Polychromy in Ancient Greek Sculpture was the subject of the exhibition Chroma: Ancient Greek Sculpture in Color, held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met), New York, in 2022–2023. On this occasion, a multidisciplinary project involving The Met’s Departments of Greek and Roman Art, Objects Conservation, Imaging, Scientific Research, and colleagues from the Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Project in Frankfurt, Germany, was carried out to study an Attic funerary monument. The color decoration of the sphinx was reconstructed by combining non-invasive and minimally invasive techniques that provided information about surviving and lost pigments, original design, and painting technique. Results of multiband imaging, digital microscopy, and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy guided the removal of minute samples from selected areas for examination by Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy, coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, to shed light on the pigments and paint stratigraphy. The color palette included two varieties of blue, Egyptian blue and azurite, a carbon-based black pigment, two reds, cinnabar and red ocher, and yellow ocher, all painted directly over the marble without a preparation layer. The scientific findings informed the physical reconstruction of the sphinx made by archaeologists from the Liebieghaus Polychromy Research Project, featured in the exhibition.
Examination and scientific analysis have elucidated the well-preserved figural painting on a collection of limestone funerary stelai and loculus slabs from Alexandria, Egypt, dating from the late 4th to 3rd centuries B.C. This paper presents new information about the preparation, design, and technique of these paintings, which display a lead white ground preparation, both incised and black preliminary drawing, and a masterful elaborate multi-layered painting process to build up color. The paintings' generally bright colorful palette employs a wide range of pigments attested elsewhere in the classical Greek palette, and features, notably, the extensive use of mimetite, a geologically rare yellow lead arsenate mineral, uncommon in Greek and Roman painting and unknown in earlier Pharaonic painting traditions.
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