“Unveiling the Scented Secrets of Antiquity: How Ancient Statues Transformed the Air We Breathe”
What’s more, it changed how ancient people interacted with them. Rather than walk by a blank, white statue in a sterile museum-like space, an ancient passerby would have experienced a colorful, perfumed statue as a powerful representation, even a living embodiment, of a god or a ruler.
“Admiring a statue in the ancient world was not just a visual experience,” the new study’s author, Cecilie Brøns said, “but also an olfactory one.”
The Scents Of Greco-Roman Statues During Antiquity
As described in a new study published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, Brøns began her investigation into the scents of millennia-old classical statues by poring over ancient texts to see how Greco-Roman writers described them.
Public DomainThe statue of Zeus at Olympia, long since lost to time, was one of the statues described as being anointed with olive oil.
An archaeologist and curator at the Glyptotek art museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, Brøns soon found multiple references to how statues were perfumed in antiquity. Texts from Cicero, Callimachus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and Pausanias all described the different ways that statues were scented.
“Perfumes were used not just for living human bodies,” Brøns explained, “but also for ancient sculptures… not only were sculptures originally polychrome and adorned but in some cases they were also scented.”
She found that, though methods varied, ancient Romans and ancient Greeks routinely doused statues of deities or rulers with pleasant scents.
How The Ancient Statues Of Greece And Rome Were Performed
As Brøns reported in her study, many of the statues that were anointed with perfumes were statues of Roman and Greek gods. In Sicily, for instance, the statue of Artemis was ritualistically anointed with perfume. At Greece’s Sanctuary of Delos, meanwhile, Brøns also found inscriptions listing perfume ingredients — olive oils, beeswax, and natron, among them — which were used on statues of Artemis and Hera. Archaeologists have also uncovered ancient perfume workshops in Delos.
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