Augustus of Prima Porta. Created circa 22 BC, rediscovered in 1863.
Colours reconstructed from pigment traces.
It is an often ignored fact that the
classical statues of Rome and Greece were originally painted, often
using quite striking colours. This reality however jars so much with
our own aesthetics and expectations about classical sculpture - as informed through its rediscovery in the Renaissance - that we
continue to prefer to look at them unadorned. But the world of
antiquity was never just marble white and as we can see from their vividly coloured paintings,
the Romans knew a great deal about pigment
making
and traces of these
paints can been still seen on the statues under
microscopic examination.
