The greatest conspiracy in ancient art - BBC REEL 

I'm sure it has. If you look at the hunting scene of Mithras from Dura Europa there is a corner of Mithras' face that retains shading and finer details, i.e. it was more protected when it fell off. Since any shading/detail, et al, was applied atop a base layer of paint, it's WAY more fugitive and will be the first to go.

Ive always wondered that too. Especially given the detail that went into these sculptures, it doesn't seem right that the artists would provide flats then consider it done

@@sebastian122 Very good point!

As time goes by, I am sure things will be modified as we learn more. Archaeology, like science, is never settled.

Agreed. Really bad coloring here. It’s hard to imagine it looked this bad at the time it was made. I have to imagine there was more shading, and overall more detailed painting.

Yea seeing the ones that are redone it looks kinda ick and weird ….🫣😰🥴

You make an assumption by pressuming they sought to make color as realistic as the sculpture. First of all because many of the more complex statues were indeed painted properly, the goldens and brass tones on the statues are proper of what you'd expect of mediterranean europenas and north africans. Second, realistic is not always the goal, even if it sometimes combines with something "realistic". Consider that many of these statues were meant to represent myths and legends, they had to have vibrancy and an air of wonder, dare I say something unrealistic. Colors, especially vibrant ones, are used to catch your eye, which in a well populated area, with many buildings, people and objects, would be easy to spot. Not every culture seeks art to be realistic. We can see that as well with a lot of chinese art, which focused more on simple lines meant to portray the feeling the object gave, more than how much it ressembled a camera picture.

@@reinapiratayquepaha Surely you can have vibrancy AND not looking hokey?

This. They remind me of those amateur 'restoration' botch jobs gotten famous by the internet a while ago. These look rushed and half-done. Yes, you can have bright colours and the end product looking good. There are the medieval sculptures for you. Heavy colour but lots of shading and detail.

Exactly. But oh well, the "recreators" will blame your criticism on you being limited, anyway.

Thank you 👏

Exactly my thoughts Just imagine if, for example, Leonardo da Vinci had re-colored those sculptures; the differece it would make! da Vinci's obviously not around anymore, but I'm sure we could find somebody, even if half as good, that could get the job done

Exactly, I honestly feel that the painted recreations aren't as detailed and accurate as they would've been at the time either. If you're a part of society that's creating such incredibly detailed and accurate sculptures as all these, you definitely have people who are able to paint them properly as well. Even in videos like this, modern people are constantly underestimating the intelligence and skill of our ancestors. And acting like the West is the one who is the greatest threat and detractor to this kind of art, this art that is revered as priceless to us and protected and studied in our museums as our cultural origins, when so many countries in the East would love to destroy it all without a second thought, is very telling about the maker's intent.

Hey genius, did you know colours fade? Christ :p

@@Nobody-hc2bo Hey genius, did you know that shading doesn’t just appear by itself?

Your "gaudy" is someone else's "vibrant".

I'm beyond suspicious, the hypothetical application of the colour is flawed. They have identified the right vribrant pigments but not their transparency verses opacity in application. Use of subtle modelling etc

It's like colour photography vs. black + white photography.

@@jonathantan2469 maybe you're talking about certain stylistic choices, but overall color IRL or photography has a lot of details/shades/nuances/expressiveness that we might not always perceive actively but we're thrown off when it's missing, that's kind of what happened with these statues. Most artists would use different shades of colors to create a face or show a folding in a cloth (depending of course on the art style, but let's go with a more realistic painting fitting to realistic sculpting) while with these remakes it seems to be the 'flat color' (the base color all that was left to detect this many years later). We of course will never know the whole original design of these statues and maybe they actually were colored this basic since they used to be up on buildings... but considering the details that went into the sculpting process (creating single locks + every detail in the cloth and face of the statue) we assume that the same love for detail & expressiveness would've gone into the painting of the statues, which is def. not the case in these replicas and leads to a perceived 'gap in skillfulness' ^^

I think some of that can be attributed to the fact that the colors we're seeing were applied by modern restorationists with limited information, as opposed to the sculptures' shapes, which have relatively been well preserved over the centuries.

That's because it was basically painted by a child. The people who painted it aren't artists, they're archaeologists and historians. They are trying to reproduce pigments, rather than reproduce art.

