Elgin's Marbles Were Blue?
The air around the Elgin Marbles has turned blue many a time - but few would've pictured any of the magnificent sculptures the same colour. Yet this is exactly what a physicist at the British Museum claims to have discovered today. Giovanni Verri claims that by using red light he has found traces of an ancient hue, known as Egyptian Blue, painted on many of the priceless pieces. In fact, Verri says that 17 of the 56 marbles have revealed traces of the pigment, which was first used in Egypt and Mesopotamia as early as 2,500 BC.
The colour certainly adds a bit more depth to some of the scenes depicted on the famous friezes. For example, Verri found the colour on the sea from which Helios, the sun god, rises in his chariot on the eastern pediment. On the same pediment Verri also found blue on the robe of the goddess Dione. His work proves what many historians and archaeologists have long argued - that famous landmarks such as the Parthenon were not puritanically whitewashed, but instead decorated in a wild range of colours. "This study provides the first scientific evidence of painted color on the sculptures from the Parthenon," a jubilant Verri told Discovery News.
Image by Jacqueline Poggi.
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It's great news to see this confirmed. Ever since I was young, I imagined the Egyptian, Roman, ... temples to be - although quite impressive - boring white/beige stones, as that is how they were photographed. Only after visiting the 'Science' exhibition at the British Museum - yes, orginally inted for kids, don't remind me - I realized most of them must have been coloured. (Quit a good explanation there about how they figure out which colours go where, although I believe the above technique wasn't mentioned.) I can only imagine to one day see (virtual) recreations of how all of them should have looked during their ages of splendor. =)
I saw an exhibition about this at the Arthur Sackler museum in Boston last year - they had life-sized models of classical statues painted as they might have been originally, with vivid blues, tawny reds and rich golden yellows. The reconstructions were on loan from museums in Munich - I don't know if the exhibition travelled anywhere after it ended in Boston, or maybe the coloured statues went home to Germany. They were pretty stunning I have to say, but I've grown to like the more familiar ghostly white marbles that we see in museums today...
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