The well to do wore inexpensive colors and the extremely wealthy wore royal colors.
Marble statues color.
Why are noses missing from so many egyptian statues.
The dress of the cambridge copy is painted.
It is because of this lack of knowledge that renaissance sculptors intent on copying greek and roman forms carved their statues in unpainted white marble.
Most of them had lost their original paint after centuries of exposure to the elements.
At the time he was a graduate student at new york.
Not so to the greeks who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too.
While to our modern eye the bright colors of greek and roman statues scream tacky to the ancients who painted them it was expensive back in the day slaves wore rough cloth like undyed and unbleached icky tan colors.
As far as they knew unpainted white marble was precisely the way their ancient forebearers had sculpted.
To us classical antiquity means white marble.
The myth of the white marble started during the renaissance when we first began unearthing ancient statues.