Agreed 💯

So true! Great way of putting it

Thats... horryfing actually

@@mariatereza9721 I guess it adds to the fascinating aspect of it. It's like they've been turned to stone - or can turn real at any moment.

_yes even medieval church sculptures_ Christian statues are polychromed to this day. :') that's no surprise to nobody

WW2 was mere decades ago, and we know that colour film back then was still expensive & technically complex (Kodachrome, Dufaycolour, Technicolor) to be widely used. On the other hand, hundreds of years have passed between the Late Roman Empire and the Renaissance, so most oral & written knowledge would have been lost down the generations if not obscured. The written works we have today of Plato, Seneca, and Aristotle are a fraction of what they produced, most have been lost to history. With the renewed interest in Greco-Roman art in the Renaissance, the artists at that time would only have the pale weathered statues, ruins, & columns as a visual reference... the colours on them having faded many many centuries ago.

@@dabrams84 well some paints others react with the stone and make it have a shorter life most relevent on more fragile pieces where the difference would matter

@@drunkvegangal8089 This is a great comparison damn.

@@jonathantan2469 The Byzantine keep the color...but after the Latin Frank and Germanic barbarian ransacked Constantinople they destroyed everything.

It's western culture that denies diversity.

Keep in mind most of these statues would have been higher off the ground than they are being presented here. The exaggeration of color would have been necessary to fool the eye into seeing what the artist intended. Like David's hands looking so big when viewed straight on, and not from below like intended.

@@sebastian122 Fair enough... then perhaps steps should be taken to display them in similar Context to reinforce this...

I wonder if the ancients had painting techniques to fix this problem

Yeah I think you are right. They blame “uneducated viewers” but don’t consider that there might be other factors at play that makes people like the painted ones less. Not to mention, the original statues may have been painted much more realistically with shading than what they show here.

@@CampingforCool41 this hole deal just seems to just be a politically pressured agenda by the left against white supremacy, because I guess the left can’t stand white supremacy also having good tastes in art and using that to promote their ideologies with. If you aren’t aware if the context in the past and present white supremacists have used Roman and Greek art in their propaganda to say “look what whites could accomplish if we united against the rest” kinda thing.

Thank you. We were told from day one inn art history that they were painted. I realise that this is news to laymen, but not to anyone who has studied art. Even worse is when they try and make it some kind of weird racial thing.

Thank you for saying it outloud that It is "hardly a conspiracy theory".. I agree with you 100%

It was perhaps a conspiracy 100-300 years ago, when European historians and art dealers scrubbed the paint off and pretended it had never existed. I've heard theories that they did this to match what di Vinci and Michelangelo did during the Renaissance (to drive up prices). I've heard the theory that it was white supremacists who were using the white-washed statues to support their world view (pale=classic=superior). But I hardly think there is a current conspiracy about it. Just a few hardliners, denying what science has proven.

Not even undergrad, you learn about this in AP art history, I did so as an 11th grader and this was over a decade ago.

in my context this information is still hardly known. i'm brazilian and just in architecture graduation that was taught to me. i don't see much of a problem if we trace "chromophobia" back to classic aesthetics, seen that renaissance was the very moment western art theory started to take real form. if i'm wrong you can help me!

I’m with you on this one - the colour does distract from the form.

Not too mention the fact that there is zero variation in the color and shade of the paint. It just looks… amaturish

Exactly! I'd love if they put a more creative, but realistic recreation using layers, shadows, texture etc. next to the scientific one

Well said I totally agree. Where are the nuances, the shading,shadowing and details? I can even picture them using an almost water color effect. Fluid and life-like as the sculptures appear.

What a very astute observation! I wouldn’t have thought about this until you mentioned it, but this is so damn true! And the “paint by numbers” comment was freaking spot on 😂

The shocking fact that they had colors doesn't mean they were painted with such basic saturated and frankly unflattering colors. The lack of colors can feel more realistic due to your brain imagining the missing elements and details. But painting them with such disharmonious and flat colors gives them an uncanny fake appearance. I don't know if they actually liked flat colors back then but I don't.

Maybe but also keep in mind paint technology was much less advanced than what we’re accustomed to today. What would have given the paint that nuance you refer to is oil. But oil was very precious and not widely used at the time

Possible, though it bears to keep in mind that these may only have been the base layers, which is all our technology allows us to detect. There may have been further details and shading added on top.

