 Today, we're going to be talking about the white marble of ancient Rome, but of course so much of that white marble the statuary was painted here's a replica of the famous Augustus prima porta that is showing you how much of the statue was originally painted. A lot of the paint from the ancient world is going to be lost over time when these statues when these monuments are buried, but we're going to be talking about that color in the context of the white marbles of ancient Rome. First of all, what the Romans were using before marble, then incomes marble with conquest really not in a grand scale until the second century BC. Then we'll be talking about what really picks up pace in the end of the first century BC and into the imperial period will be looking at Italian marble carada. And then we'll be looking at other marbles predominantly coming from the Greek East. All right, so before you have marble, you're going to use the local volcanic conglomerates these tufts that we've talked about on many occasions you have the original wall circuit made of tuft blocks. First they're quarried extremely locally really from the hills of Rome themselves, and then over time they're going to go further afield towards the Albin hills, and they're going to be identifying and extracting better qualities of volcanic stone. Now we see them principally like this and you see in the photo the cornice, the free zone, those are blocks of tuft that are compact enough that they can take detail you'll even see examples of statuary but they're poorly the archeological record for them is poorly preserved we have to go to Monta Martini to see some examples of that, but the stuff that we call Peperino comes from either the Albin hills or nearby in Gaudi. But they're going to be superseded by better materials materials that are going to be more compact so this metamorphic limestone. It's a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals. This is what we how we define marble today. Of course, you know, we're going to see other other stones that the Romans are going to be employing, particularly when we talk about colored marbles will be including the granites that are coming from Egypt. But when we're talking about marble. We're talking about something that has less tensile strength than bronze. So you're going to have all kinds of supports around extended appendages, and of course at the base. This stuff can just snap off if the, you know, the statue is big enough on the top. So, it's not as strong as bronze will need some extra supports. It is something that is difficult to maneuver to ship to work with. It's almost three tons per cubic meter. We have to always keep that in mind as well. And then ultimately how we're going to be identifying the various white marbles. There are certain characteristics that you can just eyeball to have a pretty good sense of it's probably this or it's probably that or it's definitely not this. But the scientific analysis is able enabled us to have a much clearer picture of the origins of the white marbles. So using trace elements ESR spectroscopy, thermo luminescence and stable isotopic ratios. And there are a number of scholars around the world involved in this. And it means identifying the ancient queries and getting samples for which there could be a great variety within a given query, and then going and getting permission to take small samples from the back sides of various release architectural features and statues to then match those signatures. And there's been great progress done in the past 20 years. Here we see an example of two different marbles employed. This is the famous Pontifex Maximus statue. It's in Palazzo Massimo, for which we have done a video for Museo Nazionale Romano. You can go check out this statue in that video always on our YouTube channel. Now the body is made of Carrara or Italic marble, which is going to be quarried by Julius Caesar and Augustus really not much beforehand. But then the specific designation of the stone for the portrait, which is arguably the most important part of the statue, they choose to use a more appreciated, more famous, let's say, better quality, less imperfections. It's the Perian marble, which is known and used and exploited by the Greeks from the sixth century BC. The Romans are obviously then in this statue, making a distinction of two different kinds of white marbles. Okay, now the first temple in Rome goes back to 146 BCE, not before. What are they making temples with before they're using tough, they're using terracotta plaques, and there's infrequently the use of marble, but initially, the route most of the Republic, they're going to be just small choice pieces that are used for some statuary, some architectural feature, maybe just the head of a statue, a cult statue. Now that's all going to change with so much material coming in this market this demand for the marble and incomes not just the marble, but the sculptor, the designer of that first Greek material statue. And temple, the Jupiter stator temple in the port of St. Mattelus in the Circus Flaminius. We don't have that anymore, although we know the location. What we do have is something literally one generation away. So at the end of the second century BC, we have this temple and this is the round temple in the Forum Barriam, the cattle market, and the marble here used is Pentelec marble, which is the marble made famous by the Athenians. It comes from Pentelec just outside of Athens. So things start off on a small scale when they finally do