There was a time when we imagined that most ancient sculpture never had any color except for that of the stone from which it was hewed. Doubt fell upon that notion as long ago as the eighteenth century, when archaeological digging in Pompeii and Herculaneum brought up statues whose color had been preserved, but only in recent years has it come to be presented as an exploded myth. Though some of the coverage of the false “whiteness” of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman sculpture has divided along drearily predictable twenty-first-century cultural battle lines, this moment has also presented an opportunity to stage fascinating, even groundbreaking exhibitions.

Take Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, which ran from the summer of last year to the spring of this year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. You can still see some of its displays in the Smarthistory video at the top of the post, in which art historians Elizabeth Macaulay and Beth Harris discuss the “world of Technicolor” that was antiquity, the Renaissance origins of the “idea that ancient sculpture was not painted,” and the modern attempts to reconstruct the sculptural color schemes almost totally lost to time.

Architect Vinzenz Brinkmann goes deeper into these subjects in the video from the Met itself just above, paying special attention to the museum’s bust of Caligula — not the finest emperor Rome ever had, to put it mildly, but one whose face has become a promising canvas for the restoration of color.

You can see much more of Chroma in the Art Trip tour video just above. Its wonders include not just genuine pieces of ancient sculpture, but strikingly colorful reconstructions of a finial in the form of a sphinx, a Pompeiian statue of the goddess Artemis, a battle-depicting side of the Alexander Sarcophagus, and “a marble archer in the costume of a horseman of the peoples to the north and east of Greece,” to name just a few. You may prefer these historically educated colorizations to the austere monochrome figures you grew up seeing in textbooks, or you may appreciate after all the kind of elegance that only centuries of ruin can bestow. Either way, your relationship to the ancient world will never be quite the same.

Related content:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Restores the Original Colors to Ancient Statues

How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

Roman Statues Weren’t White; They Were Once Painted in Vivid, Bright Colors

The Met Digitally Restores the Colors of an Ancient Egyptian Temple, Using Projection Mapping Technology

The Making of a Marble Sculpture: See Every Stage of the Process, from the Quarry to the Studio

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Images on this page come courtesy of the Musei del Bargello

In the year 1530, Michelangelo was sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII — who, not coincidentally, was born Giulio de’ Medici. That famous dynasty, which once seemed to hold absolute economic and political power in Florence, had just seen off a violent challenge to its rule by republican-minded Florentines who, emboldened by the sack of Rome in 1527, took their city from the House of Medici that same year. Alas, that particular Republic of Florence proved short-lived, thanks to the pope and Emperor Charles V’s agreement agreed to use military power to return it to Medici hands.

During the struggles against the Medici, the Florence-born Michelangelo had come to the aid of his hometown by working on its fortifications. It seems to have been his participation in the revolt that drew the ire of the Medici, despite their court’s on-and-off patronage of his work for the preceding four decades.

Mercifully, they never actually executed Michelangelo, and indeed pardoned him before long–not least so he could finish his work on the Sistine Chapel and the Medici family tomb. But how did he occupy himself while still living under the death sentence?

As one theory has it, he simply hid out — and in a corner of what’s now the Medici Chapels Museum at that. In a “tiny chamber beneath the Medici Chapels in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in 1530,” writes the Guardian‘s Angela Giuffrida, Michelangelo spent a couple months “making dozens of drawings that are reminiscent of his previous works, including a drawing of Leda and the Swan, a painting produced during the same year that was later lost.” All of these he drew directly on the walls, and their existence “remained unknown until 1975 when Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, one of five museums that make up the Bargello Museums, was searching for a suitable space to create a new exit for the museum.”

“Others doubt that Michelangelo, already in his 50s and an acclaimed artist with powerful patrons, would have spent time in such a dingy hide out,” writes the New York Times‘ Jason Horowitz. “But many scholars believe that the sketches show his hand”: the “imposing nude near the entrance” that evokes The Resurrection of Christ; the sketches that “resemble the central figure of his The Fall of Phaeton. Some even think a flexed and disembodied arm on the wall evokes his David statue.” And starting next week, visitors will be able to judge these very drawings for themselves.

Not that you can just waltz into this stanza segreta: “Visits will be kept to groups of four and limited to 15 minutes, with 45 minute lights-out periods in between to protect the drawings,” Horowitz writes. ‘Tickets, each connected to a specific person whose I.D. will be checked to prevent tour operators from gobbling them up, will cost 32 euros (about $34), and include access to the Medici tombs.” During your own fifteen minutes in this cramped, obscure room turned tastefully-lit gallery, you may or may not feel the presence of Michelangelo, but you’ll surely find yourself reminded that a true artist never stops creating, no matter the circumstances in which he finds himself.

Related Content:

Watch the Painstaking and Nerve-Racking Process of Restoring a Drawing by Michelangelo

Michelangelo’s David: The Fascinating Story Behind the Renaissance Marble Creation

Michelangelo Entered a Competition to Put a Missing Arm Back on Laocoön and His Sons — and Lost

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculptures

Michelangelo’s Illustrated Grocery List

School Principal, Forced to Resign After Students Learn About Michelangelo’s David, Visits the Renaissance Statue in Florence

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.