The Renaissance public’s appreciation of bare white stone led to a bias against using color to decorate sculptures, and this resulted in Renaissance artists leaving most of their marble creations unpainted.

Over time, the association of whiteness with artistic beauty grew strong in people’s minds, and it became deeply rooted in Western art and culture.

A German scholar who was one of the founders of art history in the West even remarked, “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is.”

Despite the excavation of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts with traces of color in the 18th and 19th centuries, the bias toward white marble sculpture was so firmly established that people’s perceptions did not alter.

Many scholars simply refused to believe that polychromy was used, while those who did were publicly criticized.

Sculptures painted with bright colors and patterns were regarded as inferior works created by immature artists.

Some insisted that Greek and Roman artifacts bearing obvious traces of color were in fact from other civilizations that existed before ancient Greece.

Until the 1960s, sculptures with noticeable color were largely ignored.

Some of them even had their colors wiped off so that the bare white surface beneath could be seen.

For these reasons, the misconception that formed during the Renaissance lasted all the way into the 20th century.