Why can’t it be both?
The original was probably painted too–not that I’m really gonna defend the giant oscar plating thing…except, when you walk around the corner on the Chicago street, minding your own business, and you suddenly catch sight of the thing on the ground floor of a glass lobby office tower, it’s, well, startling and pretty and larger than life. Dunno, I guess I am defending it!
That’s a good point. Our idea of ancient sculpture as pure, white and ethereal, which of course inspired the aesthetics of the Renaissance, the Baroque period and beyond, is pretty far off from how a lot of it would have looked before all the paint flaked off. Some of it was probably pretty tacky.
How dare those ancient Greeks and Romans take their own sublime art, and turn it into trash? 
Is this a stealth brag? Those aren’t “hugely proportioned legs” – they’re shapely and muscular. Condolences on your beautiful legs, I guess?
So, How ya doin?