The New York City Metropolitan Museum of Art has a fantastic exhibition on the color of Ancient Greek statues right now. When we look at the statues of the Ancient Mediterranean today, we are familiar with the unadorned stone or bronze, like the sphinx from about 530 BCE featured here. However, a team of art historians has managed to use advanced spectrum chromatography to detect some of the patterns and colors that originally decorated several statues. You can see on the second slide what the sphinx looked like long ago. The third image has the tall funeral stelle (pillar) that the sphinx statue topped, with a modern recreation in place of the original.
