This is something which really got me thinking. All that white marble really has changed the way we think about the past. The lack of colour I always thought was a cost and material thing but to know it was originally there but removed is … lets say almost sinister?
Seeing all that white marble does have an effect on the way we see the past.
I was just outside the Parthenon in Athens, surrounded by American Tourists. Upon looking at a sign showing how they were taking it all apart and putting it back together in the right order, one of the Southern women shouts out “ooh, it used to be coloured!” Which, of course, it was, but not in the way the woman thought.
This was the same people who wondered out loud why the Ancient Athenians had used a swastika motif “after what Hitler did”. I never realised that when people say Americans have no sense of time, what they meant was chronology.
Its so strange looking back at all those white statutes, while I’m museums. Why white and why zero colour? Its not like they will be touched anyway