Museum visitors have long admired classical Greek statues for their pure white marble, and generations of artists took that whiteness as the essence of classical taste. Traces of pigment, however, survive on many sculptures, and ultraviolet imaging now reveals that these figures were once painted in vivid reds, blues, and golds. The white we revere is an accident of time: paint weathered away, and later restorers sometimes scrubbed off what remained, assuming the residue was dirt. The discovery unsettles a long tradition of taste, for the restrained pallor that neoclassical critics praised as the summit of refinement never existed in antiquity. Some scholars go further, suggesting that our attachment to white marble reveals more about the aesthetic preferences of recent centuries than about the ancient world these statues supposedly represent.