Posted on 05/21/2013 7:20:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Two words — lawn dwarves. ;’)
Not to stir up a hornet’s nest, but decades ago, some genius at the British Museum decided that the Elgin Marbles (friezes that had been cut out of the Parthenon) needed to be sandblasted, because the statues should be pure white marble. So, the 2500 year old original paint job was removed.
Red barns came about because red paint is cheap. Farmhouses were fairly often not painted or stained at all; siding and other exterior wood technology was made of woods naturally resistant to decay. Alas, the old barns around here are gradually falling apart, unmaintained, because of the expense of painting, roofing, or routine repairs, vs construction of pole barns.
None of those statues have survived, even in part, which is too bad, really. I suspect that fragments of the bronze Colossus of Rhodes may still be found on the sea floor, although those have indeed been looked for. Apparently there’s a fairly current effort (again) to build a new C of R.
My wild guess is, the use of ivory on the large statues was limited, and a faux ivory made by some chemical process was used.
http://www.geopolymer.org/science/introduction
The Parthenon must have been quite something in its original paint. The Romans decorated their buildings too, which I sometimes forget because a couple of thousand years has worn so much paint off.
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