CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Polychrome Sculpture
Sculpture painted, gilded or inlaid in several colours, a practice far older and more widespread than the ideal of white marble suggests.
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About
Most sculpture made before the 18th century was coloured. The painted limestone bust of Nefertiti (c. 1345 BCE) keeps much of its colour, and scientific analysis has confirmed that Greek and Roman marbles once had painted skin, patterned garments and inlaid eyes. Buddhist sculptors in China and Japan painted wood and clay, and the Terracotta Army was originally brightly coloured.
Medieval and Baroque Europe continued the practice. Carvers of German and Netherlandish altarpieces combined wood with gilding and painted flesh, and in 17th-century Spain Gregorio Fernández and Juan Martínez Montañés worked with specialist painters to give devotional figures glass eyes, tears and vivid wounds. Neoclassical taste preferred bare stone, but colour came back: Edgar Degas's wax Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (1878–81) wears a real tutu, and Duane Hanson's painted resin figures of the 1970s pass for living people. Where paint is worn, look for layers of gesso beneath.
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