@@Anthropomorphic even then it's still a hell of a whole lot more color than our colorless world nowadays

I see a comment suggesting they should be shaded and muted which is ridiculous to me as an artist to attempt shading on a three dimensional sculpture.

You do know that skin isn't all one uniform color, right? Variations in sun exposure, skin thickness, blood vessal density, subsurface scattering, and especially hair length all contribute to the subtle shade and hue shifts real human skin contains. If people were all one color, then the flatly repainted scuptures should all look photo realistic, but, clearly, they don't

Agreed! In my opinion, if you can't recreate the color 100% exactly, then you should leave the originals untouched I'm not against making a duplicate statue to color, but I do think they should hire actual artists to paint it

every shape has a color, every color has a shape, how can one define the other?

I agree with you about the flat colors. I wonder if they were this flat though? I mean they captured every muscle and nuance of the body, why would they have missed the nuances of skin tones? I bet they painted the faces more realistically.

The surviving classical frescos from ancient Greece and Rome show a much more nuanced use of colour. One theory is that the statues did have further layers of paint, in order to create contrast and emphasize volume, but those were lost forever and only the base coat, the paint that was directly in contact with the stone, has left traces that can be discovered today.

This is amazing to me. Is there anything in the modern world that we do without color? So why do we insist that the past should be seen artificially? What is it about our attitude to history that insists on whitewashing it? How can an artificial (and modern) representation be "better" than the actual reality experienced by those who lived it?

I have a suspicion that they weren't painted so flatly or mattely.

It is but now a critical mass of content creators have gone to a museum for the first time and have to pretend their ignorance is a conspiracy

With many of the Egyptian pieces in the MET they were specifically scrubbed clean. Some of this was out of ignorance, but it was an ignorance that suited a narrative. And the idea of the superiority of "classicism" was definitely a powerful narrative in Europe and the US in those periods.

@@patreekotime4578 Where can I read about this scrubbing?

Your opinion of people not actively trying to “whitewash history” is wrong. They have. The marbles did fade out in colour but they had become very faded color, not white as you indicated. Colonists thought they didn’t have color so they had them scrubbed cleaner before putting it in the British museum. If you don’t think history can be whitewashed, you clearly don’t know anything about history.

@@beadmecreative9485 if A - they did not hypothetically whitewashed those statues, then B - it does not mean whitewashing of history does not exist. Your "logic" is pretty weird.

that is not how they appeared these people plagiarizing history and whitewashing it with fake artifacts.

Greeks were known to be great painters.

@@cangjie12 Wow... You've really made a lot of unfounded, unreasoned, and half-thought claims. Let's look at them: 1. Claim: the ancients used muted colours for frescoes. This is a gross generalisation that ignores centuries of artistic development. There are eras of Ancient Greece that preferred bright colours, and eras that preferred muted colours. Your claim also ignores a VERY important aspect of archaeological evidence............ AGEING. The frescoes we have from Ancient Greece are thousands of years old, and they have aged under centuries of soot, smoke, dirt, grime, moisture, etc. Even paintings as relatively young as 50 years can look completely different when surface grime is accumulated, and wouldn't you know what happens to their colours? They become muted. Your entire rant is based on the wrong assumption that the muted colours of the frescoes look today exactly as they did thousands of years ago. I do not think I have to explain why that is wrong. You're also ignoring that within the exhibition, there are works spanning several eras of Ancient Greece and Rome, and most of what is shown in the video comes from the Archaic Era (800-480 BCE)... It's almost like art constantly evolves or something; if you actually used your eyeballs, you'd be able to see that the painted statue of the Small Herculaneum Woman, which is 700 years later (Rome 30-1 BCE) clearly displays an evolution in the technique, showcasing textile transparency, etc. 2. (Implied) Claim: The ancients must have used the same painting techniques both in frescoes, and statues. Why? Why couldn't they have used different colours, and techniques? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm quite sure that plaster, and marble are two different media, and therefore require different skills, and approaches. Tell me, do we blend colours, use brushes, and pigments the same in watercolours, and oil paints? Why not? Aren't they media that have co-existed for centuries? Why do Italian renaissance water colour paintings look so different from their oil painting counterparts despite being made in the same time period, same geographical area, and the same artists? Could it be that they required different techniques? 3. Claim: The professors are wrong/ the professors are doing it for "shock value". How do you know, cangjie12? Are you a leading authority in Ancient Greek, and Roman polychromy? Have you read through their research and found a flaw in their methodology, and their conclusions? Do you have evidence that proves them wrong? Or evidence that they're lying, and only preoccupied with "shock value"? Please share if you do have it; we archaeologists love to advance knowledge of the past, so I'd love to read your revolutionary research. Please don't keep it to yourself! Also; even if their generation "loves garish colours" "for a fact (look! another unfounded assertion)" it is irrelevant to the science they have produced. Science is objective, so your ad hominem does absolutely anything unless you can prove that they only painted the statues like that for that reason. 4. Claim: The professors have affirmed that this is how the Greeks MUST have done it. Please. Can you link the exact moment they said this... Oh, that's right... They didn't... It's almost like archaeology so ancient makes it literally impossible to make such an affirmation.

