There is a huge literature on the coloring of ancient
statues. Coloring took many forms (see the 'article' I sent to Joe for
Forvm), some of which have always been known to everyone who went beyond tourist guidebooks and encyclopedias. The most richly colored, like that Madonna in Seville, incorporated semi-precious stones and enamels or glass-paste, and these were usually cult
statues protected in their temples. The
Zeus at Olympia and the
Athena Parthenos were not mainly white; they
had a lot of gold (not just gilding) and her
shield had inlaid metals. Under the Empire, for
Rome (as a huge exhibit in
Rome showed a couple of years ago) assorted colored marble was used not only in the
architecture but in the
sculpture that was
part of its embellishment. As for
statues (I trust you know the Riace warriors with their inlaid eyes, their silver teeth, their copper lips and aureoles around the nipples, which were typical) when bronze and inlays were not affordable or appropriate, depending on the installation, they did often, but not always, add color in paint. There are substantial traces of paint on a
head of a Doryphoros found at
Corinth. Ultraviolet light is useful in picking up faint traces of paint, too. Blackish traces, oxidized, can be analysed spectroscopically as was done more than half a century ago for the
Kore statues from the
Athens Acropolis; one of the earliest Kouroi (its
head is in the National Archaeological Museum) from the Kerameikos cemetery
still has traced of black or brown in its hair and plain
red on its headband. The pure white
statues that inspired neo-Classical
sculpture were, alas, acid cleaned and, some of them, scraped: an example is the
Apollo Belvedere.
That said, it is important to understand that though marble
statues often were painted, they usually were not painted all over; features and
border patterns and the like were painted. There is a
portrait head of
Caligula in Copenhagen with clear traces of eye color and eyelashes
still preserved. Occasionally, a statue may have been fully painted, probably to make it look more like a precious-materials cult image, but usually the beauty of
fine marble was realized and respected: hair, features, headbands, sandals, shields, and the like were regarded as color enough. There is
good laboratory evidence for this variety of approaches.
That is about as much as I can put in a
Forvm thread, but it is very important that we all understand that it is not a question of statuary being always colored or always not colored, or always partly colored. There was great variability in practice and taste, from place to place and depending on what kind of a statue it was.
Patricia LawrenceSee the monograph by Alain Pasquier on the
Venus di Milo. I should take it for granted that her hair and features were colored and possibly the drapery, but not, I think the flesh.
Praxiteles in the middle of the 4th c. BCE specified that the painter Nikias,
his friend, alone was capable of adding color to
his marble
statues subtly enough. That would apply to the Aphrodite of
Knidos herself, and it would include a touch of shell
pink in her ears, for example, and need I mention her nipples? They may, also, have routinely
toned the surfaces that were not colored, meaning the rest of her, with beeswax. Well, I have to stop. As I say, there's a huge bibliography on this. And don't believe what you read in encyclopedias or worse until you've done some serious research.