Polychromy

Polychromy is the use of multiple colors on a work of art or architectural surface. It can involve painted, dyed, inlaid, or naturally colored materials.

Pigment: A colored material that gives paint or another medium its hue by absorbing and reflecting selected wavelengths of light. Pigments supply color in many painted forms of polychromy.
Painted Greek sculpture: Ancient Greek sculpture whose surfaces were painted with pigments and sometimes gilded. It demonstrates that Greek sculpture was often more colorful than surviving marble suggests.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann: An eighteenth-century German art historian whose writings helped establish the study of ancient Greek art. His influential ideal of white Greek sculpture helped shape later expectations about antiquity.
White marble myth: The mistaken belief that ancient Greek and Roman sculpture was originally unpainted white marble. Polychromy evidence directly contradicts this enduring image of classical art.
Fresco: A mural-painting technique in which pigments are applied to wet plaster and become embedded as it dries. Fresco binds color into plaster rather than leaving it only on the surface.
Terracotta Army: A collection of life-size terracotta figures buried with China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in the third century BCE. The figures originally carried elaborate paint that largely vanished after excavation.
Quatremère de Quincy: A French archaeologist and theorist who argued that ancient Greek sculpture and architecture had been polychrome. His early defense of ancient color challenged the prestige of imagined white marble.
Museum conservation: The care of museum collections through preventive measures, research, and treatment. Decisions about cleaning or displaying color traces can alter how polychrome works appear.
Encaustic painting: A painting technique that uses heated wax as a binder for pigments. Wax-bound pigments create a distinct durable surface for multicolored decoration.
Parthenon: A fifth-century BCE temple on the Athenian Acropolis dedicated to Athena. Its sculptural and architectural surfaces included painted details and color.

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