classicism: idealized ideals

My awesome friend at work found this article about an archaeologist restoring Grecian ruins to their original color, and makes a strong argument that the ancients would have seen bare marble as undesirable. It's funny, because we have embraced these things in their raw simplicity, accepted their luminous marble uniformity as a tenet of their character and idolized them accordingly. We value the elegance and restraint, the appreciation of the material's inherent qualities, the respectful honesty and wisdom of it. I suspect it played a role in our modern love of materials' innate qualities from frank Lloyd Wright's bare bricks to Mies van der Roe's exposed I-beams and polished concrete to Aalto's /Danish Modern wood. It's a fundamental part of our classical heritage, even though it is as imaginary as the 18th century belief in the Egyptian heritage of the British.

It's almost like we don't idealize just the ancient Greeks, forgetting their gaudy and foolish humanity, we idealize their ideals. We cherish an idealized history; as archaeologists flesh out more and more truths about their lives and times they paint the source of our ideals with humanity- and divorce them from the value that we find in them. These painted reproductions are unlikely to attract the reverence of their ghostly originals, splashed with the too-familiar indulgences of humanity, they are not nearly as compelling as their mute remnants. The humanity of it is amply available in ourselves; it's the idealized version of these ideals we need, the restrained, the purified; something other than, better than ourselves, truer even in their deceit as if time has washed away the foolishness of our predecessors and preserved for us only the best hidden within them.