Michelangelo and his contemporaries would have been shocked too. The artists of the Renaissance were heavily influenced by Greek and Roman art, and Michelangelo was even present at the excavation of Laocoon, a masterpiece of Roman statuary that now has pride of place at the Vatican. By the 16th century any trace of colour was long gone, and the artists who found inspiration in ancient artworks would have assumed, as we once did, that these statues were always white. If Michelangelo had known that they were originally coloured, this knowledge may well have transformed his own art, and in turn changed the “classical aesthetic” that dominated Western art ever since.