Though the Parthenon marbles were admired for centuries for their stark white brilliance, it has long been known that the sculptures were originally brightly painted, before millennia of weathering, cannon bombardment, rough handling and overenthusiastic cleaning scoured them clean.
Evidence for the paintwork has been highly elusive, however, leading their former curator at the British Museum to confess that, after years of hunting in vain for traces of pigment, he had sometimes doubted they were painted at all.
A new examination of the sculptures held by the British Museum, using innovative scanning techniques, has revealed dramatic evidence of a “wealth of surviving paint”. What it suggests, according to the researchers, is that the painting of the marbles was “a more elaborate undertaking than was ever imagined” – potentially as intricate and subtle as their carving.
The researchers found evidence suggesting that some of the sculptures were highly patterned with designs including human figures and palm leaf patterns, painted to conform with the underlying folds and texture of the marble fabric beneath.
Rather than having been scoured of all traces of pigment, they say, the Parthenon sculptures may be “the best-preserved examples of surviving polychromy of mid-fifth-century BC Athens”.
“Generally speaking, in the scholarly field, we find very, very, very small traces [of pigment], so that’s what we normally expect,” said Dr Giovanni Verri, a conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago who led the research with a team of conservators, textile historians and archaeologists from the British Museum and Kings College London.
“And so it was a wonderful revelation to find that there was more than normally found. Because nothing was really visible with the naked eye. Not even a trace of it. In that sense, it exceeded expectations.”
The study used a technique called visible-induced luminescence, a non-invasive imaging process developed by Verri, to detect tiny traces of a colour called Egyptian blue, a human-made pigment composed of calcium, copper and silicon that was widely used in antiquity.
Though invisible to the naked eye, it glows a bright white when subjected to the scanning technique. Verri and his team found traces of Egyptian blue on 11 pedimental sculptures and one figure in the frieze, used in a variety of ways.
It is used to pick out the belt of the goddess Iris, on the snake-like legs of another figure, Kekrops, and to highlight the crest of the waves from which Helios, the god of the sun, is rising in his chariot.
Most strikingly, Verri and his team detected remarkable details from the statue of Dione, who is shown reclining on fabric-draped rocks with her daughter Aphrodite. Examining the distribution of Egyptian blue in the pattern of Dione’s gown, they detected the image of a pair of human legs running, along with other images which they believe may show a hand and a foot, part of “a woven figurative design with human figures appearing and disappearing between the folds of the garment”.
They also detected the pattern of a palmette – or stylised palm leaf – a common contemporary motif.
Previously it was assumed the Parthenon figures had been painted wearing more subdued garments, said Verri, perhaps to showcase the intricacy of the carving. In fact, the polychromy may have been just as elaborate. “The technical intricacy of merging such a complex, figurative, decorative element into already extremely complex draperies … [in which] figures appear and disappear within the folds, was somewhat unexpected,” he said.
The researchers also used other scanning technology to examine the way the statues were carved, discovering that the sculptors used subtly different techniques to represent different fabrics of the Olympian gods’ and goddesses’ gowns, with crisp tooling for linen and smoother work for wool, while skin was highly polished.
Despite the remarkable new paint patterns that had been revealed, said Verri, a detailed understanding of how the artists used it remained tantalisingly out of reach. “That makes it, I believe, almost impossible to give a sense of what they really would have looked like, because we don’t know enough,” he said. “Knowing the pigments is just not enough.”
The research has been published in the journal Antiquity.
