Figure 25 Marble statue of a young woman (“kore”); height 0.55 m, ca. 520 BC. Athens, Acropolis
Museum, no. 675.
Source: © 2015 Marie Mauzy / Scala, Florence.
We are not used to seeing stone sculpture brightly painted, just as we are not used to thinking of Greek
temples as constructed of anything other than gleaming white marble. But ancient Greek buildings and
statues were regularly elaborately colored. Almost all the marble sculpture and marble architecture,
however, that survives from antiquity has been stripped of its original paint by the action of sun and time
and moisture. This accident of history has distorted our perception of Greek art and architecture to the
point that we find aesthetically acceptable ancient sculpture and ancient buildings that are the pure and
natural color of naked stone. Artists and architects of more recent times who work in a classicizing
tradition – Bernini, say, or Rodin or the designers of countless public buildings and monuments in Western
capitals – have created “classical” masterpieces of pure white marble. This, in turn, confirms our
perception and encourages us to condemn as gaudy those historically accurate reconstructions that restore
the bright colors with which ancient Greek statues and buildings were originally painted. Our historical
awareness makes us want to restore these colors but our aesthetic sense inhibits us. Of course, our
aesthetic sense is in a state of perpetual change and a time may some day come when we will find more
attractive the brightly colored temples and sculptures that we know the Greeks produced than the washed-
out monuments imitated by Michelangelo and the architect of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.