�y��vlog

While this new monochrome work — inspired by the expression of yin and yang — is more tranquil than Brown’s usual party of polychromy, his paintings still dance with an appealing musicality.

She was one of some 17 reconstructions — made circa 2005-2019 — in a new exhibition, “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color,” which evokes how the Greeks and Romans painted their sculptures, a practice called polychromy.

However, some historians worry that the Met Museum has elevated the increasingly ubiquitous Brinkmann replicas to an iconic status that is becoming the default representation of ancient polychromy, when the couple’s research is just one among dozens of competing theories.

The Met Museum’s own research on ancient polychromy flourished under its third director, Edward Robinson, who witnessed archaeologists unearthing sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis bearing traces of paint and wrote an influential paper on the subject in 1892.

Awareness of polychromy has been cyclical ever since the Mediterranean empires fell hundreds of years ago.