20 Clues Ancient Greek Statues Were Never Meant To Be Just White

Even in the Aegean Cyclades islands, long before Classical Greece, sculptors chiseled out abstract marble female figures, called Cycladic idols, some about 4,700 years old. And they painted red stripes of cinnabar across the face and blue azurite around the eyes and hair. Researchers studying the idols noticed faint raised patches on the surface of the stone, called paint ghosts, where the pigment had protected the marble from weathering. So it’s likely that the blank white look is a result of weathering, not design.

About 525 BCE, the islanders of Siphnos constructed a grand marble dedicatory hall, the Siphnian Treasury, at the sanctuary of Apollo in Delphi, Greece. When French archaeologists unearthed the site in 1893, they discovered that the Siphnian reliefs, depicting gods wrestling giants, were still coated with their original paint. Deep Egyptian blue was applied to the background to make the light-toned figures pop against the dark ground, and red was used for weapons and to identify each god by name. This was not mere embellishment. Color was part of the information.

The most famous sculpture in 5th-century BCE Athens was the towering statue of the goddess Athena, which the city’s greatest sculptor, Phidias, built for the Parthenon. The material was not marble, but wood covered with about 1,100 kilograms of gold plates and polished ivory. A still larger image of Zeus, built by Phidias at Olympia, was also constructed from gold and ivory. They were the most holy pictures in Greek religion, and plain stone was never the objective. Opulent color and precious materials were.

The bronze Charioteer of Delphi, unearthed at Delphi, Greece in 1896, dates from the early 400s BCE and would have been bright gold in its original form, rather than dark green as the majority of ancient bronzes look now. The eyes were made of glass paste, and the lips and nipples had been colored by the application of copper, while the teeth and headband were silver. The green we expect to see on old bronze is actually the product of modern oxidation after centuries spent underground.

The renowned sculptor Praxiteles, who worked in Athens in the 4th century BCE, thought that his works weren’t finished just because they’d been carved from marble. Rather, he passed them along to a brilliant Athenian painter called Nicias, who specialized in the art of circumlitio, the application of color and shading to the marble surface to give flesh its subtle shades of life, and to make garments flow more realistically. According to the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, when Praxiteles was asked which of his works he preferred, he said: “Those to which Nicias has set his hand.”

The ancient Athenian playwright Euripides staged his play Helen in 412 BCE. In it, Helen of Troy, the famous beauty of Greek legend, curses her own looks, wishing she could lose her beauty the way color is wiped off a statue. Such an insult only lands if Helen’s audience already imagined sculptures with color on them. To them, a colorless marble statue wasn’t the finished artwork they expected to see.

The Roman writers Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder also mention a Greek polishing process called ganosis in which artisans would brush a mixture of hot beeswax and olive oil over their painted marble, buffing it with linen rags until it emitted a faint, skin-like sheen. They also used another technique, encaustic painting, in which pigment was mixed into hot wax to apply the color itself. Both techniques gave marble its natural luster rather than what you’d expect from a flat cartoon.

A sanctuary would have had its own ganōtai, maintenance men whose business it was to wash, re-wax, and re-paint the outdoor statues that were constantly being pummeled by the sun and blackened by the soot of lamps. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder mentions the ganōtai, and temple budget records from the island of Delos list separate payments, including one line just for buying pigments. Repainting wasn’t a special occasion. It was just part of routine maintenance, the same as any other repair.

Lucian of Samosata, a Greek satirist writing in the second century CE (between 160 and 180), produced a short dialogue that imagined the perfect woman, composed piece by piece from famous statues. When it came to finishing her, he imagined that the painters Nicias and Euphranor, both named elsewhere among the ancient sources as painters of statues, colored her hair and applied a blush of paint over her marble cheek. Five centuries after the sculptor Praxiteles’ time, bare marble still counted as incomplete.

German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, now regarded as the father of modern art history, published his History of Ancient Art in 1764 and announced that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well.” He developed the theory after examining a collection of Roman marble copies in Italy, where the paint had long since disappeared. He had already seen the remnants of pigment from the excavations at Herculaneum and assumed they were un-Greek anomalies. His ideas were to have a profound effect on the aesthetics of the West for the next century.

