures in their original color scheme using samples of pigment leftovers. To a world accustomed to seeing ancient Greece and Rome in black and white, his traveling exhibition, Gods in Color, was shocking. It was also well-liked and ran for 12 years, setting the stage for subsequent exhibits like the MET's Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, which debuted in 2022.

Even the most well-known Greek statues lose a lot of their familiarity when they are painted. Pale bodies develop a variety of skin tones, mostly in the dark. Bold motifs on austere gowns resemble medieval harlequins. An ochre body and an azurite mane once belonged to a statue of a lion that was erected in front of a Corinthian tomb during the sixth century BC. However, years of exposure to the elements caused it to become a uniform, dull white.

Also fashioned of metal, these sculptures exhibit this playful nature. According to a New Yorker article, bronze statues were given a "disarming fleshiness" by the addition of copper lips, nipples, and swirls of pubic hair. In addition to having sparkling gemstones for eyes, several of these Greek statues also portrayed blood trickling from open wounds using various metals.

Although these color reconstructions have garnered generally positive reviews, there is ongoing discussion over how historically accurate they are. Fabio Barry, an art historian at Stanford University, believes that research initiatives like Brinkmann's have taken on the characteristics of a marketing gimmick. Barry previously compared a repainted statue of the Roman Emperor Augustus at the Vatican to "a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi." the New Yorker was informed:

"I suspected that the various scholars reconstructing the polychromy of statuary even took a sort of iconoclastic pride in this — that the traditional idea of all-whiteness was so cherished that they were going to really make their point that it was colorful."

Τhe erasing of history

For decades, scholars in Europe concluded that Greek and Roman sculptors had intentionally left their work barren. Far from being coincidental, the lack of color was seen as an indication of artistic restraint, an emphasis on form over adornment, and a general rejection of the "bad taste" that characterized the more colorful artwork that emerged from other parts of the ancient world, such as Egypt.

Of course, since they were white themselves, European scholars likewise admired the seeming whiteness of antique sculpture. This false relationship, at best, encouraged casual bigotry. Johann Winckelmann, a German art historian, asserted in the 1800s that "the whiter the body, the more beautiful it is," and that while "color contributes to beauty," it shouldn't be mistaken for the actual thing.

At worst, it provided one of Europe's colonial ambitions with justification. Arguments for the superiority of Greco-Roman art began to increasingly serve as justifications for the superiority of Western civilizations, which had claimed the cultural and political legacy of antiquity, as the continent entered its colonial era. This line of reasoning peaked in the years leading up to the Second World War.

This Greco-Roman-white fantasy was reinforced. Experts contended that each time a rare instance of a statue with complete color was found, it had to have been created by a distinct and, in their opinion, inferior society, such as the pre-Roman Etruscans. When dealers came across such statues, they would scrub them until the colour was gone, increasing their market value.

Although it can be strange to first encounter Greek and Roman sculptures in color, the experience is crucial in serving as a reminder that the ancient world was considerably more diverse than is typically thought. There is evidence that, contrary to Winckelmann's claim, the Greeks considered deeper complexion tones to be more attractive than lighter ones. Greece and Rome were not just cultural melting pots.