@@Sebastian_Terrazas wow, what a passionate response. I won’t answer anything regarding authority and expertise, because that has nothing to do with the validity of an argument. As for claim 4, what i meant to say is that we cannot assume ‘flat colours’ to be the default just because that those were the only pigments that have been detected. And if shading was applied later on top of base coats, wouldn’t that be the first to go, leaving only the base coats behind? In this I was reminded of the argument that many musicians make (especially in the past), that we should not decorate Bach or Mozart’s music, simply because the decorations have not survived and come down to us in written form. But that doesn’t actually mean the music was bare and empty. Similarly, just because only a base coat survives on a statue, it doesn’t mean that more paint wasn’t originally applied over it; so why base the reconstruction on surviving chemical evidence, instead of the stylistic example of classical art whose color has survived? That was what I was expressing in my original comment; perhaps it wasn’t worded as clearly there. I was assuming that these ‘restorationists’ were working from a purely forensic perspective, as opposed to an approach that tried to embody the artistic and cultural expectations of the time. (Which, by the way, was very realistic when it came to statues. It would have been odd indeed, a mismatch, if the form of the statue was realistic but the color scheme was not, i.e. cartoonish instead.) As for claim 1, I have not seen a single ancient fresco (or any other classical work with surviving colour) in garish flat colours (no shading), but do share their names or links to them here if you know any, so we can see them. By the way, even if the fresco/mosaic colours themselves really did go from garish to muted, what about the shading? Weathering cannot have done that. Even if I were absolutely wrong about the tone of the colours, the fact remains that shading was definitely used. By the way, I recently saw online two versions of a fresco in the temple of Isis in Pompeii: Io (the cow-girl) arriving in Egypt and being greeted by Isis. One was very muted indeed (presumably its condition when excavated), and another one was (I assume) a photoshopped version with much more vibrant colour and details. But even the latter version still comes nowhere near the hideously garish and flat color scheme of these modern reconstructions of statues. You’ll probably (rightly) say this isn’t an argument at all, but others might find it interesting. As for claim 2: you are conflating technique and an artistic approach. What i (and other people) am referring to is the artistic/cultural expectation that colours should be one way or another. so yes, you asked, why couldn’t have the approach been different, and to that i would say, well yes, it is more reasonable to assume it would not have been too different from what we see in other media. By Occams razor, it would require more to explain away why mosaics/frescoes were muted while statues were gaudy, than if we just supposed that the statues were painted in the same spirit as the former, with the same cultural expectations of the final artistic result. The thing you need to ask is this: Was there something special and unique about marble statues that compelled their painters to use a flat and bright colour scheme? Was the material used in statues somehow unsuitable for muted colours with shading? Or did the audience for statues prefer gaudy colours when compared to the audience for frescoes? All in all, it’s simpler and more justified to suppose that the statues were painted like the frescoes etc (most likely in more tasteful colours, and certainly with shading), as opposed to flat intense colours. Because the latter would be not an ordinary but an extraordinary claim, which requires more proof. By the way, what I said about ‘shock value’ is true. You can refer to these sources. In the article, the person clearly says that his colorisation of the peplos kore statue was a ‘provocation’ meant to ‘make people think’. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4T1LjxQ0aUs.html www.classics.cam.ac.uk/museum/collections/peplos-kore So in the future you could go easy on accusing others of all sorts of things.

