That Classic White Sculpture Once Had Color
L - Augustus of Prima Porta is a 2.04m high marble statue of Augustus Caesar
"The aesthetic ideal of the Greeks was mimesis: the imitation of life. And it was color that brought their statues to life."
The art of the ancient Greeks and Romans is called classical art. This name is used also to describe later periods in which artists looked for their inspiration to this ancient style. The Romans learned sculpture and painting largely from the Greeks and helped to transmit Greek art to later ages. Classical art owes its lasting influence to its simplicity and reasonableness, its humanity, and its sheer beauty.
The first and greatest period of classical art began in Greece
They had learned to represent the human form naturally and easily, in action or at rest. They were interested chiefly in portraying gods, however. They thought of their gods as people, but grander and more beautiful than any human being.
They tried, therefore, to portray ideal beauty rather than any particular person. Their best sculptures achieved almost godlike perfection in their calm, ordered beauty.
The Greeks had plenty of beautiful marble and used it freely for temples as well as for their sculpture. They were not satisfied with its cold whiteness, however, and painted both their statues and their buildings.
Some statues have been found with their bright colors still preserved, but most of them lost their paint through weathering.
The works of the great Greek painters have disappeared completely, and we know only what ancient writers tell us about them.
Parrhasius, Zeuxis, and Apelles, the great painters of the 4th century BC, were famous as colorists. Polygnotus, in the 5th century, was renowned as a draftsman.
Fortunately we have many examples of Greek vases. Some were preserved in tombs; others were uncovered by archaeologists in other sites.
The beautiful decorations on these vases give us some idea of Greek painting.
They are examples of the wonderful feeling for form and line that made the Greeks supreme in the field of sculpture.
By the 8th century BC the Greeks had become a seafaring people and began to visit other lands. In
For artists of the Renaissance, the key to truth and beauty lay in the past. Renaissance artists assiduously studied the sculptures and monuments of Greece and Rome
If those 15th and 16th century artists had looked more closely, however, they might have found something that would have changed their vision of ancient art and had a profound effect on their own practice. That element was COLOR. 
We now know that the unblemished white surface of Michelangelo’s “David”
or Bernini’s “St. Teresa in Ecstasy” would have been considered unfinished according to classical standards.
