No one knows how it looked like, but this is almost certainly not what it looked like, that’s just made to look good or “realistic”. The preserved pigments on this statue have been analysed and the reproduction in your comment is what the base colours looked like. What or if something was on top of them nobody knows. It might simply have been a different kind of aesthetics we’re not used to.
The obvious clue that this reconstruction was done by someone who has no idea about the topic is the purple. While the real paludamentum could have been purple, the purple available back then used as paint on a statue would have faded extremely fast. A couple days or weeks of sun at most and it would have been gone. Even inside it wouldn’t last long. Considering how absurdly expensive it was this is simply not plausible. It was only really usable and durable as a dye for fabric.
2 comments
*”Augustus of Prima Porta” (0 is a typo, sry)
Please guys, for the love of Jupiter, remember this is how it looked like and [not this shite reproduced everywhere](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Oxford._Ashmolean_Museum._Gods_in_Colour._Augustus_of_Prima_Porta_2.jpg).
No one knows how it looked like, but this is almost certainly not what it looked like, that’s just made to look good or “realistic”. The preserved pigments on this statue have been analysed and the reproduction in your comment is what the base colours looked like. What or if something was on top of them nobody knows. It might simply have been a different kind of aesthetics we’re not used to.
The obvious clue that this reconstruction was done by someone who has no idea about the topic is the purple. While the real paludamentum could have been purple, the purple available back then used as paint on a statue would have faded extremely fast. A couple days or weeks of sun at most and it would have been gone. Even inside it wouldn’t last long. Considering how absurdly expensive it was this is simply not plausible. It was only really usable and durable as a dye for fabric.