It’s particularly ironic because of how important color actually was to the Greeks and Romans, who added it to sculptures in an effort to capture their subjects’ dynamic spirits, embellishing them not only with paint, but also gold, silver, and inlays of stones and gems. (They also used naturally colored marble, such as the green cipollino verde, from which they carved figures or architectural details.)

Vibrantly painted sculpture even showed up in frescoes, which occasionally depicted 2D renderings of unnaturally tinted stone. Take the multiple bright-red Corinthian columns seen on the walls of a bedroom displayed within the Met’s Greek and Roman wing, or a Pompeiian fresco from the 1st century C.E., which shows a sculpted warrior sporting a bronze hat and red-tinted drapery while standing atop a plinth.

There’s also written proof of the Classical world’s adoration of saturated sculpture. In Euripides’s 412 B.C.E. tragedy Helen of Troy, the titular queen hints toward the Greeks’ dislike of marble that wasn’t colored: “If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect…the way you would wipe color off a statue.” Roman writers Vitruvius and Pliny the Elder detailed the process ancient sculptors followed to colorize their creations. Pigments were pulled from minerals and mixed with egg yolk or beeswax, and artists either applied the resulting paint directly to marble, or atop a priming layer made from stucco. To make its colors more vibrant, many rubbed cloth-wrapped candles onto their painted works as a finishing polish.

But few of these hues survived after the Roman Empire began collapsing around the 4th century, and its citizens began securing their sculpted masterpieces underground. These works remained remarkably preserved for nearly a millennium and a half, but their colors mostly eroded due to dirt buildup and oxidation; in some cases, the hues faded from exposure to air and light upon being excavated.

Some may have even had their colors purposely erased, such as a 2nd-century Roman copy of a statue by Polykleitos. This marble rendering of the Greek god Hermes—which is currently part of the Met Breuer exhibition “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body,” on view through July 22nd—had “traces of original paint [that] were likely cleaned off to give the piece the aesthetic purity…demanded by [its] audience,” as stated by its wall text.