This tied into paragone, the popular Renaissance debate that pitted painting and sculpture against each other. While it was never settled, art lovers, including Leonardo da Vinci, agreed that the two media should remain separate—paint had no place on marble. “The power and virtue of the sculptor lie in the effects of the chisel,” asserted artist and collector Vincenzo Borghini in 1584. “If some clumsy oaf in this field uses colors, it denies the very nature of that art.”

After trade and travel brought these concepts out of Italy, monochromy became Europe’s sculptural standard, even in religious contexts. Though some degree of color was necessary in devotional statues (to better depict the subject’s suffering), by the 17th century, sculptors from Spain to Germany were coloring Catholic characters with palettes far more limited than before, thereby bringing them closer to the Classical ideal. (Religious statues also seem to have harnessed the ancient ideal on a more formal level, possibly hinting that these biblical figures were modeled on specific secular compositions from antiquity.)

The intellectual German elite demonstrated a particular fondness for the unpainted marble statue, as well, including the 19th-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, whose famous writings on aesthetics often referenced the white ancient marble. Hegel’s own views were shaped by those of art historian Johann Winckelmann, who influenced both artistic practices and popular tastes of 18th-century Germany and beyond with his consistent praise for ancient Greek sculpture, which he viewed as the pinnacle of beauty.

Winckelmann based his theories of unpainted marble’s aesthetic superiority on what he considered physical proof. As he wrote in 1764, “White is the color that reflects the most rays of light, and thus is most easily perceived.” Because of this, he believed, “a beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is.” Though seemingly based in science, this problematic statement is mostly a reflection of how white Europeans generally viewed themselves versus people of color—and an early indication of the ancient white ideal’s inherent racism.

Though Winckelmann and other advocates of unpainted sculpture were generally ignorant of these connotations, they were impossible to ignore after the white marble ideal was embraced by Adolf Hitler, who only allowed Classical-inspired art into Nazi Germany. Contemporary white supremacist groups like Identity Evropa—which uses images of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures in its propaganda—have since taken a nod from Hitler. (The racist resonances that the ancient white marble carries for conservatives were made especially clear last June, when several members of the alt-right viciously harassed a classical history professor after she published an essay on the ancient world’s actual preference for colored sculpture.)