yOHN = A-ORF

— Colour
and Meaning
Art, Science and
Symbolism — a

IN
 colour and Meaning
rt, Science and Symbolism
lohn Gage
‘

1scolour just a physiological phenomenon — a sensation

resulting from different wavelengths of light on receptors
in the eye? Does colour have an effect on feelings? And
how is pure sensation processed by the brain related
to language? This pioneering, vividly written book is
ultimately informed by the conviction that colour is a
contingent, historical phenomenon whose meaning, like
language, lies in the particular historical contexts in
which it is experienced and interpreted.

John Gage expands his lucid and lively discussion of the

topics and issues hinted at in his previous prize-winning
book Colour and Culture. For Colour and Meaning he
has chosen some familiar territory, yet his approach to
each subject is original and new. He explores the mys-
teries of themes as diverse as the optical mixing tech-
niques implicit in mosaic; medieval colour-symbolism;
the equipment of the manuscript illuminator’s workshop;
the colour-languages of Latin America at the time of the
Spanish Conquest; the earliest history of the prism; the
colour-ideas of Goethe and Runge, Blake and Turner,
Seurat and Matisse; and the use of colour in early
abstract painting. From the perspective of the history of
science, Gage comments on the bearing of Newton’s
optical discoveries on painting, the chemist Chevreul’s
contact with painters and the growing interest of psy-
chologists in the topic of colour in the late nineteenth
century. One invaluable chapter documents the literature
on the historical interpretation of colour in art.

For students and lecturers in the history of art and cul-

ture, for artists and designers, and for psychologists
and scientists with a special interest in the subject —
indeed for all intrigued by this many-sided phenome-
non, John Gage has produced a compelling study of
the meaning of colour through the ages.

With 137 illustrations, 37 in colour

 OK NO: 178540

ilIMM IIi
This book is due for return on or before the last
date shown below.

~ 4 NOY 2006

11 DEC 2006
12 JAN 2007

19 FEB 2997
28 SEP 2007.
Colour and Meaning
 Hie oN GeoA GE

Colour
and Meaning
Art, Science and
Symbolism
with 137 illustrations, 37 in colour

AND =
5S INFORMATION Gj
4 SERVICES —2>/
CAERLEON

T&H
——
THAMES AND HUDSON
For Bob Herbert, Thomas Lersch and Georges Roque,
whose writings have so often eased me into colour

Frontispiece: Brother Rufillus, self-portrait painting the letter “R’,

c. 1170-1200. Geneva, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana

Designed by Liz Rudderham

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback is sold subject to
the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out
or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
conditionincluding these words being imposed on a subsequent purchaser.

© 1999 JOHN GAGE

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy,
recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-§00-23767-0

Printed and bound in Singapore by CS Graphics

 Contents

Introduction 7

Part One
1 The Contexts of Colour 11
The history of art as a unifying subject + Artefacts and attitudes » The harmony ofcolours
The non-standard observer + Colour in context

2 Colour and Culture 21

Colour-usage and colour-systems + The spectrum and the natural world + ‘Basic Color Terms’
A disdain for colour + Colour-psychology: chromotherapy and the Liischer Test
High culture, popular culture

3 Colour in Art and its Literature 34

The politics of colour + Colour and gender + The formalist tradition « The substance of colour
Theories and assumptions + Alberti to Diirer + Science into art + Science — ‘the taste of all minds’
Twentieth-century theory + Colour as content + Colour-change: shot fabric and modelling + Colour and
symbol - Reception and response + Theories ofharmony + Representing colour + The history of colour

Part Tivo
4 Colour in History — Relative and Absolute 67
Iconography in the early Middle Ages: brightness versus hue + Colour as symbol
Red and purple in the scale ofcolours +» Medieval blues » The point ofpointillism » The mind
of the mosaicist » Atoms and mixtures + The luminous imperative

5 Colour-words and Colour-patches 90

Scribes and spectacles + Nequam’s colour-terms + Marginal notes + The medieval palette
Red and green: the psychological effects of colour

6 Ghiberti and Light 98

Ghiberti and gemstones + The art ofglass + The humanists and light

7 Color Colorado — Cross-cultural Studies in the Ancient Americas 105

‘Basic Color Terms’ — the problems + Colour-terms and colour-products
Colour and direction + The significance ofred

8 The Fool’s Paradise 121

The hexagonal stone + The reduction of means + The prism in the sixteenth century
Scarmiglioni on colour + Glass versus crystal + The spectral colours

9 Newton and Painting 134

Doctrines of mixture + In search of harmony — printing the primaries + The principles of harmony:
colour and music + Harmony and complementarity
 10 Blake’s Newton 144
Adapting Michelangelo + Blake’s interest in optics + The material bow

11 Magilphs and Mysteries 153

The lure of Venetian colour + The Secret exposed + The aftermath

12 Turner as a Colourist 162

Local colour + Primaries — the ‘colour-beginning’ + Light and colour + The relativity of colour

13 ‘Two Different Worlds’ - Runge, Goethe and the Sphere of Colour 169
Goethe and Runge + Steffens, Schiffermiiller and the Farben-Kugel
The suppression ofsymbolism

14 Mood Indigo — From the Blue Flower to the Blue Rider 185
The blue flower « Gendering of blue + An anthropology ofcolour + Goethe’s following:
symbol versus substance + Bocklin and Bezold » Experimental psychology: Fechner and Wundt
Kandinsky and blue + Goethe in the twentieth century

15 Chevreul between Classicism and Romanticism 196

Chevreul and Vernet + Painting inflat tints + Shades ofgrey

16 The Technique of Seurat - A Reappraisal 209

Seurat’s reading + Painterly experiment + The primacy of Chevreul

17 Seurat’s Silence 219

Helmholtzian chromatics + Dubois-Pillet and Hayet + Vibert and science + Indefinable colour

18 Matisse’s Black Light 228

Matisse’s Manet + Half a scientist » Dark light

19 Colour as Language in Early Abstract Painting 241

Colour in Theosophy and in Kandinsky + Nature and system
The significance of primaries + A language ofcolour

20 A Psychological Background for Early Modern Colour 249

Kandinsky’s grammar ofcolour + Delaunay’s practical theory
Mondrian’s primary order, Ostwald’s theory ofharmony

21 Making Sense of Colour — The Synaesthetic Dimension 261

Perception and deception + The unity ofthe senses + Colour and physiology
Synaesthesia and aesthetics

Acknowledgments 270

Notes to the Text 271

Select Bibliography 306

List of Illustrations 312

Index 315
 Introduction

ce WELCOME WHICH MET my earlier book, Colour and Culture: Practice and
Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, has encouraged me to think that my _
curiosity about colour may be shared by a wider public, and that this public could
be further interested in other topics in the history of colour which for one reason
or another could not find a place there.
One controversial area of colour-studies, which has developed substantially since
I wrote that book, has been in philosophy, through which colour became interest-
ing to the philosophical school of deconstruction as it reached beyond literature to
concern itself with the visual arts.’ As it happens Jacques Derrida, who has perhaps
written more than other deconstructionists on visual topics, has admitted that only
words interest him;* and in an essay on the often wordy drawings of Valerio Adami
he has concluded that ‘color has not yet been.named’.3 Adami himself, who is a
painter as well as a draughtsman, argues that ‘color is the instrument for reading
drawing as the voice 1s the instrument for reading writing’.t Colour is thus con-
ceived of as akin to musical timbre, as the ancillary qualifier of design 1n its tradi-
tional role of articulating ideas in a graphic mode like script.
Another deconstructionist, Stephen Melville, has recently posed the philosophi-
cal problem of colour, again without attempting to address it:
color can also seem bottomlessly resistant to nomination, attaching itself
absolutely to its own specificity and the surfaces on which it has or finds its
visibility, even as it also appears subject to endless alteration arising through its
juxtaposition with other colors. Subjective and objective, physically fixed and
culturally constructed, absolutely proper and endlessly displaced, color can
appear as an unthinkable scandal. The story of color and its theory within the
history of art is a history of oscillations between its reduction to charm or
ornament and its valorization as the radical truth of painting. From these oscil-
lations other vibrations are repeatedly set in motion that touch and disturb
matters as purely art-historical as the complex inter-locking borders among
and within the individual arts and as culturally far-reaching as codings of race
and gender and images of activity and passivity.
And Melville continues:

This movement of color in painting is a movement in or of deconstruction.

And if deconstruction can in some sense feel at home in reading the texts of
INTRODUCTION

color as they pass from the Renaissance through de Piles and Goethe and
Chevreul, it is in a much harder place when it comes to actually speaking the
work and play of color — not because that work and play are ineffable but
’ is the work ofart and its history.°
because its ‘speakingjust
So, what to do? The chapters that follow attempt to expose and explore the his-
toricity of colour. They deconstruct that immanence, as well as that potential for
organization in colour which has commended it, especially since Locke and Kant,
to philosophical purposes. But if colour, to yield meaning, must be named (and this
is a view which has a good deal to recommend it), the history of thisnaming should
be of absorbing interest to philosophers themselves, who have so far, and for the
most part, been content to accept the assumptions about colour-naming and orga-
nization current until their own times. Thus Kant, who has had such a crucial role
in the shaping of Derrida’s aesthetics, supposed, in the tradition ofAristotle, that
simple colours might be considered beautiful on account of their unmixed purity,
but that they might also be beautiful by virtue oftheir ‘form’ — that is, the ‘regular-
ity’ they derived from their status as vibrations of the ether, a concept he took from
the earlier eighteenth-century German mathematician Leonhard Euler.°® Wittgen-
stein, for his part, assumed that it would be appropriate to work with a six-colour
circle, derived from, say, Goethe or Runge.” Philosophers have not usually been
concerned to question the grounds ofthese assumptions; that is the task ofthe his-
torian of colour.
Any semiotics of colour must be historically contingent, and it is largely the local
historical contingencies which the studies here seek to identify. But an assessment
of historical contingencies must rest on a judgment of the immanent character of
the colour under examination — that is, on a phenomenological approach to colour-
questions, and this is what several recent philosophers of colour, as well as the older
school of Koloritgeschichte have offered (see pp. 36-41).*
This book is, of course, largely a book of words, but it also presents many cases
where words have been felt to be less than adequate to the task of characterizing
colour. If deconstruction sees nothing beyond the ‘text’, colour at least can afford an
instance of where text falls short of any close engagement with phenomena. Which
is why, although colour has offered much to philosophers, philosophy, concerned as
it has traditionally been with discursive thinking, has had little to offer for the
understanding of colour. It is arguable that the reader will find more to stimulate
perceptions of colour in the late painter and film-maker Derek Jarman’s autobio-
graphical rag-bag Chroma (1994) than in, say, Barry Maund’s philosophical treat-
ment in Colours (1995), even though Maund gives an admirable survey of current
thinking on the subject.
My own theoretical position is implicit in the three chapters which together
form Part I of this book. The first, The Contexts of Colour, proposes that an art-
historical approach to colour offers the best opportunity for a unifying vision,
because of the close engagement of practising artists and craftworkers in colour-
perceptions, as well as because many of their works have survived to be analysed by
technical methods which are daily increasing in precision and scope.
 INTRODUCTION

The second chapter, Colour and Culture, seeks to illustrate the historical con-
tingency of colour-perceptions, particularly as they are exemplified in colour-
language.
The third, Colour in Art and Its Literature, is intended to lay out various factors
intrinsic to a study of colour in the visual art of the West — from the technological
constraints, to theories accessible to artists and craftworkers, to colour-iconography
and its modern interpretation, to viewing-conditions, and on to the language of
colour-analysis itself. In this sense, it works in the opposite direction to the imma-
nent method of deconstruction, which starts from the ‘text’ immediately present to
the reader. It adopts the view that, although historiography inevitably works back-
wards from the present to the past, history as it is experienced does not. And it is
one of the tasks of the historian to reconstitute the original order of events.
Origins are crucial, since they suggest purposes and functions which are likely to
change over time; and in various studies in this collection I have attempted to go
further into origins, for example, in discussing spectacles (Chapter 5: Colour-words
and Colour-patches) and the triangular prism (Chapter 8: The Fool’s Paradise),
which may at first sight seem to have rather little to do with colour.
Although the idea of ‘clearing the ground’ might be used to characterize the
opening section of the book, all the chapters may be read in a similar light. Since
many of them have their source in occasional papers or catalogue essays they
attempt to look at often familiar art from a new perspective, or to bring newly
recovered texts to bear on old questions. They may thus seem at first to ignore what
have been generally accepted as the central issues in the various periods under dis-
cussion, but this impression will, I hope, prove to be illusory.
If there is a unifying thread running through these chapters, it is that since colour
has a vivid life outside the realm of art, its problems even within that realm cannot
be understood exclusively from within the history and theory of art itself; or rather
that at least in respect of colour, that history and that theory must be seen to be part
of a larger picture. Until the twentieth century, when the formalism that developed
in late nineteenth-century art history began to affect the attitudes of artists and
critics themselves, such a view would have been assumed, rather than thought to be
in need ofdefence.
Perhaps the most important theoretical linking-thread is the consideration that if
art and science have been united in their concern for colour, this unity has not
noticeably involved the subordination of one interest to the other. Historians of
science have long been familiar (in the face of frequent opposition from profes-
sional scientists) with the art of science; historians of art are still perhaps reluctant —
with the frequent support ofartists themselves — to consider the science of art. This
may be because the dominance of literary studies in the recent historiography of art
has tended to limit theory to rhetoric. But if Blake and Matisse are now seen to be
more, and Seurat to be less ‘scientific’ than was once believed, this is surely because
their activities as visual artists engaged them in perceptions which, in their day as in
ours, were scarcely accessible to theory. I hope by looking again at these perceptions
to have restored some fluidity to the notions of ‘science’ and ‘art’ in the visual
sphere.
INTRODUCTION

Another underlying theme is more negative, and it is that, although there must
indeed be a ‘spirit of the times’, which works as mysteriously as the spread of chil-
dren’s games or schoolboy jokes, and directs thoughtful people to common issues of
the day, the history of colour ideas can give little comfort to those who believe in
homogeneous cultures. I have highlighted the contradictions within Meso-Ameri-
can colour-direction systems, for example (Chapter 7: Color Colorado); pointed to
the substantial differences in attitude between Goethe and Runge about the charac-
ter of a coherent colour-theory (Chapter 13:“Two Different Worlds’); and under-
lined the substantial divergencies of view within Neo-Impressionism about the
function of the painted dot (Chapter 16: The Technique of Seurat, and 17: Seurat’s
Silence). The questions addressed in these cases are indeed common to the protago-
nists, and usually specific to their periods; but the differences they represent must
also, I think, make us see the colour ofthe related artefacts in more nuanced ways.

