20 years ago, a friend of mine participated to the renovation of an old chapel somewhere in the south of France. The initial plan was to clean it up and make it all nice and stone-colored, as churches should be, but the first scrubbings revealed lots of pigment traces, enough to get a good idea of what it looked like originally. The sky was deep blue, the saints had skin color and red lips, etc.
The project took a complicated turn because some of the stakeholders wanted the chapel to look like a serious chapel while others wanted it to look "original".
The "original" camp prevailed but it was an uphill battle.
In England at least it was only after Reformation that the colour was removed from churches. And this has been known forever.
"Before the Reformation, English churches were typically ornate and richly decorated," [1]
So it's a surprise to me that anyone would believe that an old chapel in the south of France would necessarily be austere and plain, I would expect rather the opposite. And there are plenty of modern churches in Catholic countries that are very richly decorated today.
> So it's a surprise to me that anyone would believe that an old chapel in the south of France would necessarily be austere and plain
IIRC the project started in a very amateurish way. The area had been steadily declining for decades and at some point the locals created a bunch of non-profits to finance small projects like that one in the hope of making the place more attractive. All without much help from central authorities.
The chapel restoration involved students, amateur artists, etc. with no particular knowledge of the subject. The Church wasn't involved either at the start because the building had been abandoned for over a century and no one cared.
So the initial plan was to make it look like other chapels in the area: rustic, mineral, austere.
The project went sideways when they discovered those pigment traces all over the place. Regional museums and universities got involved, local government took notice, and the Church weighted in as well. At that point, it became obvious to anyone that, indeed, those places had been brightly painted from the start. But the general art direction had taken a turn for the austere a long time ago and there were a lot of people who liked things that way because… that's what they were used to.
The restoration of the Sistine Chapel also attracted a lot of criticism because people liked the dark and mysterious muted images, and when cleaned it was revealed that Michelangelo used vibrant color.
It was the restoration of the whole chapel, which had been in ruins for a long time. Plastering, sculptures, murals, etc. they restored the whole thing. As it turned out, _everything_ used to be painted in wild colors: the whole roof was painted in a vibrant blue, with stars and all, the statues of the saints were painted with pink for the skin, etc.
The project took a complicated turn because some of the stakeholders wanted the chapel to look like a serious chapel while others wanted it to look "original".
The "original" camp prevailed but it was an uphill battle.