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Smell like a god: Ancient sculptures were scented, Danish study shows

Science has already proven that sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome were often painted in warm colors, and now a Danish study has revealed that some were also perfumed.

"A white marble statue was not intended to be perceived as a statue in stone. It was supposed to resemble a real god or goddess," the author of the study, Cecilie Brons, told the Danish scientific website Videnskab on Friday.

The archaeologist and curator at the Copenhagen museum Glyptotek made the discovery after immersing herself in the works of Roman writers such as Cicero and inscriptions on ancient Greek temples.

"Perfume and perfumed oils are often mentioned as part of the 'decoration' that was applied to religious cult statues in antiquity," she said.

Cicero for example spoke of a ritual treatment of a statue of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt, the forest and animals in Greek mythology, in the Sicilian city of Segesta which was anointed with ointment and fragrant oils.

In Delos, in Greece, inscriptions in temples reveal that some statues were maintained by rubbing them with rose-scented perfume.

Admiring a statue during antiquity was "not just a visual experience, but also an olfactory one," Brons concluded in her study, in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.

Previous research has found traces of pigments from long-faded paint on ancient Greek and Roman statues, showing that works long assumed to be white were in fact highly colorful.