This includes the 1st century a d.
White marble statues used to be colorful.
Original statue in white marble 1 st century ad.
Cc by sa 3 0 by ryan stone.
Italy is one of the leading marble sourcing and quarrying country in the world and exports these marble types globally.
While the image of spotless marble adonises and aphrodites are prevalent in today s culture back then the situation was very different some appear as colorful as circus clowns.
Marble is commonly used for sculpture and as a building material.
The myth of the white marble started during the renaissance when we first began unearthing ancient statues.
Ancient greece and rome were really colorful we learn.
Finding out about this is pretty great but i m so used to white marbled statues it just doesn t seem right to see them colored.
To us classical antiquity means white marble.
This marble is sourced from carrara in italy.
The temples that housed them were in color also.
I have seen so many exhibitions of greek and roman statues but i never never never even imagined any old sculpture being in color.
Augustus of prima porta the famous figure of the emperor standing triumphantly with one hand raised.
The ancients loved color.
The arabescato marble is an off white or white colored marble category that usually displays a dark brown or black veining design.
Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals most commonly calcite or dolomite marble is typically not foliated although there are exceptions in geology the term marble refers to metamorphosed limestone but its use in stonemasonry more broadly encompasses unmetamorphosed limestone.
Rather than left as blank white marble the statue would have had bronzed skin brown hair and a fire engine red toga.
Painted replica of augustus of prima porta statue with pigments reconstructed for the tarraco viva 2014 festival cc by sa 3 0.
Not so to the greeks who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too.
This statue was originally painted.
At the time he was a graduate student at new york university s institute of fine arts and like most people he thought of greek and roman statues as objects of pure white marble.
But in reality for much of human existence colored sculpture was the rule and the norm.
The white marble or the monochromatic depiction of three dimensional form has been the rule and the norm for nearly 700 years.