"Sit down everybody, the experts are here" but, jokes asside, its really cool that so there are still people who are interested in this sort of stuff, maybe school is useful after all…

Because those snobs/experts really DON'T have intelligence and got their jobs or fame through glad handing, and pats-on-backs old boys club support. It's tradition. Those experts don't even think it's possible that some old, random old civilization could possibly be smarter than they. I am not joking. Try to overhear some of their conversations at a restaurant one day, and you will see what I mean.

that's a wonderful idea, would make an amazing installation

Probably easier to use a virtual representation, visible through use of goggles, or on a smart phone/tablet. Some artists are already working in this medium, setting up works that are invisible unless viewed with the proper device.

I usually don't read "comment essays" but, credit to you, this was really interesting Nice to see that history like this is still being taught in schools, and people are still interested in it

Yeah, this gives new meaning to the saying: "the grass is always greener on the other side"

Not just to modern eyes… Not even an ancient Greek or Roman citizen would think these look good I mean, when you look at surviving Greek and Roman mosaics, its obvious they were masters of color, shadow, and realism, the polar opposite of the "reconstructed" statues

Exactly what I think! Its the difference between seeing a black and white photograph of Churchill and a colored photograph All of a sudden, he seems so… alive… so much more real All that is needed now is a talanted painter to, using the original colors, paint on a shaded replica and, suddenly, history is made

Yeah In regards to Greek and Roman sculptures, we actually have surviving mosaics. The thing is, the people in these mosaics don't look anything like the reconstructed statues. They have so much life and virbrancy (and not overly saturated vibrancy) to them: they genuinly look real, or as real as possible But, these "reconstructed" painted statues look… flat, fake, like plastic. Clearly, they need to hire actual artists who can recreate the look of the mosaics but hey, thats just my opinion

I wouldn't use the word "little" I think it undersells how much these sculptures have been butchered…

Egyptian blue, also known as calcium copper silicate, was used from pre-dynastic Egypt up to the Roman empire, then the recipe for making it was forgotten until recently. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_blue

See from 3:32

@@ninsuhnrey yeah I don’t accept that. There’s been no debate during my lifetime. Yet it keeps cropping up like a bad penny in journalistic outlets like there has been. Media acting like an amnesiac protagonist in some bad fiction. More knowledge accumulated over the decades, and I’m sure there was pushback at some point, but I imagine you’d have to go pretty far back to find when that was. Notice they don’t speak to anyone who argues the opposite. It’s long been settled.

@@BlookbugIV arrogant.

@@user-ub2jp7tg6k the hell are you talking about ?

@@BlookbugIV I'm wondering if some manipulative editing is at play here, I could belive that the substance of the chromaphobia debate is about beauty of the white statues vs the colored statues as opposed to the "truth" of the colored statues. Meanwhile I am wondering if upper class English tastes are being projected onto the breath of European history....Tatian, the impressionists, all of Byzantium, stained glass, the sistine, the Dutch still life's of fruit, etc are all reveared and filled with color.

I can only assume they looked at Surviving Frescoes and decided that "Bold, unshaded, limited graidient" was a dominant look.

@@llewelynshingler2173 but the frescos were not like that.

In Goethes times ancient sculptures were already colorless

We know ancient civilizations like the Greeks and Romans were masters at painting (just look at the surviving mosaics), so it is 100% logical to assume that they would paint their sculptures with equal skill and attention Ironically, these people who claim to be "unwhitewashing" the sculptures are presenting an image of acient art that is made up, kinda sad actually

The lack of colour helps to emphasise form.

prejudice… against… color? How? I mean, Western paintings aren't black and white. Look at any one of Michelangelo's pieces: they're full of color I guess I just don't understand how the BBC can claim that Westerners are scared of color when 99.999% of paintings say otherwise

100% agree! A lot of ppl are acting like appricating the non-colored sculptures is wrong or non-historically accurate, when, truthfully, they look good too

@@namef some people dislike it cuz they are used to the old colorless ones, some others make valid points. something that bugs me for example, why would they take the time to fetch white marble, specially Romans that went thousands of miles to get Carrara marble, to just paint them and make them look like any regular painted sculpture? since when do rich people hide the fact that they have enough money to buy unusual stuff that others can't afford? I wonder if these archeologist aren't letting themselves be blinded by their desire to prove their point. (I do believe that at least *some* sculptures were painted ofc)

I second the notion!