IO
 Part One
I - The Contexts of Colour

T MAY SEEM CURIOUS that a phenomenon which is a primary sensory experience

for most of us, and has attracted so many commentators from so many points of
view, 1s far from being understood as a whole. ‘Colour’, runs a useful standard defi-
nition,‘isthe attribute of visual experience that can be described as having quanti-
tatively specifiable dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness.’' This introduces
both the subjective element in visual experience, and the objective, quantifiable
stimuli which produce that experience, and helps to explain why colour has for
so long been a subject of investigation and experiment in both the arts and the
sciences. But it does little to show how the subjective and objective aspects of
colour are related. The difficulties inherent in attempting to quantify sensations?
have meant that ‘colour’ — the subjective outcome of an objective process of stimu-
lation — has rarely been considered in a comprehensive way.} Since Newton the
science and the art of colour have usually been treated as entirely distinct, and yet to
treat them so is to miss many of the most intriguing aspects.
One way of placing colour in a broader perspective is of course to look at its
history,‘ and I have traced some strands in the history of colour in my earlier book,
Colour and Culture.
History alerts us immediately to the variety of colour-theories of the past, but
also to the even greater variety of colour-usage. This is most striking, perhaps, in
colour-language, whose study has enjoyed a lively and independent life ever since
the 1850s, when the Liberal statesman Mr Gladstone was struck by some curious
anomalies in Ancient Greek (where the apparent absence of terms for ‘blue’ led him
to assume a visual defect akin to colour-blindness, a phenomenon which was just
beginning to be systematically investigated at that time). As it developed in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, the study of colour-language became a
branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship of language to perception,
investigated largely within the framework of experimental psychology.
While there have long been substantial studies of colour-vocabulary in several
important historical languages, among them Ancient Greek, Hebrew and Anglo-
Saxon, the most wide-ranging and influential recent work, Berlin and Kay’s Basic
Color Terms,° paid little attention to the historical dimensions of the subject. Never-
theless the authors’ findings, that in the least-evolved languages values — light and
dark — take precedence over hues — redness, blackness etc. — are precisely what the
historical evidence tends to reinforce, and their researches have important contri-
butions to make to discussions on the biological basis of colour-vision.’” Our visual
mechanisms seem to be able to reconstitute the whole range of colour-perceptions

a
THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

on the basis of a severely limited set of stimuli (red, green, blue and dark/ light) just
as colour-vocabularies seem to work with a very limited set of ‘basic’ or ‘primary’
terms. And yet, as I shall show in the following chapters, in practice the idea of
fundamental colours has been far from universal.
Perhaps the most surprising absentee from most general discussions of colour is its
use in the visual arts.’ Two of the most widely used handbooks of recent years deal
extensively with art,’ but appropriately enough, since their authors are closely asso-
ciated with colour-technology, they are more concerned to suggest practical possi-
bilities in colour-usage than to analyse how colour has been (and is) used in artefacts.
In my earlier book Colour and Culture | drew extensively on artefacts for evidence
of attitudes to colour, and in Chapter 3 below I survey a number of other art-
historical studies which have taken up the subject ofcolour in art from varying per-
spectives. So far there has been very little investigation of colour in non-European
artefacts, although, paradoxically, non-European cultures have dominated in the
ethno-linguistic studies of colour-termThus s. the picture at present is essentially
one offragmented interests,'° and research has long been most active in those tech-
nological aspects of the subject which have a direct commercial application.

The history of art as a unifying subject

A unifying framework for the study of colour in all its aspects might indeed be pro-
vided by the history of art, precisely that subject where it has hitherto been so mea-
grely treated. Its potential is due in the first place to the fact that works of art exist,
and can thus be the subject of empirical investigation. Wolfgang Sch6ne’s'' study of
light in painting (Uber das Licht in der Malerei, published in 1954) is based on this
assumption: its theoretical basis is a phenomenological one, deriving ultimately
from the German experimental psychology of the later nineteenth century, from
Fechner, Hering and Wundt (see pp.191-2, 257-8 below). The enormously expanding
interest in problems of conservation, and its more rigorously scientific application,
have also contributed directly to the study of the physical, chemical and psychologi-
cal aspects of colour in the art ofthe past.'?
But a work of art is not only a sense-datum: it is also, and primarily, a vehicle of
sensibilities, of values and ofideas, and these have not yet proved capable of being
treated phenomenologically or quantitatively. They involve the study of history
and, above all, of language. Students of colour-language have however been as
reluctant to draw on the evidence of artefacts as have students of the history of art
to draw on linguistic studies: it is an irony of history that Gladstone’s belief in the
colour-blindness ofthe Ancient Greeks, based on his studies of Homeric language,
was developed at precisely the time that archaeologists were revealing the rich
polychromy of Greek architectural and sculptural decoration."
Yet the interpretation of colour in older works ofart is notoriously difficult, and
the reticence among historians of art about questions of colour entirely under-
standable. The possibility of a phenomenological approach to colour in the art of
the past is seriously undermined by the great changes which have taken place in the

I2
 THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

condition and presentation of works of art themselves. Colour is particularly sus-

ceptible to change and decay, and even the larger decorated complexes of the past,
such as church interiors, are rarely if ever seen in their original conditions ofpreser-
vation or lighting. Moreover, the study of the history of art proceeds by means of
comparisons, and comparisons necessarily involve the use of reproductions. But for
technical as well as historical reasons, adequate colour-reproduction is an impossi-
bilty for all but a tiny fraction of art-types (such as drawings and book illumina-
tion); and since it is not a commercially significant area of research, appreciably
higher standards of reproduction are unlikely to be achieved in the future." It is fair
to say that the general standard of both black-and-white and colour reproduction
in books has deteriorated since the Second World War.
Yet, to say this is to do no more than to reinforce the truth that the reconstruc-
tion of the art of the past, as of any aspect of the past, is an imaginative and not a
physical activity. There is no ‘scientific’ art history, and this is precisely what makes
its study so compelling. It is a pursuit which can be followed only by introducing a
consideration of the literature, religion, science and technology of the age in ques-
tion — not because we have a notion of‘influences’ or of ‘background’, but because
each activity shows us another facet of the same phase in the operations of the
human spirit. The precise relationship of each of these activities to the others must
always be a matter of debate, but in my view, the debate can only rest on the detailed
examination of case histories.

Artefacts and attitudes

The materials of the-artist cannot be regarded simply as tools, for they were often
repositories of values in their own right.A particularly striking instance of this con-
cerns the coloured materials with which art was made, andthe way these materials
were described. One example is the blue pigment manufactured from lapis lazuli,
early described in Europe as ‘ultramarine’ because it had to be imported from the
Middle East, ‘beyond the sea’, Lapis lazuli was, and still is,a rare and costly stone, and.
nothing suggests more strongly the survival into the Renaissance of medieval atti-
tudes towards the intrinsic value of materials than the fact that in Italian contracts
for paintings, until-well into the sixteenth century, ultramarine together with gold
was frequently specified for use in the most important designated areas of the work.
The method of preparation led to the production of various grades of the pigment,
and sometimes a specific price is mentioned in the contract, for example for the
finest grade which was to be used for the mantle of the Virgin Mary." The reasons
for this emphasis on a particular pigment-hue are complicated, but it seems likely
that more important than symbolism, which is, of course, conveyed through the
purely optical qualities of the material, was the fully justified belief in the durability
of this pigment in contrast to its chief rival, azurite (basic copper carbonate), which
too readily turned green on exposure to damp.A stable blue was thus a costly blue.
Paint-technologists were much concerned to imitate these costly pigments with
cheaper substitutes. The most important collection of colour-recipes from fifteenth-

13
THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

century Italy devotes a great deal of space to cheap synthetic (‘artificial’) blues,
which were assumed to have similar visual characteristics to these ‘natural’ blues, but
were probably far less stable." Significantly, they have not been identified in the
Italian Renaissance paintings which have survived until our own times.
In the fifteenth century in the Netherlands, where oil painting was first devel-
oped in its modern form, the valuable material lapis lazuli was rather less frequently
used than it was in the South. The new technique of preparation of colours had the
advantage ofcoating each particle in a film ofoil which insulated it against chemi-
cal reaction with other pigments, reducing the risk of changes in their colour.
Extensive mixture was thus a far less chancy business than it had been hitherto, and
a far wider range of pigments could be used than ever before.
Our understanding of the ideas which lay behind the use ofparticular materials
in the North is not helped by the relative lack of contemporary documentation for
most surviving paintings in northern Europe before the sixteenth century, but the
case of one extant work for which the contract is also known, Dieric Bouts’s Altar-
piece of the Last Supper (1464-8) is instructive. Unlike Italian contracts, the contract
here makes no reference at all to the materials to be used, but only to the required
standard of workmanship, and technical analysis of the central panel shows that the
blue used is chiefly azurite with a minimal admixture of lapis lazuli, chiefly in the
sky.'7 It seems that the practice of mixture which the oil medium allowed had led to
a reduction in the status of the materials themselves. The mantle of the Virgin and
16 the blue precious stones represented in the Van Eyck Ghent Altarpiece of some
thirty years earlier, for which no early documentation has come to light, are, on the
other hand, painted in two layers of ultramarine over an azurite base.'* An analysis
of this particular sort of fundamental value attributed to a work of art can only be
made with a clear indentification of the substances employed in the making of it —
an identification which modern methods of conservation have made increasingly
possible; yet the part played by artists’ materials in the conception of the work can
only be assessed on the basis of contemporary written documents.
To the devaluing of intrinsically precious pigments which oil painting brought
with it can be added the identification of asmall set of‘primary’ colours, a set which
became codified, around 1600, as black and white, red, yellow and blue. It was the
oil-painters’ capacity to mix which led to the recognition that only a few colours
were needed to mix many. Although this original set was later joined by other
‘basic’ sets — according to whether the requirement was to mix lights (additive
mixture) or surface-colours (subtractive mixture), or to identify psychologically
‘unmixed’ hues — the notion of reduction itself was to be a very important one,
especially in the study of the mechanisms of colour-vision."®

The harmony ofcolours

Another aspect ofcolour in which history — and particularly the history of colour-
language — has a major role to play involves the question ofthe harmony ofcolours
— an aspect which perhaps still attracts the most widespread interest today. Sir Isaac

14
 THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

Newton's discovery in the 1660s that colours were simply a function of the variable
refrangibility of white light — the red component being subject to the least refrac-
tion and the violet to most when a ray of light is passed through a triangular prism
nAWw
— took the development of the subject away from phenomenology for more than a
century; but it remains the case that his division of the prismatic spectrum into
seven chromatic areas, announced so casually in a letter to the Royal Society of
1675, reflects his interest in the eternally fruitless, eternally stimulating search for
objective principles ofvisual colour-harmony that goes back to Classical Antiquity.
It was the analogy with the seven notes of the musical octave — with its corollary 60
that colour-harmony might be established on the same proportional basis as
musical harmony — that accounts for the remarkable persistence of this error in his
optical writings.”°
Like all colour-researchers in his day Newton was hampered by the lack of stan-
dard colour-nomenclature.*! It is interesting to note that between his letter of 1675
and the Opticks of 1704 he had come to regard indigo, rather than blue, as harmo-
nious with ‘golden’, at the same time as the term for the most refrangible colour in
his spectrum changed from purple to violet. ‘Golden’ itself is an ambiguous term
which was not included in Newton’s analysis of the spectrum: we might well
suppose that it was a yellow, but reference to the 1706 Latin version of Opticks sug-
gests that he used it as a translation of the usual Latin term for orange, aureus. Its
adoption for the remarks on harmony suggest that Newton took the Classical view
that gold had a close affinity with red, and that his beliefin the harmony of gold and
indigo or blue was related, not simply to the musical scale where they form an har-
monic fourth or fifth, but also to the frequency of this combination of colours in
regalia. Since the late Middle Ages the traditional royal purple of Antiquity had
been replaced in robes and heraldry (particularly in France), as well as in the mantle
of the Virgin Mary, by blue. That gold should have had its closest affinity with
orange, rather than with yellow, is remarkable; yellow never seems to have been
regarded as a noble colour in the West until the end of the Middle Ages, and it is
apparently still regarded as one of the least pleasurable of individual hues.”
Despite the casual treatment of both perceptions and language which underlines
the quantitative emphasis of Newton’s work, his circular arrangement of colours in 58
the Opticks (which significantly, in view of his harmonic theory, placed blue oppo-
site orange) formed the starting-point for the investigation of complementarity in
the latter part of the eighteenth century, and thus of the contrast theory of harmony
which was to prevail for most of the nineteenth century, mainly through the influ-
ence of Chevreul (see Chapter 15).*? It would be a mistake to confine Newton’s
influence to his contribution to the quantification of colour in what is now seen as
classical optics.

The non-standard observer

One of the reasons why scientific students of colour have been reluctant to draw on
the experience of art is that artists are generally considered a small, untypical and
THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

commercially insignificant group in society. Yet Aristotle already recognized that

artisans in the dye-industry were especially sensitive to problems of colour-matching;
and in the early nineteenth century one of the most important discoveries in the
field of colour-vision, the Purkinje shift, seems to have been part of the daily expe-
rience of painters at that time. The Czech scientist Jan Evangelista Purkinje had
been stimulated to investigate the changing appearance ofcolours in declining light
by his reading of Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810), and published his observations
in 1825. He noticed that at dawn reds seemed to be very dark, and that blue is the
first colour to show its hue in the advancing light. But at almost exactly the same
time, around 1820, the English portrait-painter James Northcote described the
same phenomenon (which he found rather irritating) in an evening conversation
with another artist, James Ward:
Upon going to Northcote’s at the close of abeautiful day, Ward found the ven-
erable painter quietly sitting in the corner of his largest room. He was watch-
ing, by fading twilight, the picture he then had in hand, which practice appears
to have been with him a frequent one. He had retired into the darkest corner
of the spacious apartment, and Ward, upon entering the room, could scarcely
observe his friend till the sound of his voice proclaimed his whereabouts. Ward
remarked on the utility of this method of watching a picture, and suggested
that it was calculated to point out what was faulty in the light and shade.
‘To be sure’, responded Northcote, ‘it is useful in the highest degree, not
only as regards light and shade, but form and colour as well. A painter must
study his picture in every degree of light... You know, I suppose, that this
period of the day between daylight and darkness is called “the painter’s hour”?
There is, however, this inconvenience attending it, which allowance must be
made for — the reds look darker than by day, indeed almost black, and the light
blues turn white, or nearly so...’*4
This is one of many instances where the perception of painters was shared and elab-
orated in optical science. On the other hand, later in the century the more positivist
tone in general cultural attitudes led some painters to turn to the most recent for-
mulations of scientific colour-theory for help. The most prominent of these artists
was Georges Seurat, the founder of Neo-Impressionism, whose influential tech-
nique of dotting was itself based on a rather imperfect understanding of the phe-
nomena of value-contrast and optical mixture (Chapters 16, 20). Seurat’s was the
first painterly style to be based on psycho-physical theory, but it was the first of
many, from the early exponents of abstraction like Kandinsky and Mondrian, who
drew on the experimental psychology of the latter part of the nineteenth century
(Chapter 20), to the Op artists and Colour-field painters of the 1950s and 1960s,
whose concerns are reflected best ofall by Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color (1963), a
book which itself goes back to colour-work undertaken under the influence of
experimental psychology at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau in the 1920s.
It was the painters at the Bauhaus, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, and Albers himself,
who in the years around 1920 were examining the problem ofa value-scale of equal
perceptual steps between black and white.” Itten proposed a scale of seven steps,

16
 THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

Purpurviolett
N

AD\quody

unsBaqjag

Artists are among the devisers of the numerous scales of colour and value (light and dark) proposed
since the twelfth century. The Bauhaus painter Johannes Itten’s Colour-sphere of 1921, for example,
proposes a grey-scale of seven steps, shown at far left and right. (1)

which is slightly fewer than the number introduced at about the same time by the
German theorist Wilhelm Ostwald and the American Albert Munsell in their
colour-systems. Their colour-atlases and solids, arranging samples of every known
surface-colour in coherent sequences, have offered perhaps the most widely used
standards of colour in the twentieth century.
The first, twelve-step scale had already,
remarkably, been published in the twelfth century, in one of the very earliest
accounts of a tonal scale, this time for red and green, in the technical handbook De
Diversis Artibus by the German monk Theophilus.” Theophilus introduces this scale
in a discussion of painting the rainbow, where a series of nineteen values of red and
green is to be used, and the method is also recommended for the tonal modelling of
round surfaces. It seems unlikely that this extraordinarily nuanced procedure was

17
THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

Are artists untypical cases? The greatly reduced palette of Rembrandt’s self-portrait in old age, and even
the large circles in the background, suggest an aspiration towards classical simplicity rather than the
effects of visual impairment associated with ageing. (2)

ever so used by painters, and this makes Theophilus’s an especially interesting

account ofan essentially experimental observation. Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and
100 the nineteenth-century French chemist M.-E. Chevreul after him, Theophilus did
not prescribe specific quantities of pigment for each tone, so that we cannot assess
whether he was working with equal perceptual steps; but he did assert that there
cannot be more than twelve values for each hue. The mid-nineteenth-century

