this is Caesar Augustus he was the first official emperor of the Roman Empire and if you've ever had to study Roman history you might be familiar with this little sculpture is very famous original it's called the Augustus of primaporta it was carved in the 1st century AD during his reign as Emperor then it was lost a time before it was dug up again in 1860s today it lives in the Vatican Museums alongside a bunch of other famous sculptures but Augustus he's not supposed to look like this he's supposed to look like this [Music] let's get this out of the way ancient Greece and Rome were really colorful their buildings were full of intricate frescoes and elaborate mosaics and covered with violently painted statues of things like epic battles glimmering gods and pretty flowers but today most of us picture something more like this brilliant white marble as far as the eye can see we're wrong but it's not our fault it's Hollywood's fault and our high school textbooks fall but most of all it's this guy's fault well not him he's just a statue the blame lies with Michelangelo the guy who sculpted him and with many others who made white marble statues during the Renaissance when European artists philosophers and scientists developed a renewed interest in the creations of classical Greece and Rome artists like Michelangelo began studying Roman sculptures like this one Lao kun and his sons they fell in love with its lifelike figures dramatic scene and pristine white surface but sculptures like this weren't meant to be white their paint had just faded after being buried or left out in the open air for hundreds of years so when the Renaissance artist set out to imitate them they left their masterpieces bare - and that style took over inspiring generations of sculptors white marble became the norm along the way our historians reinforce this bias namely this guy Johann Joaquin vinkle Minh he sometimes known as the father of art history in the 18th century he wrote a hugely influential book on ancient art in it he argued that statues like this one the Apollo of Belvedere were the epitome of beauty because the wider the body is the more beautiful it is he went out of his way to ignore obvious evidence of coloured marble and there was a lot of it especially after the rediscovery of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii in the 1700s Pompey's near perfectly preserved frescoes featured all sorts of colored statues and one particular mural of an artist in the act of painting a sculpture this colorful sculpture was also found in Pompeii Benkelman claimed it was too primitive to have been made by them but evidence wasn't just ignored some of it might have been destroyed remember Augustus when archeologists rediscovered him in the 1860s they sized his tunic was crimson his armor was yellow and his mantle that's this thing was purple and this is him now it's unclear if Augustus lost his color by accident as a result of over cleaning or if it was removed on purpose but either way the same thing happened to a bunch of other famous monuments and sculptures like the Parthenon in Athens which once looks something like this by the 18th century it had faded to something more like this with just hints of color left but today even those are gone luckily our historians have since shifted to believe it's not about what people think looks better it's about what's accurate but how do they get from this to this to start there are some surviving ancient descriptions of more famous sculptures which is how we know that the Parthenon once held a statue of the goddess Athena that was ivory and gold wearing a helmet adorned with the likeness of his Fink's and if you look closely at some sculptures there's still obvious traces of color like the remnants of deep purple on this Statutes clothing that's how early reconstructions like these are made today scientists can extract and test those tiny samples to determine the original pigments used but when there aren't any visible colors they have another tool ultraviolet light certain pigments glow under UV light exposing traces that would have been otherwise invisible when scientists photograph this archers legs under UV light they saw this a dizzying array of geometric patterns and saturated colors and when they compared it to trace pigments on a similar statue they were able to make this reconstruction which to be clear is about as ancient as mine because conservationists never add color to the original they use 3d scanners to create plaster replicas which they then painstakingly repaint with far greater accuracy than I can [Music] seeing these sculptures in full-color might be a little shocking at first but that's probably because we've only seen them one way for centuries to the Greeks and the Romans painting a sculpture made it complete color can make marble seem human or godlike it infused them with drama and emotion it brought history and mythology to life and even though these reconstructions aren't perfect seeing these statues in color can bring us a little closer to understanding what the ancient world might have looked like [Music]