Marble Helped Scholars Whitewash Ancient History

Polychrome over-painting has created a fiction we keep telling ourselves when "skin tones' from different people didn't meet the not-color-blind standards in the 18th & 19th centuries . . . controversy was created by research of an academic 

Published on Jul 18, 2017

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Polychromy in ancient statues and the whiteness of marble without paint has made both the Roman and Greek antiquity seem like they were all white.

This was done on purpose by scholars in the 18th and 19th century who purposefully whitewashed those periods and pointed to the whiteness of the marble as proof that those worlds, which had people from all "races" (the term wasn't really relevant back then) were also white. VICE News walks through the Art Institute with polychromy expert Sarah Bond.