Traces of polychromies in Roman sculpture: a multi-analytical approach

Recently, some museums started seeing in a new light their collections and searching for overlooked traces of painted colours: one example is the National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia, in north-eastern Italy, a Roman city close to the Adriatic Sea. Among the sculptures with an easily recognizable polychromy, five were chosen (three statues, a funerary relief and a fragment of architectural decoration), in order to give new and unpublished information about the colours on marble and stone of the Roman Aquileia between the 1st century BC and the 3rd century CE, with the support of a multi-analytical approach (imaging, FORS, Raman and microsamples).