By Kasia Weglowska, Conservator: Stone, Wall Paintings and Mosaics | 23 May 2018 Conservator Kasia Weglowska takes a closer look at ancient colour recently discovered on the Parthenon sculptures, some of which feature in our current Rodin exhibition. Since January...
By Philip Chrysopoulos | April 6, 2022 Reconstruction of the pediment sculpture at the Temple of Aphaia on Aegina. Credit: Public Domain It is nearly impossible to imagine the sparkling white sculptures of ancient Greece painted in a variety of bright colors....
BY ANIKA BURGESS FEBRUARY | 14, 2018 And why most of us grew up believing classical sculpture is white. Left, the Trojan archer from the 5th-century BC Aphaia Temple in Greece, and right, a reconstruction of how it would have looked. ALL IMAGES: COURTESY OF THE FINE...
Sarah BondFormer Contributor historian, digital humanist and baseball fan | Apr 27, 2017 Although we often romanticize the bare marble of ancient sculpture today, most of these specimens were in fact painted in bright shades of blue, red, yellow, brown and many...
By Margaret Talbot | October 22, 2018 Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction. Researchers demonstrate the process of applying color to the Treu Head,...
Alison Abbott | 15 June 2009 Pristine white marbles were once a riot of colour. Researchers have confirmed that the sculptures on the triangular gables of the Parthenon temple in Athens were originally brightly painted. Conservation scientists at the British Museum in...
By Esther Inglis-Arkell | PublishedAugust 20, 2010 Original Greek statues were brightly painted, but after thousands of years, those paints have worn away. Find out how shining a light on the statues can be all that's required to see them as they were thousands of...
Introduction Under the influence of the Ancient Greek views of art, artists of the Renaissance saw the key to truth and beauty in the past. Renaissance artists studied the sculptures and monuments of Greece and Rome and emulated them in their own work, ie they...
By Natalie Haynes - 22nd January 2018 When the Victorian painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema first showed his work, Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, there must have been a pleasing circularity in play: a painter proudly revealing his new painting...
By Margherita Cole on April 17, 2020 Color restoration of a Trojan archer from the Temple of Aphaia, Aegina. (Photo: Marsyas via Wikimedia Commons [CC-BY-SA-2.5]) Marble sculpture is a cornerstone of art history. The ancient Greeks left a legacy of transformative...