Polychrome
As André Malraux stated: "Athens was never white but her statues, bereft of color, have conditioned the artistic sensibilities of Europe [...] the whole past has reached us colorless.
Some of the best preserved examples of ancient Egyptian architecture were the tombs, covered inside with sculpted reliefs painted in bright colours or just frescos.
Description de l'Égypte is a series of early 19th century publications full of illustrations of monuments and artifacts of Ancient Egypt.
In some cases, only a few traces of paint remained on the walls, pillars and sculptures, but the illustrators attempted successfully at showing the buildings' original state in their pictures.
Such acceptance was later accelerated by observation of minute color traces by microscopic and other means, enabling less tentative reconstructions than Hittorff and his contemporaries had been able to produce.
During the Han and Tang dynasties, polychrome ceramic figurines of servants, entertainers, tenants, and soldiers were placed in the tombs of people from upper-class.
Similarly to what was happening in China, the introduction of Buddhism in Japan in 538 (or perhaps 552 AD) lead to the production of polychrome Japanese Buddhist sculptures.
These were often destroyed or whitewashed during iconoclast phases of the Protestant Reformation or in other unrest such as the French Revolution, though some have survived in museums such as the V&A, Musée de Cluny, and Louvre.
The "Majesty Portal" of the Collegiate church of Toro is the most extensive remaining example, due to the construction of a chapel which enclosed and protected it from the elements just a century after it was completed.
Monochromatic color solutions of architectural orders were also designed in the late, dynamic Baroque, drawing on the ideas of Borromini and Guarini.
There, faux marble columns are made from wood pillars that are covered in a layer of polychrome stucco, a mixture of plaster, lime, and pigment.
When the material hardens it is polished by rubbing with fine sandpaper, and thus this layer of polychrome stucco becomes glossy and imitates really realistically marble.
The State Dining Room of the Inveraray Castle in Scotland, decorated by two French painters, is a good example of a polychrome Louis XVI style interior.
During the 18th century, German kilns finally figured out how to make porcelain, beginning with the alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger and the physicist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, who made the first European variety in 1709.
Despite evidence of polychrome being discovered on Ancient Greek architecture and sculptures, most Neoclassical buildings have white or beige facades, and black metalwork.
Around 1840, the French architect Jacques Ignace Hittorff, published studies of Sicilian architecture, documenting extensive evidence of color.
Maximalism is present in many types of Victorian era designs, like ceramics, furniture, cutlery, tableware, fashion, architecture, book illustration, clocks, etc.
However, up to the 1960s, with the rise of Postmodernism, when people started to question Modernism and began to appreciate things from the pre-Modern past, the verdict of Victorian designs wasn't good.
At the end of the 19th century, Marc-Louis Solon (1835–1913), a well established ceramic designer, who worked for Minton and Company, was not unusual in commenting that the period 'bears the stamp of an unmitigated bad taste'.
Pioneer Modern architects Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier felt that works like this were not simply bad, they were such an affront they should have been made illegal.
During these periods, brickwork, stone, tile, stucco, and metal facades were designed with a focus on the use of new colors and patterns, while architects often looked for inspiration to historical examples ranging from Islamic tilework to English Victorian brick.
The Belgian and French form is characterized by organic shapes, ornaments taken from the plant world, sinuous lines, asymmetry (especially when it comes to objects design), the whiplash motif, the femme fatale, and other elements of nature.
The geometric ornaments found in Gustav Klimt's paintings and in the furniture of Koloman Moser are representative of the Vienna Secession (Austrian Art Nouveau).
The style involved reducing an object (whether a painting or a design) to its essentials, using only black, white and primary colours, and a simple geometry of straight lines and planes.
[70] Despite their lack of ornamentation, multiple Mid-century modern designs, like Lucienne Day's textiles, Charles and Ray Eames's Hang-It-All coat hanger (1953), or Irving Harper's Marshmallow sofa (1956), are decorated with colours.
In the UK, John Outram created numerous bright and colourful buildings throughout the 1980s and 90s, including the "Temple of Storms" pumping station.
She devoted the later decades of her life to building a live-in sculpture park in Tuscany, the Tarot Garden, with artworks covered in vibrant colourful mosaics.
[81] Polychrome building facades later rose in popularity as a way of highlighting certain trim features in Victorian and Queen Anne architecture in the United States.
Polychromy reappeared with the flourishing of the preservation movement and its embrace of (what had previously been seen as) the excesses of the Victorian era and in San Francisco, California in the 1970s to describe its abundant late-nineteenth-century houses.
These earned the endearment 'Painted Ladies', a term that in modern times is considered kitsch when it is applied to describe all Victorian houses that have been painted with period colors.
