And now for something completely different...

As so often happens I missed the big exhibitions at the Ashmolean museum, getting side-tracked into the dim galleries filled with ancient archaeology: Egyptian mummies, Chinese pots, Roman statues.... but here was something new, a light-filled room displaying Greek sculptures in bright colours! I could hardly.believe my eyes but it turns out they are casts of the originals painted according to the traces of pigment and pattern that have been detected microscopically in the fabric of the stone and reproduced as they actually, or closely, were.. The bleached marmoreal figures that seem so pure and glacial have been rendered vivid, garish even, in paintbox hues of ochre, malachite, cinnabar and other such natural materials that have been identified on the originals. The result is  a technicolour revelation.

Here is Theseus abducting the Amazon queen Antiope in her brightly patterned jerkin (I love the expressions of barely-suppressed teenage mischief on their faces: there doesn't seem to be much coercion or resistance going on here.) It's a cast of a 5th century sculpture that retained the original dress pattern in the marble.

The other, a seated lion, seems straight out of a child's picture book, a stable mate to The Tiger Who Came To Tea. Actually it was one of two flanking a 6th century tomb in Corinth, the pigment traces allowing an accurate reproduction of the colour scheme and facial design.

There were many more casts, even more spectacular, with flesh-coloured limbs and piercing painted eyes, some with bright gold breast plates, scarlet robes and harlequin-patterned leggings. It seems to have been a riot of colour back in ancient Greece. I loved it!

Some more about it.