Colours Revealed : Polychrome Monuments in the Roman Provinces – Detection, Interpretation, Visualisation

This volume explores the original colours of ancient sculpture and architecture, focusing on Roman stone monuments in the Danube region. Based on the PolychroMon project, 14 interdisciplinary studies compare evidence from across the Roman Empire, revealing new insights into ancient polychromy and painting techniques.

The originally colourful appearance of ancient sculptures and architecture has once again been the focus of interdisciplinary research for around half a century. New technologies make it possible to investigate colour schemes even when barely any traces of the original paintwork are visible to the naked eye. Whilst good data is available for the ancient Mediterranean region, there is still a significant lack of corresponding information regarding the stone monuments of the Roman provinces. As part of an interdisciplinary research project (‘PolychroMon’), systematic investigations into the polychromy of Roman stone monuments in the Danube region were carried out for the first time. In this volume, these findings are compared with similar evidence from other regions of the Roman Empire. In a total of 14 articles, examples of polychrome colour schemes on monuments from Egypt, Germany, England, France, Italy, Austria, Serbia and Turkey are presented, and related issues are discussed on a broad basis.