Perhaps one day you will go on vacation to Italy, maybe Rome.

And on a weekend you might go a little bit outside of Rome with a shovel and start digging.

And if you're very, very lucky, you might unearth, unmarble sculpture, a bust, something

priceless.

But you will look at it and quickly come to the conclusion that something is very wrong.

Because the sculpture won't be bright white marble, the sculpture will be painted.

Hey, it's Aurove and this is a special archive episode of a Kimbo.

Margaret Talbot in a great article in the New Yorker, Chronicles, Chromophobia, the fear

that historically some people have had of paint of color and the history of why we think

that Greek and Roman sculptures, the ones that are coming to mind when you think of Greek

and Roman sculptures, should be white.

Because they weren't white, they were painted, and yet we think they should be white.

She quotes art historian Fabio Barry, who's now at Stanford, who's complaining that a

recreation of some sculptures that he saw of the Emperor Augustus at the Vatican Museum

quote, look like a cross-dresser trying to hail a taxi.

But it's not just recently that people have spoken up because it turns out it's not

just recently that colored statues have been turning up.

For over a hundred years, experts in the art world have known that marble sculptures from

Greek and Rome were painted and yet despite all the evidence, mostly they're displayed

in their original white.

One reason is that when you look at these painted sculptures and you can see some pictures

at achimbo.link if you click the show notes, is that they look wrong?

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