Colour and classical statuary

I have posted a while back on a major recent exhibition about the fact that classical sculpture was painted and not the gleaming while or cream toned marble we see in galleries and museums today. This use of colour on statuary can, of course, be found in the ancient Near East, and in cultures far to the east of that. It survived or was revived in the medieval centuries by the Catholic Church for its own imagery.

Countering the tradition of white or nearly white marble is not that easy as we have centuries of cultural formation that tells us that Greece and Rome wrought their sculpture in that particular way.

The evidence for the original use of colour and the way the modern misperception of how these sculptures should look is set out in more detail than I have previously seen online in a useful article from The Hindustan Times which can be seen at How the myth of whiteness in classical sculpture was created

Having seen that I then found a much longer and wide ranging article from The New Yorker from 2018 which really expounds the evidence for the use of colour on antique sculpture with surviving evidence and literary references. I fully take on board the suggestion that modern copies re-coloured may well lack the subtlety the originals doubtless displayed - the painters were probably commensurate in skill to the sculptors who created the statues originally. That article can be seen at The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture

So next time one visits the British Museum or the Ashmolean one needs to take not just the head lamp suggested in the New Yorker piece but also a mental paint box to try to envisage the statues and sculpture as they once were, and in doing that come closer to the society that created them.