Hidden Colors on the Parthenon Sculptures

Some remarkable results have just been published based on new studies of the Parthenon Sculptures, aka the Elgin Marbles. Up until now, attempts to find traces of paint on the sculptures have produced extremely meager results. But using a new technique called "visible-induced luminescence" it is possible to see traces of one particular pigment, Egyptian blue. Egyptian blue is calcium copper silicate (CaOCuO(SiO2)4),and I suppose it is the copper atoms and their bonds to oxygen that show up in the scan.

Besides the article, the investigators also put up a wonderful 22-minute video on YouTube that I recommend for the curious. The remarkable thing these investigators discovered was not just that the marbles were painted, which most people already believed, but something about how they were painted. Staring very hard at the patterns made by the presence or absence of Egyptian blue, they found all sorts of stuff, like running legs and the hand and foot above.

They posit that the Parthenon figures were depicted wearing elaborately woven robes with floral patterns and in particular patterns of human figures, like the robe shown in this vase painting.

A pattern seen here on Hestia's robe suggests an elaborate border

As in this example.

I am, in general, very jaded about studies that apply high-tech methods to famous works of art, especially when the findings are presented in video. The narrator goes on about great revelations and overturning old ideas, but usually the actual discoveries are blah. That's what I thought when I first read about this study, ho hum, the Parthenon marbles were painted, I already believed that. But the discoveries presented in this study are of another order entirely, and imagining those scuptures with elaborate robes showing human figures and palmette borders very much changes how I see them.