18
 THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

French landscape painter Corot, on the other hand, spoke of a series of twenty
values between the lightest and what he called the ‘most vigorous’, which is also the
number presented by the most extensive modern system, the Villalobos Color Atlas
of the 1940s.*7 Scaling has been a major theme in recent research in psycho-physics
and colorimetry, but so far as I know there has been no analysis of these and other
experiments by artists because they have been seen as untypical cases.
Another striking area where it is difficult to relate the general pattern of colour-
experience to the specific work of artists is in the question of the physiology of
colour-vision. Several of the greatest colourists in the history of painting have lived
to a great age, and continued to be productive throughout their latest years. On the
other hand, it is well known that colour-discrimination generally becomes less
acute with age, quite apart from the effect of chronic eye-disorders, like cataract.
This latter defect helps to account, for example, for the strident redness of much of
Monet’ work around the time of the First World War,** and we might expect such
deterioration to be manifest in the work of other ageing artists.
In the case of two painters who worked vigorously until they died at advanced
ages, Titian (?1480/5-1576) and Rembrandt (1606-69), it could well be argued that
the more monochromatic tonality of their latest works, which in Rembrandt’s case
at least is inked to a reduction of the number of pigments used,” derives from the
psycho-physiological effect of ageing. But the question is complicated by the possi-
bility that the style of‘late Titian’, which has been so prized by modern critics, is in
fact ‘unfinished Titian’ — that in works like the Diana and Actaeon in the National
Gallery in London we are dealing with an underpainting, and that the refined and
highly coloured Tribute Money in the same collection is a more authentic example
of the late style.*° It is also very likely that Rembrandt’s restriction of palette at the
end of his life has less a physical than an ideological basis: he was anxious to develop
an economical style of colouring which was then thought to be characteristic of
the great masters of Classical Antiquity, whose works were known only through lit-
erary description.*'
But if the cases of Titian and Rembrandt are more ambiguous than they might
seem at first sight, what of two other aged artists, Turner (1775-1851) and Matisse.
(1869-1954), whose late work shows an increased refinement and subtlety precisely
in the handling of colour? The greatly increased brightness of Turner’s work, both
in oils and watercolours, in the second half of his career and especially during his
late sixties and early seventies, led some contemporaries to suppose that he had
developed a cataract; but this view depended on a very imperfect acquaintance
with the whole range of the painter’s work, where the brighter tonality and the
reduction of more strictly formal elements gave him far greater scope than earlier
for the exploration of infinitely subtle gradations of colour and tone — at its peak in
the great Swiss watercolours of the early and mid-1840s. Similarly, in Matisse’s
cut-paper compositions of the 1940s and 1950s, of which perhaps the best-known
examples are The Snail (1952) and Souvenir d’ Océanie (1952-3) in the Museum of 3
Modern Art in New York, the artist was working more exclusively than ever with
colour, using a wide range of previously painted papers with an unprecedented
freedom, but also with an unprecedented finesse.*

19
THE CONTEXTS OF COLOUR

In the 1952 cut-paper The Snail

Matisse was working directly in
colour with the most exact
adjustments ofscale and placing,
remarkable in an artist already in
his eighties. (3)

Clearly both these painters were non-standard observers, and seem to have
escaped the normal ageing processes. Their work is evidence of a constantly self-
refining capacity in visual experience which must surely enter into the larger study
of human responses to colour.

Colour in context

I have introduced here a few examples of the ways in which the experience of
colour in artefacts, especially artefacts from earlier periods, may be enriched by the
collaboration ofscientific analysis, and may in turn contribute to the enrichment of
the understanding of colour-perception in a scientific context. It seems to me that
the aesthetics of colour have developed very little during this century precisely
because they have been too exclusively concerned with laboratory testing, and too
little with colour-preferences as expressed in the practical choices of everyday life.
Similarly, studies of colour-language have been content, on the one hand, with the
vaguest of colour-designations: ‘yellow’ ‘red’, and so on, and on the other, with the
same constricting techniques of assessment through laboratory tests.As an anthro-
pologist put it in a critique of Berlin and Kay’s book: ‘a semiotic theory of color
universals must take for “significance” exactly what colors do mean in human soci-
eties. They do not mean Munsell chips.’
 2 - Colour and Culture

lieCHAPTER ONE I SUGGESTED SOME of the many obstacles to seeing colour as a

whole. Many scientific writers, for example, are concerned, not with ‘colour’, but
with radiant stimuli in light, or with the physiological processing of these stimuli by
the eye, whereas ‘colour’ properly speaking does not come into the picture until
rather later, in the mind which apprehends it. Research into a brain dysfunction
called ‘colour anomia’ by J. and S. Oxbury and N. Humphrey, and more recently by
A. Damasio, suggests a sharp distinction between the sensation of ‘colour’ and its
identification. Patients with normal colour-vision who were able to perform
purely verbal tasks with colour-names, such as naming the colour ofa named object
like a banana, were unable to name correctly the colours that they saw: blue, for
example, was called ‘red’.' These patients, like all of us, used verbal language as the
customary tool of communication; if‘colour’ is intimately bound up with language
—ifit is a system of arbitrary signs — it must also be a function of culture and have its
own history. And yet the linkage of colour with verbal expression is highly prob-
lematic.

Colour-usage and colour-systems

Some years ago Umberto Eco published an essay under the title ‘How culture con-
ditions the colours we see’, but he was unable to live up to the promise ofthis ambi-
tious formulation because of the very imprecision of his term ‘culture’. As a.
semiotician, Eco was embarassed in his discussion of colour by the almost complete
absence of intelligible codes of colour-meaning within a given culture.* Does
‘culture’ imply knowledge and embody rational investigation, or may it run counter
to them? Is it, in effect, largely a matter of assumption and prejudice? Who are
the agents and guardians of ‘culture’? Colour promises to throw some light on this
problem because, in the Western societies that provide me with my material,
colour-usage has long co-existed with more or less sophisticated theories of colour
that are relatively well known. Several of these high-level theories have recently
been discussed by Martin Kemp in The Science ofArt,’ but this low-level colour-
usage does not encourage a belief in the cultural coherence of codifiable systems of
thought. Let me illustrate this with afew homely examples. :
If you look intently for a moment at the red disc illustrated, and then, while 13
relaxing your eye-muscles, at the white disc adjacent (in each case fixing on the
centre of the field of vision), most of you will see a colour that you will probably be
COLOUR AND CULTURE

inclined to call ‘blue-green’, a colour close to the one which Matthias Griinewald
represented encircling Christ’s red-orange halo in the Resurrection scene in his great
Isenheim Altarpiece of the early sixteenth century, now in the museum at Colmar
in Alsace. Griinewald, who may have been a technologist as well as a painter, had
doubtless experienced this colour, as we all do, as the negative after-image ofafiery
red light.
When in the late eighteenth century the phenomenon of negative after-images
began to be investigated systematically, notably by Charles Darwin’s father, Robert
Waring Darwin, the ‘complement’ to red was also usually described as blue-green,
as it had been about a century earlier in Newton’s experiments with the colours of
61 thin plates (Newton’s Rings’).4 But after 1800 the notion that there are three
‘primary’ colours of light (red, blue and yellow), and that the eye, fatigued by the
strong sensation of one of these colours, ‘demanded’ the product of the remaining
two in order to restore its balance, was allied to an interest in symmetrical, usually
circular colour-systems. It became increasingly common to describe, and even to
represent, the complement of red as simply green, a mixture of equal parts of blue
and yellow.’ Green is still commonly identified as the complement of red, even in
perceptually oriented handbooks of colour such as Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color
(1963);° and this persistent idea suggests a powerful cultural conditioning of the sort
Umberto Eco was concerned to expose.
Charles Hayter’s colour-circle of 1813, however, also introduces us to experi-
ences of colour where culture seems to have worked in precisely the opposite way,
where perceptions appear to take precedence over ideas. Hayter’s polar contrasts,
‘warm’ and ‘cold’, may here be making their first appearance in a colour-system,
although they had been common enough in English painterly discussions for at
least a century.’ But they are contrasts which are still widely endorsed in the charac-
terization of colour. Colours seem ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ only metaphorically, of course,
but the radiation of which they are the visible sympton is radiant energy, and we
have known ever since the introduction of gas heating over a century ago that it
must be interpreted in the opposite sense to this metaphorical usage. The short-
wave, high-frequency energy of the blue-violet end of the spectrum signals the
greatest capacity to heat, and the long-wave, low-frequency red end, the least. Yet
even in the modern world, gas-companies continue to show the warming effect of
red-orange flames where domestic comfort in the living-room is in question, while
they take a much more functional attitude to ovens, which are shown correctly
with the heating flames blue. Laboratory tests in Europe and the United States,
from the 1920s until the present day, have shown that the psychological interpreta-
tion of colour-temperature has been far from unambiguous, but I imagine that
most people will continue to think of yellows, oranges and reds as at the ‘warm’ end
of the spectrum and blues and greens as at the ‘cool’.
In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the idea of a universal or
‘basic’ experience of colour, which is seen to have given rise to those interpreta-
tions that conflict so much with common assumptions. Responses to colour, it is
argued, go back to archetypal human experiences of black night, white bone, red
blood, and so on. Thus A. Wierzbicka proposed in 1990 that:
 COLOUR AND CULTURE

cold Colour,

Charles Hayter’s warm-and-cold ‘painter’s compass’ from

his Introduction to Perspective, a handbook for amateur artists
published in 1813. Hayter was probably the first systematic
theorist to introduce of the notion of hot-cold co-ordinates,
7S
a major theme in later thinking about colour. (4) @rm Colo? ©

yellow is thought of as ‘warm’, because it is associated with the sun, whereas

red is thought of as ‘warm’ because it is associated with fire. It seems plausible,
therefore, that although people do not necessarily think of the color of fire as
red, nonetheless they do associate red color with fire. Similarly, they do not
necessarily think of the color of the sun as yellow, and yet they do think of
yellow, on some level of consciousness or subconsciousness, as of a ‘sunny
enlor....%
The problem with this approach (which is rather widespread among anthropolo-
gists) 1s that the stable referent has usually been more interesting and important
than the colour. The colour of familiar phenomena in nature has indeed often been
a matter of puzzlement and debate. As early as the first or second century ap the
Greek astronomer Cleomedes pointed out the variety of colours in the sun, now
whitish or pallid, now red like ochre or blood, now a golden or even a greenish
yellow, and only sometimes the colour of fire (Caelestia, H, 1). And in the fourth
century St Augustine of Hippo even made the various colours of the sea — green or
purple or blue, all of which may still be readily seen in the Mediterranean — one of
the touchstones ofvariety in nature (The City of God, XXII, xxiv).

The spectrum and the natural world

There are good reasons for thinking that a precise recognition of all the colours we
are capable of discriminating has often been a matter of indifference. Languages
have never been used for labelling more than a tiny fraction of the millions of
colour-sensations which most of us are perfectly well-equipped to enjoy and,
we might have supposed, to name. A glance at a standard modern handbook of
colour-names, such as A. Maerz and M. R. Paul’s Dictionary ofColor, which lists and 5
represents mainly English-language trade-names, will show that although most of
us are perfectly capable of discriminating among an extensive continuum of
colour-nuances, very few of these nuances have been named, and modern colour-
systems, following the lead of James Clerk Maxwell in the 1860s, have usually
resorted to numbers in order to distinguish perceptible differences of hue or value

23
COLOUR AND CULTURE

Olympia
Monte
Carlo+

fe
Sar
aR
ioe
BABY
BLUE

Russian
Bl

Alice BL HSISTINE pales

on

BRIT-
TANY

ES
ee
a‘
Capri

nl
-
f
Z 7:
I

Saree
AST
eee
SE
PAR
5Udy
CSOT
REE
LL
a
nee
ESIYGRAD
AYRAS
P.AR

BE Cadet Bl

}7

11
©
. st
een
aa

Re
eaaee
TEP
SLMS
FNS
Paras

Eel
eT
ee

A B Cc D E 1S G H I J K 6;

‘Blue’, from Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of American trade-names. The chart reveals both the arbitrary
nature of colour-naming (note the close proximity of ‘Virgin’ to ‘Pompadour’) and the large areas of
perceptible colour to which no names have been given at all. (5)

(lightness or darkness) in what has turned out to be a far from symmetrical colour-
space.
Probably the most widely recognized of these colour-continuums in the ancient
and modern worlds has been the spectrum light as manifested in the rainbow. It was
the optics of the seventeenth century, notably the work of Sir Isaac Newton, that
made the spectrum into the standard of ‘colour’; and it is striking that in the eigh-
teenth century even a natural philosopher such as the Viennese entomologist Ignaz

24
 COLOUR AND CULTURE

A colour-circle of 1771 by Ignaz Schiffermiiller, probably the earliest attempt to arrive at a theory of
harmony by this means. The twelve colours include a ‘fire-red’, but also a ‘fire-blue’ — truer to reality
than the usual warm = red pairing, in that the hottest flame is at the blue end ofthe radiation scale. (6)

Schiffermiiller, whose concern with colour was primarily as a means of identifying

butterflies, should have used the spectrum (as an indoor experiment and as an
outdoor phenomenon of nature) as the paradigmatic manifestation of colour in the
illustration to his Essay on a System of Colours of 1771 (which incidentally includes a
‘fire-blue’ in the circle; see also p. 173-4 below). Yet the number and even the order
of colours in the rainbow has always been a matter of dispute. Newton’s isolation of
seven spectral colours had been anticipated by Dante in The Divine Comedy (Purga-

25
COLOUR AND CULTURE

torio XXX, 77-8), and illustrated very plausibly in the scene of Noah’s Flood in a
fifteenth-century Norman Book of Hours, now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford,
but Newton repeatedly changed his mind during the course of his career, and
60 opted for the seven-colour version only because he was anxious to sustain an
analogy with the musical octave.
The patriotic English Romantic John Constable, who was famous for his sharp-
ness of observation, seems nevertheless, in his frequent depictions of the rainbow, to
have been content with red, white and blue; and in the modern world of commer-
cial design I have found examples with five, six or seven colours, and a variety of
sequences. It is chiefly the imperceptible transition from one band of colour to the
next which has led to these ambiguities, and it is not surprising that we sometimes
have to resort to mnemonics to remember the order. Constable, a painter who
showed an unusual interest in meteorology, correctly recorded the reversal in the
sequence of colours in the secondary rainbow which is sometimes observed
outside the first, but this phenomenon has not always been respected. One of the
49 most unexpected lapses was in John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl (1856), where
the Pre-Raphaelite precision of the landscape-setting, painted at Winchelsea in
Sussex, is quite remarkable, but the colours of the secondary bow were not reversed
until the mistake was pointed out by a friend of the painter’s, and corrected — for a
supplementary fee.'° Even in the case of a single bow, the order of colours, running
from red at the top to violet inside the arc, has sometimes escaped the attention of
artists. Some readers may recall the broad upside-down bow in the Pastoral Sym-
phony section of Walt Disney’s Fantasia of 1940.
What the history of the spectrum suggests is that there are real difficulties in per-
ceiving and identifying colours in complex arrays, especially when their edges are
undefined, and that the relative poverty of colour-vocabularies reflects these diffi-
culties, and encourages representations to be far more concerned with ideas about
colours than with colour-perceptions themselves.
The devising of colour-systems, allowing colours to be set out in a logical
sequence which articulates relationships between them, scarcely pre-dates the
seventeenth century, and if the spectrum of white light, especially after Newton
nan(oo) rolled it into a circle in his Opticks of 1704, was embraced as the most coherent of
these systems, it not only remained the conceptual problem to which I have
alluded, but was still impossible to translate into terms ofsurface-colours because of
45 the impurities in the available pigments and dyes. Aristotle had already argued that
the pure colours of the rainbow were impossible to represent in painting, and well
into the nineteenth century, colour-atlases for the use of naturalists might avoid the
spectral colours and base their standards of hue and value on a range of natural
objects. Patrick Syme’s 1821 adaptation ofA. G. Werner's 1774 terminology in the
Nomenclature of Colours, a copy of which accompanied Darwin on the Beagle, is a
prime example of this (as it is also of regional variations in colour-categorization,
even within the scientific community at this date). Werner, a late-eighteenth-century
German mineralogist, had subsumed purple under blue and orange under yellow,
but Syme, a Scottish flower-painter, argued that purple and orange were as entitled
to be considered independent colours as were green and brown (two colours which,

26
 COLOUR AND CULTURE

BLUES
Met. tit SS ee ——— SST ieee oa
Vo | Names |Colours | ANIMAL VEGETABLE | MINERAL

24 Seotch Throat of Blue | Sarnia at Single Bhie ‘ |

Blue Titmouse Lurple Anemone. | Copper Oren
GLa kees 1)Ta I Ee ae a |
we .
SRA See ee |
SO e |
25 ?ea Beauty Spot an Wing | Stamina at Bluish Blue
= te» of Mallard Drake. Purple Anemone. Copper Ore
| |
is a = brs eb sae

26 | Indigo Blue
a Blue | Copper Ore.
is = Lewetts: sea ALS. ple cae aS
pnp ef —— }
ies ’ : yp | Blue Copper
27 China Rlamehites Nitens Back Farts ot | ea
Blue - Gentian I'lower. | fram Chessy.
eee eee Bs eo See
— = eee See aes :
ery alee Breast fTimerald- \ Grape Yyacinth, | Ble
Blue. crested Manatin. Gentian, | Copper Ore. |
Bai a
|
ae rae |
i Clira Upper Side ofthe | | Aeure Stone |
29 | marine Wings or small blive Borrage or Lapis |
Blue. Heath, Buttertly. | Macilt.
pap a oo Sj
erates eee elle = pee ere
Flax- Light Purts of the ; | Bhio
| 30 tlower Margin ef the Wings Max tlover. |p. - Ore
| Blito- at Devils Butter*y . b | Copper Ure
= = anon woabies: 4 — ——|

zal aes
. pty
Wt wag Teathers
ate Hepativa.
: | Bi
uel €
of Jay. PPA aes
iE | i
— | —

es Verditter : Lenticular
32 | Bric Ore.

