Marble Lie

The Parthenon sculptures were painted, and microscopic traces of that paint are still on them.¹

Some of the rest was removed by restorers who were trying to return ancient statues to a whiteness they assumed was original.¹

The traces were found by a study published in 2023 and led by Giovanni Verri of the Art Institute of Chicago, using an imaging technique he developed.¹ Visible-induced luminescence imaging detects microscopic amounts of Egyptian blue, a manufactured pigment of calcium, copper and silicon that was virtually the only blue used in Greece and Rome.¹ Researchers from King's College London, the British Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago found Egyptian blue, white and purple on the sculptures.¹ The purple was not the costly shellfish dye of the ancient Mediterranean.¹

A statuette of Artemis found at Pompeii in 1760 still carries substantial original paint.³ Analysis published in 2011 identified a white ground of kaolin and white lead on the garments, red on the sleeves, yellow ochre in the hair, and both Egyptian blue and madder.³

A passage by the eighteenth-century scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann is often cited as proof that he admired white marble.³ The 2011 Winckelmann-Museum exhibition catalogue that reported the Artemis analysis argued that this remark of 1764, that colour contributes to beauty but is not beauty itself, has been misread.³ Oliver Primavesi read the passage as being about bodies in general, contrasting white with black rather than with colour.³ The edition of 1776, completed by Friedrich Justus Riedel after Winckelmann's death in 1768, kept opinions that he had already abandoned, which added to the confusion.³

Museums now show what the colour may have looked like.² From July 2022 to March 2023 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection in Frankfurt, presented Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color.² Its reconstructions, by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, were 3D-printed and painted with natural pigments in egg tempera.² The Met also reported new discoveries of surviving colour on objects in its own collection.²

On this evidence, the bare white stone that came to stand for classical taste is what remained once the paint had gone.