How actually Ancient Greek statues and temples looked?

Ancient Greeks weren’t such great admirers of a whiteness of marble as it seems to us. They painted the statues, bas-reliefs and temples, covered them with patterns, traced to people, gods and heroes of an eye. As actually Ancient Greece looked, now it is possible to see only in ultraviolet.

We privylkl to see the Greek statues white, painted only in marble shades. Same there are in our imagination Greek temples with columns. However many remember that actually Greeks weren’t big fans of a monochromaticism neither to a sculpture, nor in architecture. They painted the statues in bright colors, drew patterns on clothes, emphasized with features paints.

Buildings decorated too: multi-colored patterns, geometrical and flower. It appears, these patterns can still be seen and even to reconstruct.

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We privylkl to see the Greek statues white, painted only in marble shades. Same there are in our imagination Greek temples with columns. However many remember that actually Greeks weren’t big fans of a monochromaticism neither to a sculpture, nor in architecture. They painted the statues in bright colors, drew patterns on clothes, emphasized with features paints.

Buildings decorated too: multi-colored patterns, geometrical and flower. It appears, these patterns can still be seen and even to reconstruct.

The German archeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann directs to antique statues and fragments of architectural jewelry light the ultrafioletyovykh of lamps, and outlines of patterns which once covered sculptures and temples become visible to him. Then he recreates ornaments and drawings: with his help we can see statues approximately as their Greeks saw.

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Certainly, Brinkmann can’t be confident in how to arrange colors — only outlines of drawings, without instructions on what paint the artist has used have remained. However the archeologist tries to use only those dyes which could be received in Greece. It Zelenyypoluchatsya from pounded malachite, blue — from azurite mineral, yellow of natural compounds of arsenic, red — cinnabar, black of a burned bone and wine.

To a regret, those who tried to imitate antiquity in Renaissance later had no technology which would allow to see patterns on them. Therefore the architecture of classicism believing itself the successor of antiquity has been deprived of cheerful patterns and drawings, keeping a pure “antique” whiteness.

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