L T
| | i
2 —————s fE +
“ ,
Blues’. A chart from the | a ne
c : 2 33 Greenish Great Fernel Tiirgiors.
flower-painter Patrick Syme’s Blue Flower. | Hour Spar.
Nomenclature of Colours (1821) I eee ————
which accompanied Darwin | oes Se a gs dies
a opine
on the Beagle voyage. Syme 34 eae ‘
Bach‘ of blueTitmouse Small Fentnel
ee ae: :
| sani Benet
= Le. OWT « ¢
retains colour-names, but Ite ae | yal
adds familiar natural objects
as terms of reference. (7)

incidentally, have retained their psychological independence as ‘unmixed’ colours

until our own day).'' It is perhaps worth noting that Darwin does not seem to have
used the nuanced, and hence rather precise, Symian/Wernerian terminology in his
descriptive reports for long after the Beagle expedition of the 1830s. It was probably
far too cumbersome for regular use.’
Colour-specification for scientists has now become exclusively mathematical,
but it is, of course, only the stimuli that can be quantified, not the ‘colours’; and as
recently as the 1940s an English pioneer of non-representational painting, Winifred °
Nicholson, devised a spectrum of hues and values entirely related to natural objects. 8
Her scale underlines the fact that surface-colours possess several characteristics
apart from the hue, value, and saturation (chroma) which have usually been held to
define the parameters of colour as perceived.'? One of these characteristics is

27
COLOUR AND CULTURE

clay mud dust earth shadow slate lead

terracotta dun putty khaki mist pewter prune

brick fawn beige Pcaier sea grey steel mulberry

roan bistre hay sage agin blue grey vieux rose

ue

rust ochre straw willow fell blue knife blue musk rose

coral sand amber crab apple turquoise royal wine

ruby flame topaz emerald azure sapphire amethyst

RED ORANGE § YELLOW § GREEN BLUE INDIGO VIOLET

sugar pink alabaster sulphur duck’s egg gh psi ice blue pale lilac

scarlet apricot lemon pea green sky french blue lavender

vermilion fire canary grass green oe hyacinth heliotrope

tomato fox brass cabbage larkspur ultramarine purple

en : copper daffodil forest green He“ ev nin maroon

rr SSO highly individual chart

mahogany tobacco mustard laurel horizon midnight damson of colours and substances
md compiled by the British
RAVEN
BLACK
COFFEE
TIGER
SKIN
BLACK
VELVET ZENITH PITCH CHOCOLATE
artist Winifred Nicholson
in 1944. (8)

Winifred Nicholson,
Starlight and Lamplight,
1937. The painter is
concerned here with
the character of light
and colour in the natural
world: the strong red
pentagon suggests
artificial light, the soft
bluish circle the light
of the moon. (9)

28
 COLOUR AND CULTURE

texture, and especially among Russian artists and critics around the time of the First
World War, texture (faktura) came to be recognized as a specific aesthetic category.
The radically non-representational works painted by Kasimir Malevich under the 7
banner of ‘Suprematism’, for example, depended in their articulation of several
whites partly on very suble textural variation. One of the great masters of texture
appealed to by the Russians was the Monet of the late Rouen Cathedral series, in 83
which an almost relief-like handling of surface-texture was one of the most signifi-
cant of his painterly tools.’* Such a wide-ranging understanding of the phenome-
nology of‘colour’, although it has a substantial history going back to Classical
Antiquity, and has been explored extensively by twentieth-century psychologists
such as David Katz,'® runs counter to the usual modern conception of the phe-
nomenon, which, at least since Newton, has focused almost exclusively on the
characteristic of hue; that is, on spectral location.

‘Basic Color Terms’

The widespread interest aroused, not only among ethnologists and linguists, but
also among semioticians and even physiologists, by Berlin and Kay’s Basic Color
Terms (1969), which argued for the universal recognition of eleven ‘basic’ colour-
categories, whose foci were located by their subjects on a spectrally arranged chart
of Munsell colour-chips, depended very largely on an apparent convergence of
experimental findings between ethnography and physiology, where modern
research has identified a reduced set of colour-receptors in the retina arranged to
process pairs of ‘complementary’ or ‘opponent’ stimuli: red-green, blue-yellow and
light-dark.’® Berlin and Kay identified their eleven ‘basic’ terms in nearly one
hundred widely scattered languages, and even the far larger sample in the World
Color Survey since initiated by them has hardly modified the structure of their
underlying scheme.As the distinguished anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has com-
mented, ‘it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the basic color-categories are
natural categories’.'7 Sahlins was unhappy with this inference, since he supported a |
subtle version of the cultural relativism that Berlin and Kay’s research was proposing
to combat; but he might have escaped from it rather easily had he taken on board
the curious consideration that to the physiologists’ six categories listed above,
even Berlin and Kay’s ‘basic’ set adds five others, including grey, pink and brown.
Their rather arbitrary definition of ‘basic’ has certainly come under fire from T. D.
Crawford, and more comprehensively fromJ.van Brakel and B. Saunders."*
An examination of the history of the notion of ‘basic’ colour-sets — often assimi-
lated to the concept of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water, in Classical 45
Antiquity and the Middle Ages — shows that they shared almost no common feature
other than the desire to reduce the myriad of colour-sensations to a simple and
orderly scheme."? As a leading modern student of the relationship between psy-
chology and aesthetics, Rudolf Arnheim, puts it: ‘neither man nor nature could
afford to use a mechanism that would provide a special kind of receptor or genera-
tor for each color shade’. ‘Basic’ sets of ‘simple’ or ‘primary’ colours are thus a great
COLOUR AND CULTURE

gift to structuralists, but offer little comfort to those of us who are concerned to
interpret the use of colour in concrete situations.
Marshall Sahlins shares with other modern thinkers, notably Ludwig Wittgen-
stein, a belief that the assumptions embodied in ‘ordinary’ colour-language reflect
the logic of modern colour-order systems of the Munsell type, which arrange
colours in a three-dimensional structure, co-ordinating hues in a circle of comple-
mentaries, and relate them to the co-ordinates oflight and dark. Thus he writes:
Blue is always different from yellow, for example: depressed (‘the blues’),
where yellow is gay, loyal (‘true-blue’), where yellow is cowardly, and the like.
Blue has a similar meaning to yellow about once in a blue moon.”
It is true that many Western cultures have taken on board these modern systems
with their emphasis on contrasting hues; but there are instances in the Western
Middle Ages, as well as in several non-Western languages spoken today, where the
same term was used to cover both blue and yellow, including the Old French word
bloi, the ancestor of English ‘blue’. Similarly, the other pair of “opponent hues’ in
modern perceptual theory, red-green, was also covered by a single term in the
Middle Ages: sinople, a red in Old French poetic usage, but green in the specialized
vocabulary of heraldic blazon, which was also French.** Even in our own times,
Wittgenstein’s nonsense-term ‘reddish green’ (Remarks on Colour I, 9-14) has been
perfectly acceptable in some languages (for example one spoken in parts of Japan),
14 and even in Germany in the 1920s in the context of Paul Klee’s design-teaching at
the Bauhaus.*} The anthropologist R. E. MacLaury has recently drawn attention to
instances of non-European languages where white has been assimilated to black; it
is clear that in some cultures which have had a profound effect on Western colour-
ideas, notably ancient Judaism, the semantic polarity of positive and negative which
has usually been regarded as axiomatic for this pair (white=positive; black=negative)
does not apply. An important tradition of Christian mysticism deriving from
Pseudo-Dionysius in the early Middle Ages proposed that darkness was, indeed, the
very seat of God.** These apparent anomalies have been noticed only recently and
need much more investigation; but they suggest that in the case of Western societies
as well as in non-Western ones, colour-usage cannot always be understood in terms
of colour-science.

A disdain for colour

One of my favourite episodes in recent research into colour-language is the arrival
in 1971 of the Danish anthropologists R. Kuschel andT. Monberg, armed with their
sets of Munsell colours, on Bellona Island in Polynesia, only to be told by an
islander, “We don’t talk much about colour here’.*’ In the event, their report seems
to me to be one of the best modern investigations of colour-usage within a given
culture, but it makes clear that colour as hue is not everybody’s interest, and in many
contexts we can, of course, do perfectly well without it. The black-and-white
photography which in Charles Darwin’s day seemed to offer a new touchstone for

30
 COLOUR AND CULTURE

the precise visual representation of the real world was only the latest phase in the
history of monochrome reproduction which goes back to Classical times. Darwin
himself, who as an undergraduate had frequented the Old Master print collection
of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, was content to use black-and-white
engraving even to illustrate his discussions of the highly coloured plumage of exotic
birds, for example in his Descent of Man (1871). At least since the Renaissance,
sculpture in the Western tradition has also been largely uncoloured, partly because
ancient Greek sculpture was thought, quite wrongly, to have cultivated this mono-
chrome convention. Modern studies of colour-vision have tended to reinforce the
fundamental role of the rods in the human retina which process variations in
brightness or value; and it is well known that colour-blindness may pass unnoticed
for many years because it is scarcely a functional disability.
In some European and Oriental cultures, moreover, a disdain for colour has been
seen as a mark of refinement and distinction.*° The taste for black clothing, for
example, was a prerogative of wealth and nobility in the Renaissance, but in suc-
ceeding centuries it spread in Europe to all levels of society, and black still forms
part of our dress-code for some occasions.”” On the other hand, when Vincent van
Gogh made painted versions of some Japanese prints in his collection, and substi-
tuted strident complementaries for the more subtle and reticent colour-harmonies
of his models, it may seem to us to be no more than a case of ignorance and vulgar-
ity. Yet it was one of the important achievements of the experimental psychology
of van Gogh’s time to have shown that a love of strong, saturated ‘primary’ colours
was not the preserve of primitives or of children, but was also common among
educated European adults (see p. 250); and this was a line of research which went
hand-in-hand with the development of a new range of bright synthetic pigments
and dyes. It was these psychological as well as technological developments that lay
behind what has always been recognized as the enormously expanded interest in
highly contrasting hues that marks the visual expression of twentieth-century
Western culture, and which has sometimes been characterized, rather misleadingly,
as the emancipation of colour in the modern world.

Colour psychology: chromotherapy and the Liischer Test

The attempt to yoke the structures of colour-language to the mechanisms of
colour-vision, although widespread in recent years, is still a rather specialized acad-
emic pursuit, but another modern development from late nineteenth-century
psychology has had far wider ambitions. The belief that exposure to variously
coloured lights could have a direct and variable effect on human bodily functions
(it had already been studied in relation to plant growth, by Darwin among others)
was perhaps first proposed in the quantified experiments by the French psycholo-
gist Charles Féré in the 1880s.** Féré found that red light had the most stimulating 136
effect and violet the most calming; but for the student of visual culture his ideas can
only have a limited application, since he treated coloured lights simply as variable
vibrations of radiant energy that could be sensed by the skin even with the eyes

31
COLOUR AND CULTURE

closed. This was the sort of research lying behind the development of chromother-
103 apy, a practice which seems to have had its greatest vogue in Europe around the
turn of the century, but which is still in the repertory of alternative medicine. As a
review by the physiologist P. K. Kaiser” indicated, chromotheraphy proved highly
resistant to systematic analysis; but another branch of colour-psychology, which
proposes isolating non-associative scales of colour-preference based on laboratory
testing, has been more widely acceptable, perhaps because it is promoted and used
by powerful marketing organizations for commercial purposes.
The most familiar of these scales is perhaps the test devised in the 1940s by the
Swiss psychologist Max Liischer, which according to his organization is now used
widely in ethnographical research, medical diagnosis and therapy, gerontolgy,
marriage guidance and personnel selection. The Full Test uses seventy-three
colour-patches, but a short and handy version includes only eight samples: dark
blue, blue-green (also called ‘green’), orange-red, bright yellow, violet, brown, black
and grey.The subject is asked to arrange the coloured cards in a descending order of
preference, and an analysis of this order over a number of test-runs allows the psy-
chologist to interpret the subject’s character.This interpretation is predicated on the
meanings attributed to the colours. Thus blue, which Liischer, like most modern
psychologists, has identified as the most widely preferred colour among Europeans,
is held to be concentric, passive, sensitive, perceptive, unifying, and so on, and thus
to express tranquility, tenderness, and ‘love and affection’. Orange-red, however, is
eccentric, active, offensive, aggressive, autonomous and competitive, and hence
expressive of desire, domination and sexuality. The section of the public to which
the Ltischer Test is chiefly directed may be inferred from the interpretation it gives
to an ordering which puts blue at the beginning and red towards the end of the
sequence:
Psychologically, this combination of rejected red and compensatory blue is
often seen in those suffering from the frustrations and anxieties of the business
world and in executives heading for heart disease... Presidents, vice-presidents
and others with this combination need a vacation, a medical check-up and an
opportunity to re-assemble their physical resources.*°
What the English version of the Liischer Short Test, edited by Ian Scott, does not
reveal is that the conceptual framework for these interpretations was found by
Lischer largely in German Romantic theory, in Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Theory of
Colours) of 1810, and in the neo-Romanticism of the early twentieth-century
non-representational painter Wassily Kandinsky, whose treatise On the Spiritual in
Art, published in Germany in 1912 and in England and Russia a few years later,
includes perhaps the most wide-ranging body of colour-ideas for modern artists
(see Chapters 14, 19, 20, 21 below).At one point in the first German edition of his
book, published on the anniversary of Goethe’s birth in 1949, Liischer even intro-
duced the ancient and medieval notion of the correspondence ofthe four humours
and the four elements, with one of the sets of colours attributed to them. Goethe
and his fellow-poet Friedrich Schiller had been working along similar lines at the
close of the eighteenth century.*!

32
 COLOUR AND CULTURE

It is no surprise that the Liischer Test has come in for a good deal of criticism
from psychologists for its dogmatic tone, and in particular for its failure to provide a
uniform standard in the colour-samples of its various editions. For the historian of
culture its chief weakness is that it gives no consideration to the crucial question of
whether the psychological response to colours is chiefly to their names, and hence
to a general concept of each of them, rather than to their specific appearance.
Recent work with animals and with infants might suggest the latter,* were it not
that the effects of exposure to colours have hitherto been so limited. But if language
is crucial, the problems inherent in colour-vocabularies outlined above must be
brought into play. Nevertheless the Liischer system certainly rests on what seems to
be a universal urge to attribute affective characters to colours, and it must be taken
at the very least as an important modern manifestation ofthat urge.

