The Mail

Margaret Talbot's article on polychromy in classical Greek and Roman sculpture reveals that the figures we are used to seeing as white were, in fact, fully colored ("Color Blind," October 29th). It also shows that the techniques used to identify the applications of those pigments are clearly in their infancy. Nothing Talbot writes credibly explains how these ancient sculptors--driven by a naturalistic aesthetic so intense that they labored in marble in order to replicate muscles beneath the surface of human skin and to painstakingly re-create delicate drapery--would allow painters to effectively obliterate the subtlety of their hard effort with daubs of color, at least in the way that pigment is unconvincingly applied to modern replicas. Talbot's article brought to mind the video game Assassin's Creed Odyssey. The game is a fictional re-creation of the Peloponnesian War in all its colorful glory.