Marble Statues Color

Mark abbe was ambushed by color in 2000 while working on an archeological dig in the ancient greek city of aphrodisias in present day turkey.
Marble statues color. The well to do wore inexpensive colors and the extremely wealthy wore royal colors. The myth of the white marble started during the renaissance when we first began unearthing ancient statues. Most of them had lost their original paint after centuries of exposure to the elements. To us classical antiquity means white marble.
While to our modern eye the bright colors of greek and roman statues scream tacky to the ancients who painted them it was expensive back in the day slaves wore rough cloth like undyed and unbleached icky tan colors. The original now white peplos kore a statue of a young girl wearing a long dress belted at the waist stands in the acropolis museum in athens. Not so to the greeks who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. It is because of this lack of knowledge that renaissance sculptors intent on copying greek and roman forms carved their statues in unpainted white marble.
As far as they knew unpainted white marble was precisely the way their ancient forebearers had sculpted. At the time he was a graduate student at new york.