High culture, popular culture

In this chapter I have laid most emphasis on the instability of colour-perceptions
because this should give pause to those many ethnographers and semioticians who
have been tempted to speak confidently of colour-meanings and preferences in
many cultures. I have hardly mentioned perhaps the most important issue of all: the
definition of culture itself. Which sector of a given society is in question? Which
age-group, which class, which profession, which gender? In the case of aesthetic
preferences, we have seen a liking for black spreading from aristocratic to general
usage, and a taste for bright colours spreading from less educated to well-educated
groups. R. E. MacLaury has recently argued for an emphasis on brightness or value
in colour-language as reflecting a belief in unity, and an emphasis on hue as indicat-
ing a beliefin perceptual diversity.*? Yet, at least for the specialized class of painters,
hue itself has often been a tool for unification. Similarly, the widespread perception
that women are more discriminating than men in their use of colour may be linked
to the relative rarity of colour-deficiencies in female vision.*4
Most of my examples, from Griinewald to Winifred Nicholson, and from
Cleomedes to Liischer, have come from what used to be called ‘high’ culture, but I
cannot resist ending with an example of ways in which modern consumerism has
appropriated the allure of this ‘high’ culture for the purposes of mass-marketing.
Some years ago a British household paint manufacturer produced a range of emul-
sions and gloss colours which were launched under the names of a number of
European Old Masters. Anyone familiar with the history of painting might well be
bemused by the faded gentility of‘Turner’ (pale violet) or ‘El Greco’ (pale blue), and
equally perplexed by the close proximity of ‘Chardin’ to ‘Vermeer’ (both pale grey-
greens). If by now you are thoroughly confused by how little the languages of
colour relate to its perception, you may at least take heart that this manufacturer was
prepared to supply a handful of these ‘colours’, from ‘Leonardo’ to ‘Manet’, in black
and white versions as well. It may also be a welcome sign that this range of paints
did not enthuse the DIY public, and the names of great artists were apparently soon
replaced by numbers.
 3 - Colour in Art and its Literature

T WILL BE CLEAR BY NOW THAT the history of art may well provide the most
|eweee platform for the study of colour - but what methods have art historians so
far brought to this study? Nervousness about methods has increased enormously in
recent years, as a function of the growth ofart history as an academic discipline, but
academics have not always recognized that methods have no autonomous status;
they are tools developed to serve particular ends, and it is these ends, rather than the
methods, that are the primary subject ofdebate. I have argued in Chapter 1 that the
study of colour in art must draw on a wide range of other disciplines;' and these
days interdisciplinarity is a fashionable notion. Yet a glance at the literature of the
humanities as well as of the sciences will show that they have their own purposes
and dynamic, which are not necessarily those of the history of art. Art historians
must use whatever they consider appropriate in the findings of scholars in many
other areas to pursue the aims that only they can identify as their own.’
I have introduced these generalities at the beginning of a review of the literature
of colour in this century, particularly as it relates to art and visual practice (see also
text notes), because colour, in spite of a widespread belief in the universality of
certain colour-ideas, is like all formal characteristics ideologically neutral. It can be
seen to have served a very wide range of aesthetic and symbolic purposes; and the
same colours or combinations of colours can, for example, be shown to have held
quite antithetical connotations in different periods and cultures, and even at the
same time and in the same place.

The politics of colour

The politics of colour as a subject ofstudy has had a lively history since at least the
early nineteenth century, when Romantic commentators on the Norse Edda inter-
preted the three-colour rainbow-bridge of Bifrdst as symbolizing the three social
divisions of nobles (gold), freemen (red), and slaves (blue). These colour-coded
social divisions have been revived more recently by Georges Dumézil to bolster
his now rather discredited analysis of the tripartite social structures of the Indo-
Germanic peoples.4 More fundamental as well as more urgent are the values attrib-
uted to black and white in many Western societies — values that have continued to
underpin racial prejudice.’ Recent work on the connotations of black has served to
give a more nuanced picture of the values attributed to blackness and whiteness,
light and dark, in the United States, and not least in Black Africa itself.° Among

34
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

European historians of art there have been occasional and rather half-hearted
attempts, in the tradition of W6lfflinian formalism, to distinguish national charac-
teristics in the colour-usages of painters;” and some more promising work has been
done on the propaganda functions ofthe colours of national flags.*
Within the history of Western painting, the structures of power and influence
may be seen in the economics of picture-making itself, in which raw materials
played a major role. Since Classical times it had been usual for the patron to provide
the most expensive and brightest pigments, such as ultramarine, a practice still fol-
lowed occasionally as late as the eighteenth century.’ This gives us some indication
of a split, particularly developed in the High Renaissance in Italy, between the
aesthetics of patrons and the aesthetics of artists. The lavish use of colour which
Vitruvius and Pliny had condemned on the grounds of wanton extravagance was
now interpreted as a failure to recognize the proper function of painting. This judg-
ment is encapsulated in Vasari’s sixteenth-century story of the fifteenth-century
Florentine painter Cosimo Rosselli, who in seeking to curry favour with his patron,
Pope Sixtus IV, smothered his contribution to a cycle of frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel with the brightest and most expensive colours. The Pope (who according
to Vasari ‘knew little of painting’) awarded Rosselli his prize for the best work in the
series; but to Vasari and to later critics, the Florentine’s extravagance was simply
another example of his lack of invention and disegno.'°
The growing field of patron-
age-studies has usually rested on some perceived community of interest between
commissioner and executant, at least before the nineteenth century: colour is one
area where this was manifestly not always the case. But none of the considerations
mentioned above has so far impinged upon the social history of art.

Colour and gender

In Black Athena Martin Bernal cites the nineteenth-century racial theorist Gob-
ineau’s equation of the male with white and the female with black, a judgment
curiously at odds with the Egyptian and Graeco-Roman traditions of painting, in .
which pale skin was already established as a most appropriate attribute of the fair
sex.'' Feminist art historians might well find much to ponder in the history of
colour, for in one phase ofthe post-Renaissance debate about the values of disegno
and colore, even when both of them were characterized (as attributes of pictura) as
female, colour was the ‘bawd’ whose wiles and attractions lured spectators into traf-
ficking with her sister, drawing.’* In the nineteenth century the French theorist
Charles Blanc stated categorically that ‘drawing is the masculine sex of art and
colour is the feminine sex’, and for this reason colour could only be of secondary
importance."? When, around 1940, Matisse told a friend that for him the opposite
was the case, and that drawing, the more difficult task, was female, he was still insist-
ing on this traditional gendering of polar opposites.'* The polarities that have since
the eighteenth century increasingly been assumed in the colour-systems used by
painters have also lent themselves to gendering: about 1809 the German Romantic
painter and theorist Philipp Otto Runge devised a colour-circle expressive of ideal 90

oh
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

and real values, on which the warm poles of yellow and orange represented the
‘masculine passion’ and the cool poles of blue and violet the feminine. When this
scheme was taken up about a century later by the neo-Romantic Expressionists in
86 Munich these values were reversed, so that for Franz Marc blue became the mascu-
line principle and yellow the feminine, ‘soft, cheerful, and sensual’.’°
Perhaps the most interesting area for feminists to explore is, indeed, the recurrent
assumption that a feeling for colour is itself peculiarly female province, an assump-
tion touchingly exemplified in the admission by one of the leading mid-twentieth-
century German colour-theorists, Rupprecht Matthii, that he left all judgments of
colour-harmony to his wife.'® Such beliefs, as previously mentioned, may have a
biological as well as a cultural basis, for it is well known that colour-defective vision
is nearly a hundred times more common among white males than among white
females.’ It is also striking that one of the most important areas of colour-study in
the history of art, the study of dress, is — notably through the work of Stella Mary
Newton’s Department ofthe History ofDress at the Courtauld Institute in London
— virtually a female preserve; although the most important large-scale work of
costume history’s ancillary, the cultural history of dyestuffs, has been carried out in
recent years by the chemist Franco Brunello.'* But if the history of costume has
been attacked with great vigour by feminist historians,"? so far the history of colour
has not.

The formalist tradition

One of the longest-running debates about colour has concerned its cognitive
status; ever since Antiquity there has been a fairly clear-cut philosophical division
between those, like Berkeley or Goethe, who considered that our knowledge of the
world was conditioned by our understanding of its coloured surfaces, and those,
like the ancient sceptics or Locke, who regarded colour as an accidental attribute of
the visual world, and visual phenomena themselves as an unreliable index of sub-
stance.*° Cézanne’s career as a painter might well be characterized as a sustained
meditation on this theme. There is now some reason to think that there may be a
biological basis for the belief that tonal variations in a scene supply the viewer with
most of the information needed to interpret it." Monochromatic engraving and
photography are the most obvious manifestations of this belief in Western art; but it
is a belief that would also help us to understand the persistence of a light and shade
(value) based colour-systems in the West, from Greek Antiquity until the nine-
teenth century, as well as the recurrent debate on the respective places of disegno and
colore in painting, a debate that took a particularly philosophical turn in the seven-
teenth century, when, especially among Italian artists and theorists, the cognitive
independence ofline and ‘form’ was increasingly claimed.”
As it happens, the only ‘school’ of colour-analysis in the history of art owes its
development, not simply to the theoretical framework proposed in the nineteenth
century by the Swiss critic Heinrich WGlfflin, who focused on the formal charac-
teristics of visual style, including colour, but also, and more importantly, to the

36
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

stimulus of the more recent philosophical tradition of phenomenology, represented

in Germany chiefly by the philosopher Edmund Husserl. Lorenz Dittmann’s wide-
ranging study, Farbgestaltung und Farbtheorie in der abendliéndischen Malerei (Colour-
structure and Colour-theory in Western Painting), 1987, is only the most important
summation ofa tradition of Koloritgeschichte (history of colour in painting) that goes
back in Germany to around the time ofthe First World War and has engaged a con-
siderable number of distinguished art historians, including, most recently, Theodor
Hetzer, Hans Sedlmayr, Kurt Badt, Wolfgang Schéne and Ernst Strauss.”3
Husserl’s pupil, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, took the study of the phenomenology
of colours out of the psychological laboratory and into the studio and the gallery;
away from a concentration on nature and into paintings, where nature was exposed
in all its chromatic wholeness.
Conrad-Martius’s colour-theory [wrote Dittmann] shows us again [i.e. after
Goethe] that only a developed nature-philosophy, a comprehensive ontology,
will be fruitful for the perceptive, thoughtful engagement with works of art.An
isolated ‘aesthetic’ will hardly serve, and only occasionally the individual sci-
ences, such as experimental psychology, which are tied down to the empirical.
Within the framework of aphenomenological study of colour in art, the role of light
and shade (values) and the role of chromatic elements (hues) have been particularly
difficult to distinguish, and it is not surprising that the only classic survey of the
field remains Wolfgang Schéne’s Uber das Licht in der Malerei (On Light in Painting,
1954), which is still being reprinted after four decades.** The hallmarks of this school
of analysis are immediate confrontation with the object, and a systematic and sophis-
ticated technique and terminology for describing the effects of that confrontation.
In his large-scale study Dittmann has been somewhat dismissive of the work of his
only rival in the field, Maria Rzepinska, whose History of Colour in European Paint-
ing, he claims, neglects the comprehensive study of individual works.” But as his
own work shows, confrontation is a method that is fraught with pitfalls. Many of his
sensitive analyses are masterly — for example, the paragraph on Millet’s The Gleaners, 18
which gives a very precise sense of the way in which the almost indefinable, shifting
nuances of the painter’s palette nonetheless contribute to the creation of a stable,
monumental structure:
The Gleaners...is dominated by a muted brightness with a brownish and
grey-violet undertone. The sky appears tinged with a tender violet, as it were a
mixture of the two most evident hues in the picture: the very dull grey-blue
and copper-red tones in the headscarves of the bending peasant-women. In
the white sleeve of the central figure the light gathers with a ‘filtered’ effect.
The unusually restrained colours (which seem to contradict the monumental
forms) follow a closely-stepped sequence: reddish tones in the central figure,
based around copper-reddish, brownish and bright carmine; delicate nuances
of colourful greys in the standing figure to the right: silvery bright blue-grey,
dove-grey, blue and turquoise greys. The colour-thresholds are kept so low
that induction effects are made much easier, which allows the indefinite

Su
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

colour-tones to appear as ‘resonances’. Thus the barely definable, shimmering

brownish tone ofthe field in the middle distance takes on a tender pink-violet
tone against the grey-scale of the figure at the back, which is echoed again in
the slightly darkened foreground.”

But a lengthy book made up of such plums, particularly one for which the pub-
lisher has (justifiably) chosen the austerity ofan unillustrated text, would indeed be
indigestible, and there are fortunately not many set pieces like this. In any event,
Dittmann soon gets into trouble with his principle of personal encounter, because
he has simply not been able to examine in the original all the artefacts he wants to
discuss. His chapter on medieval book illumination — that most inaccessible of art
forms, rarely available for inspection, and usually displayed one opening at a time —
depends entirely on descriptions by Heinz Roosen-Runge: and indeed, Dittmann’s
text in general owes much to quotations from other scholars such as Theodor
Hetzer and Kurt Badt, and most of all, Ernst Strauss, whose unpublished notes as
well as published works (which Dittmann edited) have provided him with a good
deal of material. But the visual analysis of colour can in principle never be at second
hand, for different eyes will, as like as not, see quite different things.**
This type of detailed visual analysis works well enough for gallery paintings such
as Millet’s; far more disturbing than the occasional reliance on informed hearsay
is Dittmann’s almost complete disregard of the context of seeing. The discussions,
for example, of Taddeo Gaddi’s frescoes in the Baroncelli Chapel of S. Croce in
Florence, or Ghirlandaio’s in the choir at Sta Maria Novella,?? do not so much as
mention the stained glass in the windows which gives a pronounced colouristic
atmosphere to the architectural space; and this is the more surprising in that Sch6ne
had devoted a good deal of attention to the problematic effects of environmental
light (Standortslicht), particularly in the context of the modifying effects of stained
glass on the frescoes in the Upper Church of S. Francesco at Assisi.3°
In dealing with the painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Dittmann gives less and less space to his own visual analyses and more and more to
the statements of the painters themselves, even to the extent of reprinting Delau-
nay’s short essay on light in both its French original and the German translation by
Paul Klee.A beliefin the primary importance ofartists’ views of their own colour-
practice is also a notable feature of the approaches of Strauss and Badt, whose
studies of Delacroix and van Gogh depend heavily upon those painters’ abundant
writings.*' But we are increasingly aware that painters are not necessarily privileged
spectators of their own works; and when they turn to words they may in fact be
rather less able than other categories of writer to articulate their thoughts about the
notoriously opaque. world of visual sensation. One cannot but be struck, for
example, by the poverty of idea and expression in, say, Mondrian’ writings between
1917 and 1944, or Matisse’s between 1908 and 1947, compared to the richness and
variety of the work to which these writings ostensibly relate. In the case of Matisse
we are dealing with a far more sophisticated thinker than Mondrian, but the simpli-
fications that arise from an essentially propagandistic intent are no less evident.
Artists’ statements are not transparent; they must be unpacked like any others. For

38
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

example, it would have been helpful to have had Dittmann’s commentary on the
manifest differences of tone and emphasis of Delaunay’s essay La Lumiére, and Klee’s
version of it,in which Delaunay’s loosely structured meditations on the primacy of
sight and the spatial effects oflight — which created what he called ‘rhythmic simul-
taneity’ — were given a far more coherent structure, and a far greater emphasis on
the complementarity of polar energies.
Though my heading above characterized the German school of Koloritgeschichte
rather crudely as ‘formalist’, it is clearly not formalist in any rigorous sense. Since it
grew out of Conrad-Martius’s theory that colour serves to identify the very essence
of being, it could hardly have rested content with the mere analysis of external
characteristics. It is true that one of the few Classical archaeologists to have been
affected by this approach, Elena Walter Karydi, has undertaken the improbable task
of draining the symbolism even from archaic Greek colour.*? But the search for lit-
erary ‘meaning’ in colour has been pursued by followers of this tendency, not only
where we should most expect it (for example in Uwe Max Riith’s dissertation,
Colour in Byzantine Wall-painting of the Late Paleologian Period, 1341-1458),}} but even
in Gisela Hopp’s monograph on Manet - a painter whose style has until very
recently been interpreted as a ‘realist’ ancestor of Impressionism, and hence largely
free of literary or symbolic content. Hopp’s treatment of expressive colour in
Manet is particularly interesting because in her analysis of a number of the major
canvases she makes much of the painter’s use of emerald green, a pigment that in
German has quite deservedly been named ‘poisonous green’ (Giftgriin). In The
Balcony, Hopp saw this green as overwhelming and oppressive,** and in her discus- 20
sion of the late Bar at the Folies-Bergére she was even tempted to identify the charac- IO
teristically bulbous bottle on the bar to the right as holding green absinthe, and, by
contrasting with the ‘heated orange’ next to it, helping to establish a mood of
tension and irritation in the picture. But, as Frangoise Cachin noted in her account
of this painting for the Manet exhibition of 1983, the green bottle contains, not
absinthe, but the far cosier creme de menthe, which is still marketed in this format.» IEA

