The weird crayon like coloured facsimiles we see as examples are based on historians colouring statue copies with flat colours matched to minute remnants of original paint—not artists, and especially not artists with any sort of proper clue about the intricacies of the original paintwork, being allowed to make stuff up. They extract a flake of red from the groove of a cloak, that's the 'crayon' they get to use for the cloak in their reconstruction.
AFAIK there's no extant statue paint job preserved well enough for us to get a decent clue at how the statues may have been originally shaded, blended, hatched, textured, and patterned by contemporary top artists, or to confirm they weren't. It's kind of a big deal we know they were painted at all.
I guess I'm trying to say, don't be too bummed out, we don't have enough proof the ancient artists had paint game as weak as our non artist archaeologists.
szabiy t1_je73jb3 wrote
Reply to comment by Graega in eli5 why ancient historical buildings haven’t been kept up? Why are buildings like the Parthenon and the Colosseum in such disrepair? Greece and Rome/Italy have existed the entire time? by PickledSpace56
The weird crayon like coloured facsimiles we see as examples are based on historians colouring statue copies with flat colours matched to minute remnants of original paint—not artists, and especially not artists with any sort of proper clue about the intricacies of the original paintwork, being allowed to make stuff up. They extract a flake of red from the groove of a cloak, that's the 'crayon' they get to use for the cloak in their reconstruction.
AFAIK there's no extant statue paint job preserved well enough for us to get a decent clue at how the statues may have been originally shaded, blended, hatched, textured, and patterned by contemporary top artists, or to confirm they weren't. It's kind of a big deal we know they were painted at all.
I guess I'm trying to say, don't be too bummed out, we don't have enough proof the ancient artists had paint game as weak as our non artist archaeologists.