Polychromy is the practice of painting sculpture and architecture in multiple colours — universal in antiquity, suppressed during the renaissance, and rediscovered in the 19th century.
Polychromy (Greek: 'many colours') refers to the application of paint to sculpture and architecture. Greek and Roman marble statues, Egyptian temple walls, Mayan pyramids, medieval cathedral portals, and Gothic altarpieces were almost universally painted in vivid colours — reds, blues, gold, often laid over a layer of plaster. The bare-marble aesthetic that we now associate with classical antiquity is a misreading: the paint had simply weathered away by the time the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods rediscovered the works. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the 18th-century founding figure of art history, championed the supposed 'noble simplicity' of unpainted Greek marble, and his influence shaped centuries of museum display. Beginning in the late 19th century with Franz Wickhoff and intensifying in the work of Vinzenz Brinkmann at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, scholars have used ultraviolet, infrared, and X-ray analysis to reconstruct the original colours. The reconstructions — bright, sometimes shocking — have transformed how we understand ancient art's relationship to spectacle, ritual, and political display.