The Washington Post recently published this article about a new exhibit at the Met displaying sculptures that use color, as opposed to 'traditional' sculptures that are generally undecorated marble. In the article, the author claims that the preference for undecorated marble emerged in the Renaissance and was "bound up with racist ideas about human beauty and civilization." That's an interesting explanation, and one that I've never heard before, usually people point exclusively to the Renaissance artists (erroneously) mimicking Roman and Greek statuary. Is it an accurate statement? The author's description of the history of sculpture uses some terms heavily associated with modern American discussions about race ("privileged," "marginalized," "whiteness"), which makes me wonder whether they aren't mistakenly wandering into presentism. Does anybody know?
This has been a subject of some debate recently. Dr. Sarah Bond wrote an article for Forbes last year, based on her scholarship, in which she made an argument similar to what the Met is saying: that modern Europeans wanted marble statues to be white because it fit their ideal of perfect beauty, i.e. whiteness. Bond mentions one German scholar, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (d. 1768), who saw color in art as evidence of barbarism and decadence--something that was tangled up in a lot of colonial discourses that included the idealized white body as well as the notion of classical simplicity (vs. oriental opulence). You can read Bond's article here.
The idealization of white skin in Europe goes back into the middle ages. Medieval writers repeatedly associate fair skin with beauty and holiness, and dark skin with barbarism and exoticism. That's not to say that medieval people shared our same ideas about race (they didn't, and you're right to recognize that these things change over time), but the seeds of modern white supremacy were already germinating in late medieval beauty standards.
Historians debate when precisely this preference for white skin because what we would today recognize as white supremacy. Ibram Kendi's recent history of racism, Stamped from the Beginning, puts it in Henry the Navigator's court in the mid-fifteenth century. Others would put it a century or so later or earlier.
Certainly, by the Rennaissance, there was a clear association between white skin, civilized people (as opposed to barbarians), and ideal beauty in Europe. It wasn't exactly the same as modern racism (our racism is rooted in centuries of slavery), but the themes that the Met describes using familiar modern language (privilege, marginalization, whiteness) were things that people were thinking about already then.