have marble arriving. And in fact, one of the famous characteristics of this particular temple is when we look at the columns, the column capitals were actually made of two separate blocks. And that's an indication. Here's the suggestion. The indication in the scholarship is that's unusual. You don't normally make capital out of two separate blocks. It suggests then that the amount and the size of the blocks that are coming into Rome initially are not that great. So here's a solution. We'll just take two of the smaller blocks available to us, pin them together and then carve the capital. Now, keep in mind also, when we talk about the white marbles, statuary was painted. Now the paint was applied and over time reapplied. Why are they doing this? You're giving more details. You're informing the viewer more about that figure, mythological or real. Think about hair color. Think about the color of the eyes. Think about the color of the skin. You're giving details, character, drama, emotion. Think about conveying more the hair on the body. If it's a cyclops, you want that hair on the feet and the chest and the arms to stand out. Maybe it's because you want to convey or show more at the particular kind of clothing that they're wearing, which would then be distinguished from the flesh. Oftentimes, they use encaustic painting technique. Melted beeswax and paint is then applied over the surface of the marble and it has been a sort of translucent quality. So you'll still be able to see the actual surface of the marble itself. Where's the color coming from? Red is from cinnabar, which is mercury sulfite. A brownish color is from an ochre, which is just a clay earth pigment. Black can be obtained in many different ways, including burning ivory. Murek shells can be used, squashed little sea snails to get the purple dye. Blue comes from calcium copper silicate. White comes from white lead. And then you're going to be applying these to the surfaces of the statues. Now, when they're buried for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years, when you're uncovering them, most of that paint, it's biodegradable, is going to be lost. Or when it's exposed to the air after thousands of years, it eventually fades. So for example, when we go back to that Augustus prima porta statue from the beginning, the reason why we have a pretty good idea of what it looked like was that when it was on earth in the 1860s, a lot of the paint was still actually quite visible and it was documented. So what happens though as as we're unearthing these statues over the centuries through, let's say in particular the Renaissance times. There is a kind of a development of this aesthetic of appreciating the statues as they are, which by and large was not too much paint. And when we get forward into the time of Winckelmann, who is considered to be the 18th century father of art history, he's really pushing this aesthetic. So over time, we're also understanding that at times the color, if it's still there, is actually forcibly removed by those early collectors and so forth. Today, how do we understand if they're, unless it's visible like this painting here from this statue from Ponte Martini, how do we know that there was color on it? We can use ultraviolet light, but we can use microscopic analysis of the traces that are still identifiable on the surface of the statue. We can use x-ray spectroscopy. And of course, when we look at mosaics, when we look at paintings like this one from, you know, from Pompeii. When we look at the famed mummy portraits, using encaustic painting on wood, and we're seeing the tones, the shades, the color of the hair and so forth. We're understanding that, yes indeed, color, that's what the Romans saw in. They weren't looking at their artwork in black and white. They weren't looking at their statues as white statues, but they were distinguishing them with all kinds of color highlights. You also painted the letters, 9 times out of 10, for the inscriptions again to better highlight the letter forms because all, as you can see, the letters are all kind of squashed together. So you want to heighten the legibility as much as possible. Now here's an example of a hall in the form of Augustus where you actually have the traces of painting on the panels of white marble. So we don't have a ton of examples to refer to like this, but there are indeed quite a few that exist throughout the Mediterranean. Here's another famous example from Monte Martini. This is attributed to the garden estates of a caligula and a close-up. Here shows us that they're using all kinds of paints to apply to statuary. You can see how the eyes have been painted, but you can also see gold that has been applied to the surface of the skin. Here we have a portrait in the Museum of Athens, the National Museum of Athens, and we have a lot of the beard still painted. And then there would have been highlighted further by the insertion of probably glass pastes for the eyes. So when we do go around and we do take a look at architectural features, freezes, when we're taking a look at statuary, we want to then be well aware that those features, by and large, were originally painted. And sometimes it's quite obvious here we have the dying gall and the image on the right, I guess, maybe beneath my screen. What you actually see is the mortal wound applied to the surface of the skin of this man and the drops of blood that are forming on the surface of the skin. How much more that would have been highlighted with the application of