Why. It so boring when they were made to be vibrant.

I agree with you here! The paint looks like makeup almost. Plastic definately. I'm not against showing how these statues actualky looked like, but the paint job is terrible, much worse than that of the ancient people who actually colored them

@@user-ub2jp7tg6k The colored recreations looms comical by comparison,every detail is masked by ugly vibrant colors

Problem is we don’t actually know what the original paint job looked like, only the flat, base colors.

​@@CampingforCool41 I don't think that's such a problem. I'm ok with approximation. I'm sure the original artists added in details, shades and glossy lacquers and such. Just the fact about (pre-)classical being painted enriches our understanding of that era.

Goofy is an understatement… Its so flatly shaded it could've been in a Nintendo 64 game, its seriously a terrible paint job

Good point. We tend to bring our own prejudices or presumptions to many areas of the past; both ancient and more current. I'm glad to see that more people are accepting that these sculptures were once brightly painted. Which makes sense, given that many were high up on buildings, or otherwise visually restricted.

True, but couldn't this exact line of reasoning be applied to these "reconstructions" as well? I mean, we are working with limited information here. We know what colours they used, but not how much, what exact mixture, or which brushes the painters had. If we are getting the look wrong, (which is far more likely than getting it right) then we would be presenting an image of the past that never actually existed. Wouldn't that be just as bad? We know the colourless marble isn't historically accurate, but its at least the closest to how the sculptures looked when we discovered them (at least for Greek and Roman pieces). My though is that showing them as such is the best solution when we know so little and could mess up so much At least thats my opinion on the matter

And then they actually tried to make "colourphobia" a thing Like, realy…

Imagine tryna get all preachy when half your collection is stollen, plundered, or brought of the black market Insain

Its painfully clear that the people who "reconstructed" these sculptures were scientists, NOT artists Any competant artists would immediately see the problem with the flat, plastic, makeup ""asthetic"" Clearly the scientists were only concerned with "filling out the data", puting the exect color, and only the exact color, that the computer told them to at each specific point. Heres the thing, these computer systems work by counting the number of specific pigment particles and averaging them to get the color for each patch However, the averaging, although technicly the most "probable" outcome for that specific number of particles, inevitably creates a blury, statistically uniform mess Theres no passion, creativity, or even any imperfections in this process, just plain statisticsl averages Somehow, I don't think the ancient sculptures would approve of a process like that

In English at least, it is true.

English, for this case, has only 11 eleven basic color terms: black, white, red, green, orange, yellow, blue, brown, pink, purple and grey.

@@reinapiratayquepaha english has a looot more than that. let's talk about green. dried bay leef green tempest sea green green lemon deep forest green kale juice green mint milk green, etc. the same goes to french (my language). you have 1 word to tell the kind of color you spot (rouge, orange, jaune, vert, bleu violet, indigo, blanc, noir, gris, brun, rose), and then a looot of words to explain what kind of green, red or pink you are talking about. because kale juice green and mint milk green have nothing to do with each other apart being green. this person is assuming that people don't care, that's where I don't agree. most of the time people have communication issues, and they lack the experience to find in their memory the same kind of green most people have already seen so they can both relate to it. that's why I said, it depends on who's speaking. someone with experience will find the words to express his colors.

@@dianemoril7612 tell me, what did you understand by "basic terms"?

What about cyan, thats pretty popular Also violet, its litterally in the rainbow we learn in school

I lost it when they claimed europe is "colourphobic" and then immedietly gave Michelangelo as an example. Like, zero self awareness…

I laughed out loud at your user name. Well done 😂 Wry toast indeed.

Oddly, that would make their origins even more cryptic.

Hahahahahaahhaha noooooooo

Exactly! Also, the anciant sculptures looked NOTHING like the "reconstructed" ones they show in the video We have found surviving paintings from ancient Creece and Rome, we know the people in said paintings don't look flat, hyper-saturated, and, to put it bluntly, ungly, we know there is more to painting than slapping a single pigment on a statue! Could be wrong, but I find it increadibly ironic how the people claiming to be against "re-writing history" are litterally rewriting history by presenting a false narrative of what these statues adtially looked like

@@namef wow I never knew that! Thanks for sharing it's really interesting.