What polychromy means
Specialists call it polychromy, from the Greek for “many colours”. It covers everything that gave a statue colour: paint on the skin, eyes, lips and hair, patterned clothes, gilding, and metal or stone inlays.
Four pieces of evidence
The first is on the stone itself. On the Peplos Kore from the Acropolis of Athens, carved around 530 BCE, the eye can still see red on the lips and in the irises of the eyes, and the hair carries a red undercoat on which a brown colour was once painted. Spectrographic analysis, which identifies pigments from the light they reflect, found that her belt was blue and green and her chiton blue, while her white peplos was decorated with rows of animals, birds and riders on red squares.
The second is history. After the Persians sacked the Acropolis in 480 BCE, the Athenians buried the damaged statues in large pits, and that burial preserved traces of colour on many of them, protected from rain and sun for more than two thousand years.
The third is the great temple. The fifty statues of the Parthenon’s pediments, carved in Pentelic marble, were originally enriched with colourful paint and metal accessories.
The fourth comes from bronze. Greek and Roman bronzeworkers often set eyes of glass or stone into the heads of their statues, inlaid teeth and fingernails with silver and lips and nipples with copper. A bronze statue, too, was a statue in several colours.
How are the colours found?
Most of the paint has gone, so researchers look for what the eye cannot see. Spectrographic analysis reads pigments that survive only as faint traces. Conservators and scientists add imaging and 3D scans of the surface, and the results can be checked against Greek vases that show artisans painting sculpture. The method is close to the way Greek painting is pieced together from scattered traces.
What do the reconstructions show, and what don’t they?
Modern copies painted in the original colours make the evidence visible, and they also show how much interpretation goes into it. The same statue can look very different. In 1975 Robert Cook painted a cast of the Peplos Kore, now in the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, and gave her a red peplos. Later research by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann for the exhibition “Gods in Color” concluded that she wears the dress of a goddess, probably Artemis, and one of their versions gives her a bow and a wreath.
The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color (July 2022 to March 2023) set fourteen full-size reconstructions by the Brinkmann team beside comparable originals in the Greek and Roman galleries. It also presented a new one of the Met’s Archaic sphinx finial, which once crowned a grave stele, built from analytical work that included 3D imaging and from art historical research. Every reconstruction is an interpretation of the evidence, and two teams can paint the same statue differently.
Were the statues meant to be white? No
The paint on the korai, the colour and metal of the Parthenon pediments and the inlays of the bronzes all point the same way. The white statues of museums are what remained after the paint wore off, and they shaped centuries of ideas about Classical art. Bright as some reconstructions look, they come closer to what the Greeks saw than the bare stone does.
Where to see it
The Acropolis Museum in Athens shows the korai with their surviving colour. The Metropolitan Museum in New York has the Megakles stele and other painted Archaic monuments; colour reconstructions can be seen at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, in the travelling “Gods in Color” exhibitions and among the casts of Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Acropolis Museum, Athens: “Statue of a Kore. The ‘Peplos Kore'” (Acr. 679); “Dedications”; “The pediments”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, exhibition and press release (2022); “The Technique of Bronze Statuary in Ancient Greece”; “Architecture in Ancient Greece”; collection record 11.185.
- Harvard Art Museums, press release for “Gods in Color”; Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, “Ex-Peploskore (Variant B)”; Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, “Peplos Kore (restored)”.
