Ancient Sculptures: Smell like a god: Ancient sculptures were scented, Danish study shows

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COPENHAGEN Science has already confirmed that sculptures from historical Greece and Rome were usually painted in heat colors and now a Danish study has revealed that some were additionally perfumed.
“A white marble statue was not intended to be perceived as a statue in stone. It was supposed to resemble a real god or goddess,” the creator of the study, Cecilie Brons, informed the Danish scientific web site Videnskab on Friday.
The archaeologist and curator on the Copenhagen museum Glyptotek made the invention after immersing herself within the works of Roman writers akin to Cicero and inscriptions on historical Greek temples.
“Perfume and perfumed oils are often mentioned as part of the ‘decoration’ that was applied to religious cult statues in antiquity,” she mentioned.
Cicero, for instance, spoke of a ritual therapy of a statue of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, the forest and animals in Greek mythology, within the Sicilian metropolis of Segesta, which was anointed with ointment and aromatic oils.
In Delos, in Greece, inscriptions in temples reveal that some statues were maintained by rubbing them with rose-scented fragrance.
Admiring a statue throughout antiquity was “not just a visual experience, but also an olfactory one,” Brons concluded in her study, printed within the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.
Previous analysis has discovered traces of pigments from long-faded paint on historical Greek and Roman statues, displaying that works lengthy assumed to be white were in truth extremely vibrant.