This omission has had critical consequences for the perception of what should be considered within the Western canon of art. Additionally, the willful ignorance of classical polychromy has also affected the perception of who can own, or not, the cultural heritage of classical ancient sculpture.

In the widely read The New Yorker article The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture, professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, Mark Abbe, shared that the idea that the ancients disdained bright color “is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art.” It is “a lie we all hold dear.”

The variety of colors in Ancient sculpture and art was not only decorative. It also reflected the colorful variety of daily life in the ancient Roman empire. The Fayum Portraits, for example, are a remarkable trove of naturalistic paintings from the imperial Roman province of Egypt, which are among the few paintings on wood that survive from that period. These near-life-size portraits, which were painted on funerary objects, present their subjects with an array of skin tones, from olive green to deep brown, testifying to a complex intermingling of Greek, Roman, and local Egyptian populations.