Did you know that Greco-Roman art was in colors?

Hello friends of Steemit, recently I found out that the ancient Greco-Roman art was in colors and it was something that left me quite impressed, that's why I wanted to write a post about it.

For hundreds of years it was considered that the ancient Greco-Roman white and light sculptures were the canon of beauty to follow, in fact, the color was totally suppressed during the Italian Renaissance (just remember the sculptures of Michelangelo or Donatello) and artists sought to imitate that aesthetic simplicity of the classics using white marble.

Our eyes and our brain are accustomed to seeing the classical Greco-Roman art of white color, of pure marble, however originally they were not like that, they were polychrome statues and structures, full of exuberant colors, that disappeared with the passage of time without leaving a trace.

In ancient times the colors were symbols of value, for example, in his statue found in Primaporta in the villa of his wife Livia, Emperor Augustus wears a red cloak that only he could wear (as a symbol of his military authority), including there were laws about what colors each person could use when dressing depending on their social status, for example, blue and purple were reserved for the nobility.

The loss of color is mainly due to two reasons: the first because the natural pigments used in the making of the paintings were organic and secondly because most of them were outdoors, suffering from the inclemency of the weather.

Their polychromy is suspected because the sculptures found in pits in the ancient Acropolis preserved some of their colors and some ancient texts also assured this, like one by Platon in which it is stated that paint were applied to statues, especially the eyes that were the most beautiful, in order to achieve the beauty of the whole.

Thus, since 1982, an international team of scientists (archaeologists, chemists, philologists), led by Vinzenz Brinkmann, director of the Collection of Antiquities of the Munich Museum and his wife Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, has worked on various collections from places like Athens, Attica and the island of Aegina, with the purpose of being able to reconstruct the original color of the sculptures. This is done using laser equipment, ultraviolet light scans, infrared spectroscopy, microscopic examination and chemical analysis, looking for traces of pigments imperceptible to the human eye. Working for twenty years they have managed to rescue the true appearance of ancient art, showing us their original colors in molds painted by hand by Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann herself with the help of Sylvia Kellner and Kristine Siebert. The archeologists have looked for the maximum possible similarity with the original and before the doubt they have left colorless those areas where it has not could be obtain the suitable information. The figures also show replicas of their original ornaments, either in metal or or eyes with incrustations of glass and stone.

These same reconstructions have been made with temples and structures, and this is how it was identified that the Parthenon was decorated with the colors blue, red, green and gold and also the sculptures made by Phidias that are found in the pediments, metopes and friezes were multicolored. Likewise, the roof of the porch of the Erechtheion (on the Acropolis of Athens) was painted in Egyptian blue.

Science really helped to recover a hidden information for hundreds of years and although I find it hard to get used to it, I have to admit that colors add humanity to the object, they contribute with much more detail and depth, however there are those who express their overwhelming rejection and consider an aberration the reconstruction in colors, finally, I would like to read your opinions about it.