Were ancient Greek statues really white?

No. Greek and Roman statues were painted, often in vivid colours. Sometimes only the clothes and hair were coloured and the skin was left the colour of the stone, but many sculptures were painted all over. The Greeks took this for granted: in Euripides' play Helen, the heroine wishes she could shed her beauty "the way you would wipe color off a statue", as if bare stone meant a ruined statue.

So why do we picture them white? Time did most of the work. By the time Europeans rediscovered ancient ruins, the paint had largely weathered away, and what remained often faded once statues were dug up and exposed to light and air. Some restorers even scrubbed pigment off. Renaissance artists took the bare stone at face value, and Michelangelo left most of his own statues unpainted. In the 18th century the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann declared that "the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well", and his view stuck for centuries, feeding the white marble of neoclassicism.

Today archaeologists such as Vinzenz Brinkmann hunt for the lost colours with raking light and ultraviolet lamps, then paint full-size copies with ancient pigments like malachite green and azurite blue. The results look startlingly bright, and some visitors call them kitsch. But as the writer André Malraux put it, "Athens was never white."