Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World

The latest Legion of Honor exhibit, Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World, will have you rethinking art history. The exhibit includes nearly 40 reproductions of well-known Greek and Roman artworks painted in “brightly colored authentic pigments” and 30 statues and carved reliefs from ancient Egypt, the Near East, Greece, and Rome. The museum included sculptures from Egypt and the Near East to show a fuller range of polychromy from across the ancient Mediterranean world. The exhibition concludes with a description of the sources of pigments used and how they were applied. Most of these pigments were of mineral origin, such as red and yellow ocher, bright red cinnabar, azurite, and malachite, but also synthetic such as Egyptian blue, a material made from a mixture of silica, lime, copper, and alkali. White pigment was derived from lead or lime, and black from carbonized bone or other materials.
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