VATICAN CITY.- The Vatican Museums present The Colors of White exhibition, featuring 15 reproductions, some alongside the originals, aiming to show the real colours with which the works were created, before the hues were washed away by rain and bleached by the sun over the centuries.

Francesco Buranelli, director of the Vatican Museums, said, "It is an innovative and revolutionary proposal to read ancient art and understand what artists were looking for. It is as if these artworks were made right now by ancient artists."

In the 19th century, scholars knew that some ancient Greek and Roman sculptures bore traces of mainly lost pigments. But white was considered the color of ideal beauty then, following an exaltation of the ancient world by neoclassicists.

Buranelli said,"The image of a white, immaculate beauty still prevails and has become popular among the majority of the public."

Paolo Liverani, technical and scientific curator of the exhibition, said, "The aim is not to delete the white, but only to place it back to where it belongs, which is in the middle of all the other colors."