paint. So where is the white marble coming from? So you have, on the one hand in Italy, the famous Carata marble, the Italic marble, but everything else is coming from, well, you can see here in what we call Greece today. That's Mount Ventalicon right by Athens, and everything else is coming from the islands in between Greece and Turkey, as well as mainland Turkey. These are all important Greek city-states with very important cores that are going to be exploited. Some already exist as early as the 6th century BC. Other ones are going to be really exploited only under Augustus and subsequent emperors. But you can see right here in terms of the white marble extraction, it's predominantly coming from the east, but also predominantly these quarry sites are islands. So you extract the stone and pop it on the ship and off you go to Rome. The major difficulty, the major costs, like for a Dakimian marble that we'll talk about shortly, is when they're at a land route, your cost is extraordinarily high because transporting by land is much more expensive, tedious and time-consuming than shipping by sea. So here we have our famous Carata marble, sure the Etruscan Dakimian as having extracted some, but really not so familiar to the Romans into the 2nd century BCE. And then of course is Julius Caesar begins to exploit it for his building project, particularly his first form of Caesar. And then on a large scale, it comes in under Augustus. And again, it's that form of Augustus that's really having quite a substantial supply, the first big use of Carata marble. And it's coming from a great distance from Rome, 350 kilometers. But hey, most of that route you can do by sea, the difficulty is extracting it from the top of a mountain and then carefully controlling the path down off the mountain to the port city. Looney to then bring it all the way to Rome. So here we get a little view past the later form. For the tour, we're going to pivot over to the form of Augustus. And we want to think about predominantly here for the columns and so forth in the staircase. It's Carata marble. It's the marble of Italy. What a great statement then for Augustus as he's employing it on a grand scale as never before seen in Rome at the time. And the white marbles Imperial Rome, let's look at Perian marble already being quarried heavily by the Greeks. It's an island. And it has it's known for just this incredible translucent quality. Number one, statuary marble for the Greeks and tellic marble has a lot of inclusions, microports and so forth. So not as prestigious, you can say, but of course use for very many projects, including the Parthenon on their cropless and Athens to Kimion marble, aphrodisiac marble. They're both really going to be heavily exploited only from Augustus and onward. And it's to Kimion. That's really, really expensive because it's inland and central Turkey and Fridja. And there is no easy way. There's no river connecting to the sea. It's a big expensive land route. So when you saw to Kimion marble in Rome, you knew it had a big price tag aphrodisiac marble is close to the coast. It's got tepe and that is these quarries. Actually, in recent times, we really understand how heavily this was being used in particular the spare longer statuary coming in either Augustan or Tiberian and date fantastic. You can see my video on it on my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash sorry, sorry. And, you know, more and more, first and second centuries, this is becoming a predominant statuary type. And with these new studies, more sophisticated studies on the marbles, it's turning out that a lot of things that like when I went to school, we were told was the carada marble is now turning out to be to Kimion marble, such as the famous commonest statue commonest as Hercules in the capital line museums. So we are getting a more refined understanding and view of the various kinds of marbles and how they're picking up and becoming more popular under certain emperors over others. So you can see the process is an island prokinesis is an island. And so obviously you get a lot of these shipments coming from an island on a boat and then off to Rome. So you can imagine then that's going to keep the cost down a prokinesis in particular is going to be very popular in the second century and on where we can see it for the columns, for example, for the temple of Hadrian, the God just down the street from the, and it has a very distinct kind of regular gray banding that goes through it. So that's when you can feel pretty confident when you look at when you're trying to eyeball it, and it's going to be used all the way forward into the fourth and fifth centuries. CE a pentallic marble is particularly popular with the Flavians. And here we're taking a look at the magnificent arch of Titus the inner arch is what's original. The outer part is made of travertine stone. That's going to be with a restoration job in the early 19th century. And we also want to keep in mind that throughout this discussion today of all these white marbles, the true white stone of ancient Rome was actually a travertine stone. Limestone quarried from Tivoli ancient keyboard. And it was in use, really from about 200 BC and onward, and the sheer amount of volume of travertine stone that comes into the city of Rome for antiquity far outweighs the amount of marble that came into the city. You won't see travertine stone as statuary building material and rather is for grand public structures like the state of admission and the Colosseum.