Livelygrey

The White House in Washington is a Georgian style building. Georgian architects employed a decorative style derived from ancient Greece and Rome. Which explains the white painted surface, because it was generally assumed that the ancient Greek and Roman buildings were white. After all, when looking at pictures of the archetypical example of classical architecture, the Parthenon in Athens, it always looks white.

Only recently I visited the Parthenon for the first time. And probably similar to most architects in this world, I had always assumed that it is white.
Well....
It isn't.
The color of the Parthenon is more like ochre, which is not white by a long shot. I suppose most of the pictures of the Parthenon are shot so that they more or less represent our cliche image of it, instead of representing the actual situation. But as the saying goes: every picture is a lie. If indeed the design of the White House was derived from classical architecture, its color is simply plain wrong. But there's more to it.....
In fact the Parthenon, and all other major classical buildings, were originally painted in bright colors. I will delve deeper into this subject in future posts, but just trust me on this for the time being. This also means that the colors of neo-classical buildings such as the White House are based on a misconception. In fact it would probably be more historically accurate, not to mention more fun, to repaint the White House in pink. ;-)

I recently visited the National Museum in Athens which houses the world's largest collection of ancient Greek works of art. The collection is truly breathtaking. I can wholeheartedly recommend a visit.
There is nevertheless something odd about the museum. A leaflet claims the museum intends to give a good impression of antique art. But nothwithstanding the splendor of the collection, it hardly gives good impression of art in antiquity at all.
There main body of the collection consists of a vast number of marble statues. All the statues in the museum are bare marble of a grey-yellowish hue. However, in antiquity the statues (and buildings, for that matter) were painted in bright colors (gaudy colors as some modern scholars keep insisting). So bare marble hardly gives a good impression at all. Being a color geek I paid attention, but in the whole museum there was hardly a mention of color or paint to be found. When I did finally spot a small indication, I photographed it. The small sign next to the statue is about all the museum has to say on the subject of color. It sure leaves me with the impression that color on antique statues are still taboo.
I would love to see larger pictures of virtually painted statues next to each and every original. It shouldn't be much of a problem with a bit of modern technology combined with an old-fashioned sense of color.

Light is obviously quite important in the occurence of color. How important exactly can now be assessed through the billions of snapshots that have been uploaded onto the web. Many of those snapshots are from the same landmarks, such as the Taj Mahal in India. Waht would happen if you place a number of these snapshots next to eachother? What does it do to the appearence of the Taj Mahal?
I searched the popular photo site flickr.com for pictures of the Taj Mahal. It didn't took much effort to find thousands of them. That made it easy to identify several hundreds of snapshots of the exact same view. Here's a series of 6. You can tell by the shadows that I assembled them to represent different times during the day, from early in the morning till late in the evening.

Here's another series of Taj Mahal snapshots. Now at around the same time but on different days.