I read a brilliant piece in the New Yorker on the weekend titled The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture. The article explored the world of polychromy –– painting sculpture or architecture in colour –– and questioned Western ideals of beauty, ones rooted in an erroneous assumption that deities, leaders and war heroes were immortalized in pure white. It’s a fascinating read. To see colour reconstructions of ancient sculptures, ones I grew up studying, is exciting. Some find the colour lewd and gaudy, but to me, the pink and ocher and azurite brings the sculptures to life, and gives them a soul. As one scholar said, “nobody has a problem hailing Nefertiti as a spectacular piece of world art, and nobody says that it’s unfortunate that it’s painted. Because it’s not Western, it’s perfectly O.K. for it to be polychrome. But let’s not have it in our part of the world, because we’re different, aren’t we?”