I love wood and have a number of wooden statues of Our Lady, many of them carved in Anri studios at different points in the 20th century. They are old and for the most part, only the natural wood ramains... but when new, they were painted as well! It is odd to consider how our perceptions depend on the time when we encountered something for the first time. Whether it is a city, an ancient Greek statue made of marble or a wooden statue made by Anri. What is conjured in our minds when we think of these things is our own point of encounter, often quite different from the original.
In the case of the ancient Greek statues of marble and the Anri wooden carvings, I think I prefer the item ravaged by age. Perhaps this is somewhat sad and I should hate to think that I myself am more the 'honest' version of my own self now that I have aged, with the brightness and hope chipped away by the decades than I was when I was newly minted by my Creeator... but in the case of these objects, representations mainly of gods and goddesses, I do prefer the medium stripped down to itself rather than obscured by paints.
Even in India and Nepal, for the most part, when I encountered the Hindu gods and goddesses in their temples or on their carts in procession, they being ancient no longer were painted either, but displayed the dimmed lustre of the brass from which they were fashioned. Curious, isn't it? I spent a great deal of my childhood in museums. My own vision of history and other civilisations therefore probably was determined by the fact that I first encountered most objects and symbols in an altered setting, behind glass, preserved for the future, rather than finding them when they were new, before the value that history imposes on such items had accrued.