The créme de menthe sits very well with the equally identifiable bottle of English
beer. Perhaps Hopp’s interpretation of the greens in Manet’s paintings was largely .
conditioned by her use of this particular German term, and thus raises the question,
to which I shall return later in the chapter, of how far symbolic interpretation may
simply verbalize a visual attribute.
Central to the problem of formalism in this style of colour-analysis 1s its relation-
ship to a notion of history. Dittmann’s meticulous and highly selective method
resists historical generalization; and Schéne has stated quite categorically that the
starting point of any investigation must be the impressions made on the modern
investigator him- or herself.*° It is not at all surprising that there is a certain lack of
historical dynamic in this sort of writing. Dittmann, to be sure, makes historical
judgments from time to time, for example that the seventeenth century saw the
fullest development of chiaroscuro,’’ or, less plausibly, that colour in the twentieth
century gained a quite new independence in art. But these judgments are quite
ancillary to the detailed characterization of a selection of ‘key works’. Sometimes
Dittmann is struck by what seems to him to be the earliest significant use of a par-

39
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

ticular hue. Brown is a particularly interesting case in point. As a non-spectral

colour, brown has been especially resistant to theory, and philosophers and experi-
mental psychologists have generally argued that it is simply a darkened variety of
spectral yellow. But, although it may be perceived to be unmixed,*° brown also has
a very wide range of affinities with the long-wave spectral colours yellow, orange
and red.‘' Traditionally, and in some European cultures until remarkably recently, it
has had, like blue in earlier periods, the general connotation of‘dark’.4* Because of
its importance in painting, brown has particularly attracted the attention of the
German school of colour-analysis, beginning at least with Conrad-Martius.*
Dittmann traces the ‘discovery’ of brown as a unifying pictorial device to the late
Quattrocento in the work ofthe Pollaiuoli and Signorelli, but other scholars have
dated its coming of age to the early work of Velazquez and Ribera.** The identifica-
tion of this rather late emergence of brown is given a certain force by the undoubted
conceptual link between brown and darkness in the seventeenth century (and in
French, for example, brun still means dark), but it is also supported by the evidence
of Iberian treatises on painting in this period, which list an exceptionally large
number of earth-browns as habitually in use.*° It is contextual material of this kind
that is needed to turn visual analysis into history.

The substance of colour

Koloritgeschichte is notable for a certain reluctance to consider the material condi-
tion of the works of painting it chooses to analyse.*7 Yet perhaps the most important
developments in the study of painterly colour in recent years have come from con-
servationists, who have been making the results of their campaigns increasingly
available to the general public as well as to historians of art. Technical discussions
have become commonplace in exhibition catalogues dealing with all periods ofart,
and there have been several popular exhibitions on restoration itself.4* It is particu-
larly remarkable that the specialist literature of conservation, such as Studies in Con-
servation or Maltechnik, has now been widely supplemented by periodicals that are
clearly aimed at a general readership.*? Catalogues of single artists as well as cata-
logues of particular collections are now likely to be provided with far more techni-
cal information than hitherto.*°
Not that conservation is likely to give formalist critics much joy: the enormous
help that it can give in matters of connoisseurship is hardly matched by its aid to
aesthetic presentation (see, for example, Leonardo's newly stripped-down Last Supper
in Milan); and conservation methods are, of course, a very controversial area among
historians ofart as well as among conservators themselves. In recent years the clean-
ing of some Titians at the National Gallery in London,” the restoration ofthe glass
of Chartres West,* and, most of all, the cleaning of the Sistine ceiling’? have given
rise to much excited debate, which is not, since it is primarily a question ofaesthet-
ics, ever likely to reach any settled conclusions. What restoration reports do offer the
historian of colour is more reliable information than that hitherto available about
the methods and materials of painting in many historical periods — methods and

40
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

Edouard Manet, A Bar at

the Folies-Bergére, 1881-2. A
too-literary reading of colour
led to the bulbous bottle at
the right being identified as
containing ‘absinthe’, and its
green, clashing with a nearby
orange, as contributing to a
mood oftension and irritation
in the picture. In close-up
(right) it is revealed as the
far cosier créme de menthe.
(10, 11)

Al
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

materials that have often been part of an ideology or mystique of technique specific
to those periods and to particular places.
There have been a number of recent exhibitions devoted to techniques and
materials,‘ but rather less attention has been given to tools. The pioneering work of
E Schmid and J.W. Lane and K. Steinitz fifty years ago on that most important con-
ceptual as well as practical tool of the artist, the palette, has only recently been
developed.°>
Colour-symbolism itself has sometimes been thought to depend on the qualities
of materials; Michael Baxandall has pointed to the way in which certain Florentine
contracts ofthe fifteenth century prescribed specific qualities of ultramarine for the
most important areas of the picture, such as the Virgin’s robe, because it was the
most costly of all pigments (see pp. 13-14 above); and this is an attitude also found
in seventeenth-century Spain.°° Yet, as both contracts and the technical analysis of
surviving works abundantly show, other blue pigments were used as frequently
in these vital places, and the most important Italian recipe book of the period
described synthetic blues that were claimed to be indistinguishable from the best
ultramarine.‘’? Contracts often specified other particularly expensive pigments, as
well as gold, and the use of these specified colours was prescribed by many Italian
guild regulations:>* rather than demonstrating a ‘materialist’ attitude to colour-sym-
bolism in the spectator, they show a concern for the colour-stability of the product,
which, it was assumed, could only be guaranteed by the use of the ‘best’ materials
(see p. 13 above).*
One of the important conclusions to be drawn from much recent research in
conservation 1s that artists’ practice at all periods was often far more complicated
than the handful of surviving technical texts would suggest; and with the excep-
tion of Roosen-Runge’s study of the Mappae Clavicula and ‘Heraclius’ texts in rela-
tion to English Romanesque manuscript illumination, David Winfield on Byzantine
mural-techniques, and Mansfield Kirby-Talley’s account of the theory and practice
of the eighteenth-century English portrait-painter Thomas Bardwell, there has, it
seems, been little attempt to test the texts against the practice.°' Nor has the corpus
of written texts expanded much in recent years, although there have been impor-
tant new editions of some ofthe standard ones.
A systematic survey of scientific sources, particularly medical literature, would
certainly extend the range of technical sources for the arts:° there is, for example,
some particularly rich material on dyeing and painting — including what appears to
be the earliest textual reference to oil painting — in a recently published treatise on
the elements by the southern-Italian physician Urso ofSalerno, dating from the late
twelfth century.”
The vastly expanding technical literature for artists in the nineteenth century has
still to be surveyed and evaluated, although Anthea Callen has used some of it in her
important study of Impressionist technique.® Virtually no work at all has appeared
so far on the technical interests of twentieth-century painters, although the com-
mercial development of new artists’ materials has been greater in our time than in
any earlier period, and they have as usual formed an important part of the prevailing
aesthetic ideology.”

42
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

Theories and assumptions

It has been quite a common practice among writers on colour in art to preface
their analyses with an account of colour-phenomena in general, an account for the
most part based on the literature of experimental psychology of the past century
or so. It is quite unrealistic to suppose, however, that the psychology of colour-
perception has reached firm ground, and its relationship to the practice of painting
must thus remain highly problematic. The art historian must, I think, be more
concerned with the local context of colour-ideas as they relate to the artist under
consideration than with any global theoretical framework; and in many cases these
ideas will be assumptions rather than anything that could be plausibly be presented
as a theory. The treatment of colour-theories has usually been the weakest element
in the discussion of what may lie behind the choice and handling of colour in a
given artefact; and this has been because historians of art have found it hard to shake
off that ‘progressivist’ approach to their subject which historians of science have
long since discarded. They have tended to expect more coherence in the handling
of theory by painters than the evidence would warrant, and to see in the colour-
theories of the remoter past a unity and simplicity that in most cases have barely
been achieved even today, as well as a tighter fit with practice than it is reasonable to
expect. This does not make colour-theory any the less important.
Stated in its broadest terms, the theory of colour in the Western tradition, from
Antiquity to the present, can be divided into two phases. Until the seventeenth
century the main emphasis was on the objective status of colour in the world, what
its nature was, and how it could be organized into.a coherent system of relation-
ships. From the time of Newton, on the other hand, the emphasis has been increas-
ingly subjective, concerned more with the understanding of colour as generated
and articulated by the mechanisms of vision and perception.” At the same time, the
relationship of science to colour has shifted from an earlier dependence of scientists
on artists, who in their capacity as technologists of colour supplied science with the
necessary technical and experimental data, to an increasing dependence, about the
end of the eighteenth century, of artists on scientists, whose growing professional-
ism and prestige allowed them to offer more, and more that was beyond the reach of
art. Even the early treatises for artists, such as Theophilus’s De Diversis Artibus or the
slightly earlier anonymous De Clarea, can now be seen, not merely as random col-
lections of recipes, but as incorporating often quite sophisticated statements of
theory.® Conversely, it is very hard to find artists capable of absorbing the colour-
science of any period after the early nineteenth century.
On the other hand, attempts to reconstruct a philosophical context for ancient
colour-practice — attempts that go back at least to the eighteenth century but are
still an active preoccupation of Classical scholars — have not been able to overcome
the brevity and unreliability of the written sources and the ambiguities of the
surviving monuments.As Leon Battista Alberti noted in De Pictura (§ 26), and in
support of his own literary efforts, several ancient artists had written on painting,
but none of their writings has survived, and we are still dependent largely upon the
architect Vitruvius and on Pliny for our interpretation of the styles of the earlier

43
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

Greek examples of painting that are coming increasingly to light. The key text has
always been Pliny’s account (Natural History, XX XV, 50) of the four-colour palette
of Apelles and some of his contemporaries, which has been related to an archaic
Greek doctrine of the ‘basic’ colours of the four elements. While several modern
scholars have continued to use Pliny’s text as a guide to colour-principles in the
fifth and fourth centuries Bc, others have more plausibly placed it, with the related
judgments of Vitruvius and the orator Cicero, in the context of aspecifically Roman
polemic against extravagance in decoration.”

Alberti to Dtirer

Alberti’s De Pictura, which includes a number of important remarks on colour, was

an entirely new kind of theoretical text in which practicalities played a very minor
role, although the author was also a painter.” It has suffered from being seen, in its
emphasis on ‘variety’ and on the tonal scale, as embodying a very medieval attitude
toward colour, and as depending more or less exclusively on Aristotelian tradition.”'
Rather little has been published so far on specifically fifteenth-century develop-
ments in optics, but Alberti’s interest in the effect of light and shadow on colours
can be paralleled in some contemporary Central European, if not Italian discus-
sions, and anticipated the far more extensive investigations by Leonardo at the close
of the century.” Alberti’s remarks on the harmonious assortment of colours in
painting also reflect a preoccupation in Florence in the early fifteenth century.”
Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentaries, and particularly his Third Commentary, may have
been stimulated by Alberti’s work, although they were never shaped into a coherent
treatise. But where Alberti was content to leave to ‘the philosophers’ the detailed
discussion ofthe nature and effects of colours, Ghiberti drew heavily on these same
(mainly medieval) philosophers, so that his Third Commentary is as it stands little
more than an edited selection of passages from earlier authors.” But, as I shall
attempt to show in Chapter 6, this does not detract from its relevance to Ghiberti’s
practice, especially as a jeweler and a stained-glass designer.
Leonardo, too, looked very widely at medieval writers on optics, but he found
their opinions difficult to reconcile with his own experience and the results of his
experimentation. The work of Corrado Maltese in the 1980s has sought to weld
some of Leonardo’s scattered remarks on the mixture of coloured lights into a more
or less coherent prefiguring of the modern theory of additive and subtractive
mixture; but although Maltese recognizes the many gaps in the painter’s experi-
mental procedure, he has still tried to fill too many of them with his own engaging
speculations.’
His argument that in the course of his work Leonardo was able to reduce the tra-
ditional four-colour scheme of ‘simple’ colours to the modern three, flies in the face
not only of Pedretti’s revised dating of the Codice
Atlantico, where much of this work
appears, but also of Leonardo’s frequently changing attitude to what constituted a
‘simple’ colour — both green and blue, for example, appear as compounded colours
in various notes.”° Least convincing of all is Maltese’s attempt to link Leonardo’s

44
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

perception of the formation of colours through semi-opaque media with the

glazing methods used in the underpainting of the Uffizi Adoration and the Vatican
St Jerome.”
What seems increasingly clear is that Leonardo’s inability to elaborate a coherent
theory of colour, and his traditional distrust of the capacity of colour to reveal
truth,” fuelled his inclination to regard light and shade as the primary visual phe-
nomena, and stimulated his development of techniques in drawing and painting to
exemplify this truth. Recent commentators have underlined Leonardo’s view of the
dynamic power of darkness, superior even to that of light,”? and his creation of a
new and fruitful concept of chiaroscuro.*® Leonardo was even suspicious ofbellezza
— beauty — because for him it implied lightness.*' His supremely subtle interpreta-
tion of chiaroscuro in art, and particularly his technique of sfumato, was to involve
an unprecedented experimentation with media, including the development of soft
pastels,** and the extensive use of those most delicate and responsive of all painting
tools, his fingers."
Much has been made of the little that Diirer wrote on colour — effectively only a
short note on drapery-painting, in which he advocated modeling without ‘shot’
effects, advice that, as Dittmann has pointed out, Diirer was not always inclined to
follow himself.*t More promising, perhaps, is the linking of Griinewald’s unearthly
colour with his experience of the theory and practice of metallurgy, although there
are no indications so far that Griinewald ever turned to colour-theory as such.*
Although the sixteenth century was unusually productive in colour-theory relat-
ing to the arts, little of it was by or addressed to painters, and it seems to have borne
only tangentially on their practice.*°

Science into art

Only around 1600 did the theory of colour seem to offer something new and excit-
ing to artists, and the widespread movement to integrate the art and the science of
colour, which began essentially at the court of Rudolph II in Prague, was to last for .
nearly two centuries. In the the era of the Kunst- and Wunderkammer, colour and
colours, like painting and engraving, were among the wonders of art to be set
beside the wonders of nature. In Rudolph’s entourage several artists and scholars —
the painter Arcimboldo, the mathematician Kepler, the physicians de Boodt and 45
Scarmiglioni (see Chapter 8) — were interested in colour, and especially in its rela
tionship to music.*” During the seventeenth century many artists became involved
in colour-theory, and many theorists of colour looked to painting for enlighten-
ment. It was the period when Leonardo’s writings were first evaluated and pub-
lished, and when artists in both northern and southern Europe turned their hands
to writing. There are now studies of the theoretical interests of Rubens, Poussin,
and Pietro Testa,** as well as of the minor painter but influential theorist Matteo
Zaccolini.*? In the burgeoning French Academy of the 1660s colour and its rela~_ 57
tionship to design became a standard topic of formal, as well as informal debate,
generating an important and influential literature, especially by Félibién and De

45
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

Piles.” Paradoxically, since this was also the period that gave the greatest value to
darkness, both in theory and painterly practice,” light and colour found for the first
time a unified theory in the work of Descartes and, especially, Newton, who
showed that colour was indeed illusory, and that light was its only begetter. Yet
artists were at first both willing and able to draw on Newton’ ideas, especially his
conjectures about harmony, and his circular arrangement of colours which eventu-
ally gave them a clue to the nature of‘complementary’ contrast (see p. 142 below).??
Contrasts are, of course, subjective effects, and it was one of the greatest achieve-
ments of Newton to have shown that all colour is intrinsically subjective.

