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Ancient Greek and Roman Statues Were Not Only Beautiful But Also Smelled Nice

New research suggests that sculptures were perfumed with sweet-smelling fragrances such as rose and beeswax. In ancient Greece and Rome, statues not only looked beautiful—they smelled good, too.

That’s the conclusion of a new study published this month in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. Cecilie Brøns, who authored the study and works as an archaeologist and curator at the Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen, finds that Greco-Roman statues were often perfumed with enticing scents like rose, olive oil and beeswax.

These fragrances were “not merely decorative but symbolic, enhancing the religious and cultural significance of these sculptures,” writes Bill Giannopoulos for the Greek City Times. In some instances, the scents were also applied in ways that helped preserve the statues.

While reading ancient Greco-Roman texts, Brøns noticed a handful of references to sweet-smelling statues. She was intrigued, so she decided to go looking for even more mentions of scented sculptures.

Brøns was surprised to find lots of evidence in texts by Cicero, Callimachus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder and Pausanias, among other writers. Several of these texts mentioned anointing statues of Greek and Roman deities—including one depicting Artemis, the Greek goddess of wild animals, in Sicily. Statues of rulers, such as Egypt’s Berenice II, were also perfumed, Brøns finds.

The statues were anointed in different ways. In some instances, they were covered in a mixture of waxes and oils through a process known as “ganosis.” In others, they were coated in olive oil as part of a process called “kosmesis,” which was meant to help protect the sculptures from the elements.

The fragrances would have made viewing the statues not only a visual experience, “but also an olfactory one,” Brøns writes in the paper.

Ancient Greeks and Romans often decorated sculptures with colorful paint, as well as jewelry, fabrics, flowers, garlands and ribbons.

Today, ancient Greco-Roman statues housed in museums are typically stark white and devoid of decoration. But research by Brøns and others suggests that wasn’t always the case.

By the time people in Italy began excavating ancient artworks during the Renaissance, the vibrant pigments had mostly faded away—and any color that had managed to survive quickly disappeared once the statues were exposed to the air and sunlight; cleaning procedures also erased many lingering traces of color.

“Taking their cue from these seemingly unpainted marbles, artists like Michelangelo left their Renaissance sculptures similarly unadorned,” wrote Meilan Solly for Smithsonian magazine in 2022.

The myth of the all-white Greco-Roman sculpture persisted after Johann Winckelmann, an 18th-century art historian and archaeologist, wrote that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well. Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence."

But, in reality, ancient Greeks and Romans embraced bold colors, which archaeologists call “polychromy.” Brightly hued paints and embellishments would have created the illusion that statues were alive—and scents would have added to that illusion, Brøns tells All That’s Interesting’s Kaleena Fraga.

“For example, a cult statue of a god or goddess with such decoration placed in a temple, would have given the visitor to the temple the impression that the divinity was somehow present in the temple,” she adds.

By Sarah Kuta!.

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