Moving beyond longstanding debates about whether or not ancient Mediterranean art was polychrome, the speaker will explore how polychromy impacts our interpretations of ancient objects: what we know of ancient Mediterranean conceptions of color and how art and early philosophy intersected to craft an understanding of colors as material phenomena. She will make a distinction between this pre-Newtonian understanding of color as material and a modern understanding of color as a property of light and analyze how this distinction has shaped the role of color in western art from antiquity to the present.