«Only colour, rather than form or size, is the object of visual perception » (Galen, On the doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, VII, 7).

In the archaeological tradition colour has been subordinated to form. Consequently, the impact of the colour code of Antiquity on our own has been lost. It is only in the last twenty years that archaeologists have focused on the well-preserved colours (mosaics, painting, marbles) and established a physico-chemical protocol to study those that are no longer visible with the naked eye on sculpture. However, also because the data are quantitatively insufficient, using the data obtained from material science to write a cultural history of colour, is a challenge that has never yet been attempted, and one that will revolutionise our perspective on the semantics of colour.

COLOURCONCEPT proposes to unravel the cultural meaning of colour in the Roman empire and the Late Antiquity (31 BCE-6^th c. CE), documenting on a large scale the remains of non-immediately visible colours (“colours lost”) by physico-chemical analysis (Multi Sp. and Hypersp. imaging, microscopy, pXRF, pRaman, SEM/EDS, TOF/SIMS) on a corpus of sculpture and architectural elements representative of the Roman Empire and its heirs.

The project relies on established partnerships with significant museum collections and institutions.

Collecting both published and unpublished data from the collections of major museums and institutions, an open-access database dedicated to the polychromy of ancient sculpture is offered in this website. This tool is designed to foster the integration and comparison of the results and promote greater data interoperability and advancing scholarship on ancient polychromy, as well as its broader dissemination.