In 1811, while the architects Charles Robert Cockerell and Carl Haller von Hallerstein were excavating the Temple of Aphaia on the Greek island of Aegina, they unearthed a marble pediment figure of what appeared to be the Trojan prince Paris, from about 500 BCE. He was clothed in a close-fitting suit decorated in diamonds of bright red, blue, and yellow. Fewer than 50 years after Winckelmann’s theory was published, Europe already possessed a statue that contradicted it.

French archaeologist Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, for his part, excavated not a single statue. But in 1814 he published a reconstruction of Phidias’s long-lost gold-and-ivory Statue of Zeus at Olympia based solely on ancient written descriptions. De Quincy’s reconstruction demonstrated that classical sculpture commonly combined gold, ivory, colored stone, and paint. Far from being monochromatic, the appearance of statues such as Zeus challenged the plain white aesthetic becoming popular at the time.

The Grave Stele of Aristion is a marble relief sculpture made in approximately 510 BCE by Aristokles. The stone, which depicts a hoplite (armored Greek infantryman) named Aristion, was unearthed in 1839 in Velanideza, Attica, Greece. When it was excavated, there were traces of bright red pigment in the background, blue paint along the edges of his helmet, and stars on his armor. A personal gravestone received all this lavish decoration.

When Persian armies invaded Athens in 480 BCE, they toppled many of the statues that dotted the Acropolis hilltop. After the Persians left, the Athenians collected the statues’ broken pieces and entombed them in sealed pits to make way for reconstruction. That pile of statues and stone fragments, known as the Perserschutt, or Persian debris, was simply the rubble of a demolished city. By sealing that rubble away so soon after the statues were painted, however, the Athenians inadvertently preserved their vivid colors for more than two millennia.

The Greek archaeologist Panagiotis Kavvadias excavated pits on the Acropolis where statues damaged in the Persian sack of Athens had been buried, and found the Peplos Kore, a marble sculpture of a girl made in about 530 BCE. She had been entombed just after the Persian sack, and was retrieved with traces of green, red, and blue pigment still on her hair, her eyes, and on the edges of her clothes. Today, some scholars believe that the peplos’ pattern identifies her as a goddess, rather than just a girl.

This Archaic marble figure of Kore 675, called the Chiotissa (around 520 BCE), also came from the Acropolis pit graves, where damaged statues were buried after the Persian invasion. She retains traces of red and blue geometric-patterned paint on her garment, and her head bears 17 drill-holes that once held a removable, gilt-metal crown. In fact, painted ornament and gold adornment were not competing traditions. The Greeks applied both to the same figure.

Discovered in Rome and studied by the German archaeologist Georg Treu, the Treu Head is a marble goddess head from the 2nd century CE that still bears traces of yellow ochre underneath, presumably intended to emulate golden hair, as well as vivid red paint on the lips. The Romans still painted their statues’ hair and skin to look like that of living humans, centuries after the Archaic statues of Greece were created.

In 1887, the archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey discovered a marble sarcophagus among the royal tombs of Sidon, in present-day Lebanon, dating from around 320 BCE. Its reliefs depict Alexander the Great battling Persian soldiers, who are still dressed in their traditional attire of purple tunics, yellow capes, and blue shields. Despite its title, it is highly unlikely that the Alexander Sarcophagus was commissioned by Alexander, who was interred in Egypt. Instead, it is thought to have been intended for a Sidonian ruler named Abdalonymus, installed on his throne by Alexander.

The archaeologist Osman Hamdi Bey’s excavations in Sidon in 1887 also revealed another marble sarcophagus, the Mourning Women Sarcophagus, which dates from approximately 350 BCE. It shows 18 women weeping between temple columns. According to excavation reports, delicate blue and yellow pigments were still visible on some of the marble, as well as subtle paint layers applied to the skin. But not all painted statues were designed for ostentation. Some express subtle grief.

By the 1880s, proof of painted statues had been piling up for decades. Yet people still visualized naked white marble. The German archaeologist Georg Treu concluded that the physical evidence needed reinforcement. He held an exhibition in Berlin’s National Gallery in late 1885, featuring over 300 painted plaster casts of ancient statues next to modern colored works. The show created a furor in European art circles. Nevertheless, people continued to worship blank white marble well into the 20th century.

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