{weekend words}

Would we admire the Parthenon if it still had a roof, and no longer appealed to the modern stereotype taste for an outline emerging from rough stone? If we repainted it in its original red, blue and gold, and if we reinstalled the huge, gaudy cult-figure of Athena, festooned in bracelets, rings and necklaces, we could not avoid the question that threatens our whole concept of the classical: did the Greeks have bad taste? When, in the 1950s, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens spent $1,500,000 building a copy of the Stoa of Attalus in the old market place they were faithful to every known detail except one - they couldn't bring themselves to paint it red and blue as it had been in the original. To have been authentic would have made it seem untrue to the modern stereotype of the classical.

Donald Horne: The Great Museum: The Re-presentation of History (1984).

This is a plaster cast of a kore (maiden) in the Museum of Classical Archaeology in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge (UK). It has been painted to give an idea of what ancient Greek statuary may have looked like. The original dates from c.530BC Athens.