alt Hacker NewsThey're making it up no matter what they do, since we don't know how these things were originally painted and have no way of knowing. They should just present the reconstructions as interpretations and actually try to do a good job painting them. I agree with the article that what they're doing now is harmful to the public understanding.
I mean, we kind of do though? We could assume that the surviving images of statues showing how they were painted are accurate. If you know the colour of the underlayer, this actually lets you determine exactly what the colouration of the paint on top of that is despite it not being present whatsoever
This gives you a general trend of how brightly underlayed statues tended to be painted afterwards to finish them, and lets you infer how other statues without surviving coloured pictures of them would have appeared based on the likely prevailing style at the time