Virtual Exhibition Experience: Colours of Kore

If you asked your students to imagine travelling down a street in ancient Greece, around 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, what do you think they would picture? White buildings and white marble statues? We see this all the time in movies and stories about ancient Greece, so that must be what it looked like, right?

The statue of a young, unmarried woman visited ROM in 2022.. It's called a kore (KORE-ay), and it paints a different, more colourful picture of the past. Looking closely at the statue, you can see traces of paint that has faded over time. This shows that these ancient statues weren’t all white; they were actually painted bright colours!

Learning about the colours on Kore 670 invites students to re-think their assumptions about the past, and shows us that ideas we have can change as we learn new information. Being able to change our minds based on new facts we learn is a good skill that can help students better understand the world around them.

The ideas unlocked by Kore 670 invites students to find similar clues in many different ROM galleries, and re-think past assumptions about other objects, cultures, and works of art. Looking at objects through the lens of how humans see themselves, students can compare and contrast changing ideas of the human image through time and around the world.

The exhibition may be gone, but you can still sign up for the self-directed Virtual Experience to gain access to the annotated virtual tour!

Register your class for the free Virtual Experience