Today, ancient Greek and Roman statues appear as plain white figures. But originally, artisans painted them with vivid colors. Their decoration continued during rituals in which ancient people adorned sculptures with clothing, jewelry and floral wreaths, and even anointed them with perfumes that gave the statues scents.

Scientific techniques have allowed researchers to confirm traces of paint on ancient sculptures. In addition, scholars have identified references to other decorative practices in ancient written sources that give us a better idea of what these statues may have looked and smelled like. Cecilie Brøns, a senior researcher at the Glyptoteket art museum in Copenhagen, says that to ancient people, statues of gods and goddesses were more than sculpted representations—they were lifelike embodiments of divinities.

“The aim of the artist was to make these sculptures look as lively as possible,” says Brøns, who published an article in March 2025 on sculpture and scents in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. “They were meant to look like they could act, speak or walk and do things. They were meant to look alive.”

Painted sculpture has a long history in the Mediterranean world. Starting around 3200 B.C., artisans on the Cyclades Islands in modern-day Greece began producing distinctive marble statuettes. After the modern rediscovery of these Bronze Age sculptures, artists like Pablo Picasso drew inspiration from their seemingly simple, abstract designs. It wasn’t until later that researchers detected traces of paint on these Cycladic sculptures, changing our understanding of what they originally looked like.

A similar shift has happened with public understanding of Greco-Roman sculptures, which had an even greater impact on modern art. Starting with the Italian Renaissance, European sculptors crafted white marble statues that resembled what they thought ancient Greek and Roman statues looked like. This trend continued with the rise of neoclassical sculpture in the 18th century. Unpainted neoclassical statues adorn cities throughout Europe and the United States, and have helped shape the public perception of Greco-Roman art as unpainted.

Yet in recent decades, researchers have upended that widely held assumption by detecting colors like yellow and red ochres, carbon-based blacks and Egyptian blue on Greco-Roman statues. Furthermore, they have argued that the surface of these statues was often entirely covered in different colors, making these polychrome sculptures much more vivid and striking than the plain white versions we see today.

These researchers are not the first to assert that Greco-Roman statues were painted. Archaeologists and scholars, going back to at least the 19th century, also detected paint, which was more likely to be preserved on buried statues. However, the biased assumption that Greco-Roman sculptures were unpainted—and that only “non-Western” people, like ancient Egyptians, painted their statues—was so ingrained that many scholars ignored these findings. Some may have even scrubbed paint off of Greco-Roman statues along with dirt and other debris.

Today, the notion that Greco-Roman statues featured colorful paint is a widely accepted fact. Institutions like the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City have held exhibits showcasing reconstructions of what Greco-Roman statues may have looked like with paint. Ancient sources suggest that people decorated these statues in other ways too, by garnishing them with physical and even scented adornments.

Brøns’ research on statues and scents suggests that Greco-Roman statues were not just visually compelling, but may have smelled nice too. Ancient people used perfume on their own bodies, so applying perfume to a statue could have added another dimension to statues’ mimesis, or imitation of life.

Ancient perfumes were thicker than the alcohol-based ones that are common today. They could be made with oil or animal fat, as well as spices or flowers to lend a particular scent. So far, scientific studies of statues haven’t focused on looking for evidence of scented oil or perfume. Because of this, Brøns has turned to ancient written sources for evidence of scented statues.

One example she found comes from the Roman orator Cicero in the first century B.C. In a record of one of his speeches, he disapprovingly described a ritual that girls and women practiced on a statue of Artemis (or Diana) in the city of Segesta. He said that the celebrants “anointed her with precious ungents,” “crowned her with chaplets and flowers” and “attended to her to the boarders of their territory with frankincense and burning perfumes.”

Both scents and physical objects like textiles and wreaths appear to have been part of the adornment known as kosmesis that ancient Greeks and Romans practiced on statues. On the Greek island of Delos, multiple inscriptions mention rose perfume as a part of statues’ kosmesis. The adornment of statues depicting gods and goddesses most likely happened during rituals. There’s also evidence that ancient people adorned statues of humans, especially during funerary rituals. Brøns hopes that her research will encourage other scholars to look for physical evidence of perfume on statues, providing more insight into how scents played a role in ancient Greek and Roman life.

“I’m quite sure if we start looking,” she says, “eventually we’ll be lucky enough to find something.”