Scrubbing the Marble

The myth wasn't only a misreading of worn ruins — at times it was enforced. Some museums and restorers scrubbed away surviving traces of color to make statues match the pristine white ideal collectors expected. Cleaning meant to restore the marble often erased the last of the original paint.

That habit destroyed evidence and hardened the lie. With the painted clues gone, bare white stone looked like the authentic Greek aesthetic, and each cleaned statue made the next generation more certain that white was how the Greeks meant it to be.