“an investigation of white and its many connotations, from purity to infinity, from newness to blankness, from light to transcendence”

Plato, as it happens, used 'whiteness' as his example of how perception of qualities depends on an interaction between the eye and the appropriate object meeting together in combination with an ideal to become 'not whiteness but a white thing' (Theatetus). It's tempting to suppose that marble might have been that 'thing', but even though we instinctively think of marble sculpture as white there are already contradictions built in that story: not only are there plenty of marble of other swirling colours, the Greeks and Romans actually painted their sculptures and it is only the passage of time which has established the look we now take as characteristic.