Science — ‘the taste of all minds’

After Newton, the aspects of colour-theory most interesting to artists have been, in
addition to theories of harmony, the devising of colour-systems,” and the explo-
ration of how colours relate to the mechanisms of perception, and affect the feel-
ings of the spectator. Many of these concerns had long since developed in artists’
studios themselves, but they were now investigated and codified systematically.
Long before the Czech physiologistJ.E. Purkinje announced the principle of chro-
matic shift in subdued lighting that now bears his name, it had been part of studio
lore that paintings could best be examined in the conditions of lighting in which
they were made (see p. 16 above).”
The most comprehensive contribution to the study of colour, which laid great
emphasis on these subjective phenomena, was Goethe’s Farbenlehre (Theory of
Colours) of 1810. It has a claim to being the most important single text on colour
78 for artists, and, indeed, for historians ofart, since one part is devoted to ‘materials for
a history of colour’, including what appears to be the first historical outline of
colour in painting, contributed by the painter Heinrich Meyer.®> Recent studies of
the Farbenlehre have tended to revive the old theme of Goethe’s outspoken opposi-
tion to Newton’s theory that colour 1s a function oflight alone,” this campaign in
favour of Goethe has ceased to be the preserve of spiritual movements, and has
joined the mainstream ofthe history of science. Newton is, of course, no longer the
rationalist idol he was in Goethe’s day: we have long had Ronald Gray’s Goethe the
Alchemist, and we now have Newton the alchemist, although Newton’ practice of
alchemy has hardly been brought to bear on the history of his optics,?” as Goethe’s
has. What is more important for us is the puzzle of why a theory of colour so
patently directed at artists, and deriving partly from Goethe’s theoretical and practi-
cal experience of art, should have made so little impression on artists for nearly a
century (see Chapter 14).
The original and extensive theory of Philipp Otto Runge, the one painter who
was close to Goethe during the final stages of his colour-work, has in detail very
little to do with Goethe’s theory (see Chapter 13).°? Unlike Goethe, Runge was
unable to develop an integrated theory: his published Farben-Kugel (Colour-
Sphere) of 1810 was in the tradition of European colorimetry in the seventeenth
79 and eighteenth centuries — the direct descendant, indeed, of the 1611 colour-sphere

46
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

of the Swedish mathematician Sigfrid Forsius,'°? while his unpublished thoughts

were in the metaphysical tradition of the late-Renaissance speculators G. P Lomazzo
or Athanasius Kircher.'®' Neither Runge’s practical experiments with transparency,
which may be related to his delicate watercolour technique, nor his ideas on
colour-meaning, which he sought to exemplify in the unfinished cycle of the Times
of Day, bore fruit in the rather austere diagramatic format of the Kugel, although
Matile has shown how Runge brought his published ideas of harmony to bear on
the small version of Morning in the Hamburg Kunsthalle.’ 84
Whereas in the seventeenth century the scientific theory of colour drew largely
on the experience ofpainting, not least in the search for a set of ‘primary’ colours,'®
by about 1800 the balance had shifted, and the very extensive development of sci-
entific colour-theory since Newton was now directed to artists through many pop-
ularizations, sometimes at the request of the artists themselves.'°** This does not mean
that artists were invariably willing, or even able, to use the colour-information sup-
plied to them in this way; and the more circumspect studies of the relationship of
colour-theory to painting in the nineteenth century have shown that theory and
practice very rarely went hand in hand. But then we should not have expected that
theory, any more than ‘nature’, would have been ready for direct and complete
transposition into art. The extraordinary vitality and tension of much nineteenth-
century colouristic painting derives precisely from the struggle with the intractable
ideas and sensations of colour. The Newtonian solution to the problem of an
antithesis between ‘apparent’ and ‘material’ colours had thrown the scientific
emphasis entirely on to the study of light, and decisively separated the procedures of
the laboratory from those of the painter’s studio. Runge, who experimented in both
traditions, remained hopelessly, if fruitfully, confused about the relationship of
theory to practice (see Chapter 13).'°* Most painterly theory in this period was
more or less anti- Newtonian, and it is not surprising that Turner, for example, felt
himself drawn even at an advanced age to study the theory of Newton’s leading
opponent, Goethe. But Turner’s theory of colour mingled traditional and modern
elements in a thoroughly idiosyncratic way, and it remains an open question how
far he understood the main issues at stake.'°°
Delacroix’s thoughts on colour have also generally been linked with the publica-
tions ofa single theorist, the chemist M.-E. Chevreul (see Chapter 15).'°’ But, for
example, the well-known colour-triangle with a note on primaries and secondaries
in Chantilly derives from a less abstruse source,J. F L. Mérimée’s De la Peinture a
Vhuile of 1830,'* and it was not until about 1850, when Delacroix was deeply
involved with the technical problems of large-scale ceiling-painting, that he seems
to have turned to Chevreul for advice, acquiring a set of notes from a lecture-series
of 1848, and proposing to visit the chemist in person.’ It was at this time, too, that
Delacroix came to know Charles Blanc, whose Chevreulian interpretation of the
painter’s colour-handling served to assure the younger generation of the 1880s that 95
Delacroix was indeed a ‘scientific’ colourist.'"°
Blanc was perhaps the most important of the mid-nineteenth-century French
writers on colour because he was read so avidly — by Seurat, Gauguin and van Gogh
among others."'! An admirer and follower of Ingres, he regarded colouring, para-

47
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

doxically, as an inferior part of painting; and it was from a pupil of Ingres, Jules-
Claude Ziegler, that he took his colour-diagram and, probably, his first knowledge
of Chevreul.'” Like Ziegler, Blanc moved easily between the fine and the applied
arts — he also wrote a Grammaire des arts décoratifs — and he saw no contradiction in
applying the same colour-theory to both. With far-reaching consequences, he also
praised Oriental cultures, especially the Chinese, as expert in colour and models for
European colour-usage. It was on to an Oriental — albeit a Turk — that Gauguin
foisted his amusing pastiche, the brief essay on colour-harmony that he circulated
among some friends in Paris in 1886.'"
Seurat’s reputation as a theorist has suffered somewhat in recent years, and it is
certainly not easy to understand why he remained so loyal to Chevreul, when the
literature of colour for artists in the 1870s and 1880s had introduced the far more
sophisticated notions of Hermann von Helmholtz (see Chapters 16, 17).''* The
explanation may lie in Seurat’s belief in Blanc’s view of Delacroix as a Chevreulian
painter; for it seems that the colour-circle that Seurat drew on a sheet of sketches
106 for La Parade is a reminiscence of the circle that Delacroix sketched in a notebook
iene) of about 1840, and that had been published by Auguste Laugel in 1869. Laugel’s
commentary is interesting for he introduces the new research of Helmholtz into
the colours of light, with its scheme of complementaries red-blue/green, orange-
cyan, yellow-indigo, yellow/green-violet, but he argues that Delacroix’s ‘crude
diagram’ of Chevreulian complementaries is far more practical for artists. Seurat
clearly agreed.''’ The context of Seurat’s scientism has still be be fully examined,
but it seems likely that in future less emphasis will be placed on the physics of
109-10, 105 Helmholtz and more on the psycho-physics of Charles Henry.''®
4
If Seurat as a colour-theorist has been the victim of revisionism, knowledge of
van Gogh’s approach to colour has remained essentially where Kurt Badt left it in
his 1961 study, which gathered a large number of references to colour from the
painter's extensive correspondence and related them only very loosely to his
work."'” Vincent’s own writing has continued to be the almost exclusive source of
documentation, and although we know a good deal about his reading of the theo-
retical literature of the period, very little has been done to evaluate his use ofit."'®
Nor has the crucial friendship with Gauguin in 1887 and 1888 been looked at
closely from the point of view oftheir rival conceptions of colour. Gauguin’s sym-
pathy withVincent’s notions, shown in the very flatly painted and strongly coloured
Vision after the Sermon in Edinburgh, and in the lesson he gave to Paul Sérusier in
1888, gave way increasingly to dislike for what he considered to be van Gogh’s very
crude colour-aesthetic. Although Gauguin never showed much interest in colour-
theory as such, the colour-system later published by Sérusier, with its emphasis on
warm browns and cool greys and its avoidance of complementarity, may substan-
tially represent Gauguin’s views."!?
Cézanne’s late work is perhaps the highest exemplification of a nineteenth-
century theory of colour-perception as a sequence of naively apprehended flat
patches, made popular in France by the publications of Helmholtz and his follow-
ers. Shiff has drawn attention to this strand of thought,'”° but he has not explored
the consequences ofthese ideas for Cézanne’s style; and the debates continue about

48
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

whether Cézanne may be considered to have had a ‘theory’, and the relationship of
theory to his painterly practice.'?' Here is one area where formal analysis still has a
major role to play.'”

Tiventieth-century theory
The historiography of colour in the art of the recent past has faced two intractable
problems.The first is that the categories of colour-analysis — the terminology intro-
duced in modern colour-systems, and the concepts of the psycho-physiological
effects of colours — are the very same ones that have been developed over the past
century or so; and they have thus tended to be taken for granted and exempted
from historical analysis. The second problem has been the hermetic character of
modernist criticism, and, together with this hermeticism, the extensive self-analysis
of artists themselves, which this criticism has often seen as sufficient. Criticism, that
is to say advocacy, has naturally taken precedence over the more analytical proce-
dures of history. Thus, although the more or less collected writings of some of the
major movements, such as Russian Constructivism and the Bauhaus, and some of
the major figures, like Matisse and Mondrian, and minor ones, like Marc and van
Doesburg, Hans Hoffmann and Winifred Nicholson, are now readily available,
there has been remarkably little secondary discussion of the colour-ideas of twenti-
eth-century artists.'*3
Several general treatments of individual artists, however, such as Hoelzel, Itten,
Matisse and van Doesburg, and of groups such as the Orphists, Russian Construc-
tivists and De Stijl, have included important considerations of their theoretical
interests in colour.’ There has also been a handful of short essays on Orphism, on
Russian Constructivism, on Marc, Klee, Picasso and Rothko, that have focused on
colour, '?> and a few monographic studies with the same emphasis.'*°
Several exhibitions in recent years have dealt with colour-theory in the twentieth
century, or have given a large place to it in the context of some other concern.‘
What these studies have usually lacked has been some sense of the ways in which
the discussions and usages of artists have related to the more general concerns of
colour-theory in their time. I have made a limited attempt to point to the psycho-
logical context of Kandinsky’s, Delaunay’s and Mondrian’s ideas (see Chapter 20),
and to the debates on the structure of colour-space that form such an important
part of early twentieth-century colour-science (see Chapter 19).'** The wide range
of attitudes toward colour as dynamic and affective that Kandinsky deployed, for 125
example in his On the Spiritual in Art (1911-12), including a colour-system that
owes as much to the late-nineteenth-century Viennese psychologist Ewald Hering
as it does to Goethe, can be paralleled closely in the responses revealed in a long
series of interviews and experiments, chiefly with artists and professional people,
conducted by the psychologist G. J. von Allesch in Germany in the decade before
the First World War.'”? At the Bauhaus in the 1920s Kandinsky was probably the
teacher most inclined to draw, as we know from his lecture notes, on the recent lit-
erature of experimental psychology, notably Neue Psychologische Studien (19266).

49
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

The Bauhaus represents a particularly rich field of colour-study, where the tradi-
tional concentration on the ideas of the most famous ofthe individual teachers has
civen quite a false impression of what was actually taught about colour there. It
never seems to have been a central issue. Itten is assumed to have taught the Basic
Course (Vorkurs), compulsory for all students, from the outset in April 1919, but the
first prospectus makes no reference to it, and it does not appear in the deliberations
of the Masters’ Meetings until October 1920."°AtWeimar, after Itten’s departure in
1923 colour was taught in the Vorlehre by Kandinsky for a mere hour a week, com-
pared to the eight hours of form-study under Moholy-Nagy plus an hour of the
same with Klee, two hours of drawing with Klee, and two of analytical drawing
with Kandinsky." Klee’s colour-lectures of 1922-3 (excerpted by Spiller in his
edition of the Notebooks and now available in facsimile) must have been given to
more advanced students in only some of the workshops.'** After the move to
Dessau, under Moholy-Nagy and Albers colour appears to have been dropped from
the Vorkurs entirely.'33 Albers, however, came to put colour at the centre of his inter-
ests, and after his move to the United States he taught the colour-course that gave
birth to his great Interaction of Color of 1963. In this beautiful and influential book,
Albers relegated ‘theory’ to the final stages of practice; and it is certainly question-
able how far he had a coherent conception ofcolour-theory at all."

Colour as content

In a review of the Titian exhibition in Venice of 1935, and of Hetzer’s book on

Titian’s colour, which coincided with it, Oscar Wulff accused Hetzer of setting up
far too abstract a model ofthat painter’s colour-concerns, and of neglecting colour’s
Darstellungswert, or representational function.'*’ Since Hans Jantzen’s pioneering
essay ‘On the Principles of Colour-composition in Painting’ of 1913, which intro-
duced the concepts Eigenwert (autonomous function) and Darstellungswert of
colours,'*° German scholars have sought to understand the role of colour in paint-
ing as moving essentially between these two poles. Hetzer himself argued that in
the 1530s Titian solved a colouristic problem that had plagued painters since the
early fifteenth century: that ofstriking a balance between the function of colour to
articulate space (Raumwert) and its surface function (Flachenwert), between its nature
as phenomenon (Erscheinung) and as material pigment, between colour as beauty
and colour as meaning.'*” But what these scholars understood by representational
or meaningful colour was essentially its capacity to imitate the object; that it had
any intrinsic capacity to convey meaning they left entirely out of consideration.
Wulff suggested, for example, that Titian’s great command of black may have
derived from his experience as a portrait-painter rendering the black dress of his
many maale sitters; but he did not inquire why black was such a high-fashion colour
in the mid-sixteenth century."*
In figure-painting, of course, the deployment of coloured drapery has always
been a major vehicle for the free exercise of aesthetic choice; and Cennini, for
example, in a little-noticed passage of the Libro dell’arte, argued that the colour-

$O
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

designs of leaves or animals used in block-printed fabrics were entirely a matter of

fantasia, provided they created an appropriate contrast. Here, ofall places, we might
expect colour to be unencumbered by any but formal considerations."° And yet
textiles are perhaps the coloured artefacts most expressive of social values, and,
through these values, of ideas.

