How the Ancient World Used Color
Were ancient Greece and Rome filled with dignified white marble statuary? Not a chance. Though we still think of them in terms of white marble sparkling under a hot Mediterranean sun, a new exhibition shows at least one Greco-Roman lady as they really were -- in technicolor. Under Stanford sophomore Ivy Nguyen's skillful watch in the Cantor Arts Center lab, long-dead colors on marble have indeed come alive after two millennia. A team there discovered minute traces of pigments that originally covered the original sculpture but were washed away by the millennia. The team used 3D rapid prototypic technology to create replicas of the artwork, which is painted to look as the sculpture did in ancient times.
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