Category of Nice to Know and Not a Surprise

By now it's not a surprise to learn, or rather, relearn that the ancient statuary and monuments of Rome and Greece were highly multicolored, polychromed, even garish and gaudy by our standards. The modern Roman forum is actually just a bunch of ruin porn, aged and sad.

So we learn that the menorah, the one up on that Arch of Titus, that triumphal arch that was built to celebrate the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and of the temple and the dispersal of Jews throughout the empire, was painted yellow. Actually, it was painted ochre, which they say that from a distance looked gold. The latest generation of ultraviolet-visual absorption spectrometers are more manageable and more sensitive. That's nice to know.