Though the Parthenon marbles were admired for centuries for their stark white brilliance, it has long been known that the sculptures were originally brightly painted, before millennia of weathering, cannon bombardment, rough handling and overenthusiastic cleaning scoured them clean.
Evidence for the paintwork has been highly elusive, however, leading their former curator at the British Museum to confess that, after years of hunting in vain for traces of pigment, he had sometimes doubted they were painted at all.
A new examination of the sculptures held by the British Museum, using innovative scanning techniques, has revealed dramatic evidence of a “wealth of surviving paint”. What it suggests, according to the researchers, is that the painting of the marbles was “a more elaborate undertaking than was ever imagined” – potentially as intricate and subtle as their carving.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Evidence for the paintwork has been highly elusive, however, leading their former curator at the British Museum to confess that, after years of hunting in vain for traces of pigment, he had sometimes doubted they were painted at all.
A new examination of the sculptures held by the British Museum, using innovative scanning techniques, has revealed dramatic evidence of a “wealth of surviving paint”.
Rather than having been scoured of all traces of pigment, they say, the Parthenon sculptures may be “the best-preserved examples of surviving polychromy of mid-fifth-century BC Athens”.
It is used to pick out the belt of the goddess Iris, on the snake-like legs of another figure, Kekrops, and to highlight the crest of the waves from which Helios, the god of the sun, is rising in his chariot.
Most strikingly, Verri and his team detected remarkable details from the statue of Dione, who is shown reclining on fabric-draped rocks with her daughter Aphrodite.
The researchers also used other scanning technology to examine the way the statues were carved, discovering that the sculptors used subtly different techniques to represent different fabrics of the Olympian gods’ and goddesses’ gowns, with crisp tooling for linen and smoother work for wool, while skin was highly polished.
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