The Polychromy of Ancient Sculpture

Harvard FAS

Statues in marble and bronze count among the most prominent artworks that survived from Greek and Roman antiquity. Since the first discoveries of classical sculptures in the Renaissance, ancient statues not only served as paragons for the perfect, idealized representation of the human body, they also largely coined the conventions of the visual appearance and materiality of contemporary sculpture: the whiteness of marble and the dark surface of bronze became the standards of statuary…