How elaborate ceiling and plaster decoration like this doesn’t fall down baffles me. Over the fireplace here is the arms of Elizabeth I with the Latin inscription:

Honi soit qui mal y pense
(Shame on whomsoever would think badly of it)

Today it’s white over, but if you look at this watercolour of the room (purchased with the help of the Art Fund a decade ago) the frame around the crest is coloured blue and gold.  

There’s sometimes a tendency to paint over things with white to make them look ‘olde worlde’ or a bit Tudor-ish, but so often, historical objects were much more colourful than we give them credit for. Same with classical sculpture, which was often pretty gaudily painted and which we prefer to see as raw stone, or Christian decoration in places where the Reformation took hold and religious iconography was painted over.