>>21409276Not all statues were outdoors statues, but that's beyond the point when you consider the exorbitant amount of wealth spent on luxury items, art and public works at the time. Paying some asshole to maintain and retouch the statues is perfectly reasonable.
I will that it perhaps was the case that at some point during the decline they decided to stop maintaining them and/or strip the color off, since they look alright without paint anyway and it's an unnecessary expense. Not to mention the fact Rome ran out of talent around the third/fourth century. If you look at works of that time you'll see what I mean. Some retards say it's a conscious style change but that's cope, Constantine looks like an anime sketch by a 14yo.
The main thing you're not considering, however, is the fact statue's original purpose wasn't solely aesthetic as it is today.
This was before photography and the explosion of visual media. You'd want a statue to be closest to the real thing because accurately depicting something you want to show around (like who the current princeps is) had communicative value. It wasn't exclusively a power move flex about having something nice.
Coins are the same way, although there is only so much you can show there.
A pleb would like to know who was ruling over them, and Patricians would've liked to peek into the past by observing depictions of their civic heroes. It wasn't just a piece of marble, statues were an attempt to capture reality for display purposes, past and present.
Thus it's logical that they'd want them to approach reality as closest as possible.
As I said before, they probably looked extremely lifelike, not what you see on these hackjob reconstructions
