> colorless white Greco-Roman temples: all the paint faded away, leaving the underlying white stone
Wait, I get that the statues and the bas-reliefs were painted, but were the columns too ?
Wait, I get that the statues and the bas-reliefs were painted, but were the columns too ?
We don't actually know that. We know more or less what pigments were used but not how artistically it was applied. The gaudy reconstructions are made by scientists, nor artists. Not many paintings have survived from antiquity, but the ones we have does not strike me as gaudy.