The colours that adorned the white marble included a particularly mysterious purple.
Paint often does not survive on archaeological finds, particularly in cases such as the Parthenon sculptures that date back to between 447 and 438 BCE and were continuously exposed to the environment, said lead study author Dr Giovanni Verri, a conservation scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago who previously was a fellow at the British Museum.Sculptures in Athen's famous Parthenon were probably painted, a new study says.
. The bright blue was highly valued for its rarity and was commonly saved for royalty or depictions of gods and goddesses. The researchers also detected a purple colour that was not found through the imaging process but by the human eye, Verri said. The hue, which they named "Parthenon purple," is particularly unique, the study said, because researchers found that it was not made using shellfish — the common ancient Mediterranean recipe.
"This recent study gives more proof that colourful decoration was common in ancient Greek art," said Michael Cosmopoulos, a professor of archaeology and Greek studies at the University of Missouri–St Louis, via email. He was not involved in the study.Many ancient Greek sculptures likely lost their colourful paint to the passage of time.
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