Colour-change: shot fabric and modelling

Historians of textiles and costume have not yet given much attention to question of
colour,'*° and historians of art have so far used costume almost exclusively as an
aid to dating. There has indeed been a tendency to treat the handling of colour-
composition in painted draperies as if it were entirely an aesthetic matter. The
art-historical treatment of ‘shot’ materials (cangianti or changeantes), is particularly
instructive. Since Siebenhiihner’s study of 1935,'4! several historians of Italian
Renaissance art, notably John Shearman, have discussed the technique of colour-
modelling by hue rather than value-shifts, resulting in’ effects that seems close to
those of silks woven so the weft of one colour is dominant when seen from one
direction, and the warp of a contrasting colour is dominant viewed from another.
Although not directly related to the distribution of light and shade, colour-changes
do relate to the three-dimensional character of folds, and can thus serve as a form of
modelling. The question is, whether they were adopted, as modern scholars have
suggested, because of their formal capacity to model without value-contrast, and
hence maintain a high key throughout a particular form, or whether they bore the
connotations that derive from representing a particular sort of fabric. Shearman, for
example, has argued that Andrea del Sarto used colour-changes ‘of an entirely new
order of subtlety’. Unlike those of the Quattrocento,
which make a sharp contrast of chromatic and tonal value, from yellow to red
or green to rose... they [del Sarto’s colour-changes] move between values that
are deliberately selected for their close association. Highlight and shadow are
not, to a greater or lesser extent, made from separate pigments, but are care-
fully adjusted mixtures; cream-grey and lilac-grey may be coupled together, or
shell-pink and lavender, turquoise and grey-green. When the colour-change 1s
a matter ofnuance, like these, it can appear to be the fall of light on a lively and
uniformly coloured material.’
Very little is known about the early history of shot fabrics; none has apparently sur-
vived from the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, perhaps because they were not
figured and were thus less valued, and perhaps for the same reason very few were
mentioned in the early sources. The earliest literary references seem to be in early
fourteenth-century commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard," and the
earliest inventory reference I have discovered is at Assisi in 1338." The related dis-
cussion of lightening or darkening the colours of drapery in manuscript painting
occurs in treatises from the mid-thirteenth century onwards;'* but here it is often
difficult to separate the idea of value from the idea of chroma (colour); yellow and

si
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

green, for example, so often encountered together in the drapery of Trecento paint-
ing, had been since Antiquity regarded as the light or dark species of the same genus
of hue." The pairing of black and blue, mentioned by Cennini in his chapter on
block-printing, and recognizable in many paintings, is subject to the modern eye to
similar confusions. Cennini (ch. LXXVII) assumed that cangianti draperies were
suitable for angels, and this is often, though not exclusively, where they appear in
Italian Trecento and Quattrocento painting. But what was perhaps most important
was that they clearly connoted silk, probably exotic silk, and hence great expense: at
the end of the sixteenth century Lomazzo, who provides the most extensive treat-
ment of cangianti combinations (Tiattato della pittura, II, X) and regards them as
appropriate to nymphs and angels, insists that they are silks, and seeks to restrict the
vast range of colour-possibilities to those giving a convincing rendering of actual
stutis.A8

Colour and symbol

Historians of colour-meaning need not only to look at the recent literature on the
affective characteristics of colour,'** but also to embrace that area traditionally called
colour-symbolism. By far the most useful source for the Middle Ages is still G.
Haupt’s dissertation of 1940, Colour-symbolism in the Sacred Art of the Western Middle
Ages,'*? which surveys and excerpts the medieval literature with admirable thor-
oughness. But Haupt, like more recent students of medieval colour-iconography,
notably Peter Dronke,'*° depends very much on texts, and he is naturally somewhat
at a loss when colour-terms and colour-usage do not seem to marry. '*’
In the pre-modern period the study of coloured artefacts or materials seems to
be a more fruitful line of inquiry than the study of abstract hues, and some excellent
work has been done along these lines by Christel Meier, who is preparing a com-
prehensive dictionary of medieval colour-symbolism. In her study of the interpre-
tation of gemstones from Antiquity until the eighteenth century, Meier has shown a
subtle understanding ofthe way in which perceptions of colour may be affected by
conceptions of what the stone in question means: the same material may be seen as
variously coloured according to the need for meaning, and this imagined need is
primary, rather than flowing from the perception of the colour.'*
Many observers may share my experience that the identification of a colour in
a given array is a conscious and verbalized act, and that it is thus dependent upon
the available colour-language.'*} On the other hand, a good deal of the colour-
terminology in European languages is derived, not from perceptions of hue, but
from the materials that characteristically embodied those hues, and from which the
hues derived their value and meaning. The most studied example of this is scarlet
(see also pp. 110-12),'** but the most striking instances are to be found in the lan-
guage of heraldry, all of whose specialized colour-terms derive from precious mate-
rials. In a remarkable series of books and articles, Michel Pastoureau has
transformed the modern study of heraldry, and brought it out of the almost exclu-
sive province of genealogists and into the history of ideas.'’’ He started from the

§2
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

brilliant perception that imaginary coats of arms might be more revealing of atti-
tudes to symbolism than historical ones; and he has gone on from there to survey
the vast field of medieval secular and ecclesiastical symbolism. Heraldry offers a par-
ticularly fruitful area for the study of colour-language because of the abundance of
more or less datable armorials, from the early thirteenth to the seventeenth century,
many of which are illuminated.The detailed analysis of this language remains to be
done, but it is likely to reveal a gradual shift from object-based terms to more
abstract ones, a shift in line with the greater capacity for conceptualization percep-
tible in other areas of colour-experience in the later Middle Ages. Closely allied to
heraldic attitudes to colour-meaning are those of liturgical usage in the Christian
Church; and the study of liturgical colour, both Catholic and Protestant, has now
received an incomparable boost from the exhaustively documented articles in the
Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, which, as usual in this encyclopaedia, are
far from confined to German examples.'*°
In the post-medieval period the colour-content of paintings has sometimes been
extended far beyond symbolism and into the often highly complex iconography of
colour. Painters began, from around 1600, to refer in some works directly to the
colour-theories of their day, for example to the new doctrine of primary colours,in
Rubens’s Juno and Argos (1611) or Poussin’s Christ Healing the Blind (1650). Even
more explicitly, Turner took up a contemporary debate about the relationship of
the hues to light and dark in a pair of paintings of 1843: Shade and Darkness, and
Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) .'*7 A conspicuous modern instance, characteristi- 76, 77
cally more self-referential than these, is Joseph Albers’s long series Homage to the
Square, beginning in 1950 and continuing until the year of the artist’s death, 1976,
which relates very closely to his experimental work published in 1963 as Interaction
of Color. '**

Reception and response

A good deal ofrecent art-historical writing has been concerned with the reception
ofartefacts, and it would be surprising if colour did not find an appropriate place in
these discussions. Museology has certainly given an impetus to the study of the
visual context, in particular to the history of frames and hanging, and to the hghting
of the gallery environment. Framing is perhaps closest to the interests of the origi-
nating artist, who at least from the mid-nineteenth century often designed his
frames himself: but, like the conservationist, the modern framer is often at a loss
to know what the original character of the artefact was.’ Lighting has naturally
been far more the preserve of curatorial specialists, but even here the experience of
conservators and other optical scientists is emerging from the technical literature
and appearing in more general art-historical publications.'* Framers and lighting-
technologists are usually, I suppose, animated by the same urge to recreate an
‘original’ state of affairs that stimulates conservationists and even art historians:
Wolfgang Schéne once proposed — seemingly without irony — that historians of art
should equip themselves with sets of dark glasses that approximated as closely as

53
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

possible the original lighting-levels of the artefacts under examination.'®' But the
technician, like the conservationist, has to come to terms with the fact that the
history of the object in question may include the history of its presentation in an
inappropriate frame or environment; and that the response of the public to the
work in these unoriginal circumstances must be seen as no less valid than that of the
originator and his or her circle.
Perhaps the least developed area in the history of colour is indeed the area of
spectator-response, and this is probably because the very impressive advances in the
modern understanding of colour-vision have not been matched by advances in the
theory of colour-perception.As I have suggested in Chapter 1, it may well turn out
to be in this area that the historian of art has most to offer the sciences at large. The
distinction is, of course, that vision is a matter largely of bio-physical mechanisms,
whereas perception depends upon the psychological controls to which this vision is
subjected. The one is relatively easy to examine and test by laboratory methods; the
other is not. This distinction is very graphically illustrated by the fact that the
number of colour-sensations that can be discriminated by the human visual system
is numbered in millions,'® while the number of ‘basic’ terms used to classify these
sensations in most languages is believed to be around a dozen (see pp. 29, 68). The
number of these ‘basic’ terms can be further reduced to three or four ‘primary’
colours, relating to the mechanisms of the eye which translate incident light into
sensations of colour; and the idea of primariness itself has had a particular resonance
in modernist art."
Several researchers into colour-defective vision have turned their attention to
artists: Patrick Trevor-Roper’s major study The World Through Blunted Sight has now
appeared in a revised edition.'*t The effects of congenital or temporary abnormali-
ties, of ageing, and even of drugs'®’ might have been expected to be very marked on
the colour-practice of artists; yet the very tentative results these studies have pro-
duced must remind us that, in its broadest sense, psychology is more important than
physiology for colour-usage, and psychology depends upon a wide range of often
imponderable cultural factors."
The study of the effects of colours on the physiological functions, a branch of
research that was especially active in Europe in the late nineteenth century (and, in
the form of chromotherapy, especially interesting to Kandinsky), has also proved
surprisingly inconclusive, although this therapy is a form of alternative medicine
still practised in several countries." A century of research seems to have shown
136 little more than that, as previously mentioned, exposure to red light increases the
pulse-rate and blue and violet light retards it.
Also heavily implicated in modern practices is the use of colour in psychological
tests, notably in the personality-testing developed in the 1940s by the psychologist
Max Liischer (see pp. 3 1-3 above). In the Liischer Test (in which the subject is asked
to arrange eight coloured cards in descending order ofpreference of hue), the order
which, according to Liischer, gives the ‘surface indications of complete normality’
— dark blue, blue-green, green, orange-red, yellow, violet, grey, brown (‘a darkened
yellow-red’), black — is close, in the broadest terms, to the results of earlier tests with
many thousands of subjects." Liischer’s widely used Test'”? has as we have seen

54
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

come in for a good deal ofcriticism for its lack of precision and concreteness.'7' But
there has also been some scepticism about the capacity of colours to evoke or
expose states of mind at all'?* — a scepticism that has spread to the very notion of
colour-harmony which was such a sustaining ideal for colour-theorists until well
into this century.

Theories of harmony
Traditional theories of colour-harmony may be grouped roughly into three classes:
those regarding the spectrum of white light as in some sense analogous to the
musical scale, so that it could be treated in a ‘musical’ way (Newtonian); those 60
requiring the presence ofall ‘primary’ colours in any harmonious assortment, often
in a ‘complementary’ arrangement (as in Goethe’s theory); and those regarding the 78
value-content of hues as the primary determinant of their harmonious juxaposi-
tion (as expressed in Ostwald’s colour-solid).'73 More recently, experimental psy- 133
chologists have sought to ground theories of colour-harmony in the empirical
study of responses to single and paired colour-samples by a variety of subjects.'”
This empirical work has done little either to substantiate any of the traditional
systems, or to replace them;'7 and yet it remains that harmony is still a very promi-
nent concept among students of colour, and that behind several of the colour-
systems currently in use among painters and designers as well as art historians, in
Europe and the United States, lies the urge to organize colour in a harmonious
way.'”° Is this another instance of the gap between theory and experience in
modern colour-practice?
One aspect of the doctrines of harmony that has maintained a certain buoyancy
among historians of art is the analogy with musical harmony, whether through that
branch of psychology known as synaesthesia (not necessarily involving musical, 1.e.,
pitched sounds), or through looser associations. The high period of synaesthetic
research was from about 1890 to about 1930, and it made a notable impact on atti-
tudes toward colour among painters during this period, especially in Germany and
Russia (see Chapter 21).'7” In recent years there has been something of a revival of
interest among psychologists in cases of synaethesia;'” but it no longer seems to
play a role in visual aesthetics, as it did at its beginnings in the nineteenth
century.'”The looser affinities between colour and music, on the other hand, con-
tinue to fascinate painters and other students of the harmony of colours. The links
between colour-interests and musical skills in Matisse, Kandinsky and Klee, for 129
example, have always impressed critics; and in the case of Kandinsky we can now
be more certain that his friendship with Arnold Schoenberg helped him to move
away from a traditional striving after colour-harmony. It was, as he wrote in On the
Spiritual in Art (1911-12), no longer in tune with the age:
From what has...been said about the effects of colour, and from the fact that
we live in a time full of questions and premonitions and omens — hence full of
contradictions...we can easily conclude that harmonization on the basis of

55
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

simple colours is precisely the least suitable for our own time... Clashing dis-
cords, loss of equilibrium, ‘principles’ overthrown, unexpected drumbeats,
great questionings, apparently purposeless strivings, stress and longing (appar-
ently torn apart), chains and fetters broken (which had united many), oppo-
sites and contradictions — this is our harmony.'*°

Representing colour

In sharp contrast to the fitful light thrown by experimental psychologists on the

effects of colour is the illumination offered by philologists and theorists of language
over the past two decades. The puzzle of colour-terminology — why such a rich
human experience of colour has issued in such a universally impoverished vocabu-
lary — is one that has taxed students of classical philology for well over a century; but
it has also attracted the attention of art historians anxious to bring greater subtlety
and precision to their own subject.'*' The mapping of colour-space through lan-
guage can of course suggest far-reaching consequences for our understanding of
mental structures, and the extensive discussions that have been generated by Berlin
and Kay’s synthesis Basic Color Terms of 1969 have extended into many areas of psy-
chology, ethnology and psycho-biology.'** Much of the raw material has been taken
from non-European cultures, but it is clear that very simular structural patterns
apply in Europe, especially in early periods, and that the use of linguistic material
must be drawn into the assessment of colour-meaning in a far more systematic way
than has been done so far.'™
But of course, language is also the tool ofthe art historian, who can learn much
from masters of colour-description such as (to name only those writing in English)
Robert Byron, Adrian Stokes, Lawrence Gowing, John Shearman and Paul Hills —
writers who have sought to extend the range of hue-description, and to introduce
important considerations of surface texture as well as of synaesthetic effects into the
taxonomy of pictorial colour. Here is Byron on one of the versions of Andrej
19 Rublev’s Trinity in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow:

The central angel and that on the beholder’s right wear full-sleeved robes,
round which cloaks are draped to cover one arm and shoulder. On the central
angel these garments are respectively of rich flat chocolate, tinged with red,
and of a brilliant lapidary blue, a colour so emphatic, yet so reserved, that in all
nature I can think of no analogy for it. The angel on the right wears a robe
whose tint is of this same blue, but whose intensity is less. Across this is draped
a cloak of dry sapless green, colour ofleaves at the end of summer, whose
high-lights are rendered in light grey-green shading off into pure white... All
the faces and hands are nut-brown, modelled only by variations in the tone of
the same colour, and outlined in black. The outspread wings, whose feathers
are denoted by thin gold lines, are a flatter and paler brown, something
between tea and toffee, which strikes a mean plane between the figures and
thetree.

56
 G

Minox
DAM

[NESS
F =
Derk

vee Exatse)
SoyS

In the early Middle Ages blue was seen as akin to darkness — it is even associated with the dark
angel of evil in a sixth-century mosaic panel in S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna. Later, blue became the
colour oflight. In the eleventh-century book-cover of Aribert (above) the cross and mandorla are
coloured in two shades ofblue, and in an inscription Christ is characterized as Lux Mundi. (12)
Red and green
Stare for a moment at the red disc (right), and then, with eyes unfocussed, at the white disc (left). Most people will see
an after-image they would call ‘blue-green’. Yet since about 1800 red’s complement has usually been described simply
as ‘green’— partly because in the system of the three primaries red, blue and yellow, the complement of each colour
was deemed to be an equal mixture ofthe other two. The optical evidence is secondary. (13)
In his Bauhaus exercises and watercolours such as Crystal Gradation of 1921 (below), Paul Klee constructed a scale of
colours from red to green, one of whose steps must be the ‘red-green’ which the philosopher Wittgenstein declared to
be a logical impossibility. (14)

58
Unstable hue

During the successive stages of the

ancient and medieval technology of
alchemy, identical substances might
be characterized by entirely different
colours. Similarly in the process of
glassmaking, the identical additive,
copper oxide, coloured white glass
bog)
both red and green, according to the
degree of heat applied — as would
: fe
a
have been the case for the red-green
tonality (right) of one of the earliest
surviving stained-glass windows, the
King David window in Augsburg
Cathedral (c. 1135). Hue was not
stable. The only fixed points were
those of light and dark. (15)

a
as
1

! t
 Blue and the advent of oils

Artists’ materials are more than mere tools,

they are repositories of values in their own
right. For the mantle and gems of the Virgin
in Majesty of the Ghent Altarpiece (left),
painted in 1432, Jan van Eyck uses the most
precious of blue pigments, ultramarine. (16)

With the advent of the oils in the Netherlands

in the fifteenth century the mixing of colours
became a less chancy business. The medieval
concentration on the intrinsic value of
materials gave way to another type of richness
— that of variety. The surviving contract for
Dieric Bouts’s Altarpiece of the Last Supper in
St Pierre, Louvain (right), painted in 1464-8,
is instructive, for it does not stipulate the
quality of the materials, and the blues used are
mostly the cheaper pigment azurite. From the
mixing of few colours to make many arose the
fruitful notion of a set of‘basic’ colours. (17)

60
Confronting colour

Millet’s highly nuanced handling of colour in the monumental composition The Gleaners, 1857, gave rise to one ofthe
great set-pieces of German formalist criticism. Lorenz Dittmann observed in 1987 how: “The unusually restrained colours
(which seem to contradict the monumental forms) follow a closely stepped sequence: reddish tones in the central figure,
based round copper-reddish, brownish and bright carmine; delicate nuances of colourful greys in the standing figure to
the right; silvery bright blue-grey, dove-grey, blue and turquoise greys. The colour-thresholds are kept so low that
induction effects are made much easier, which allows the indefinite colour-tones to appear as ‘resonances’ ...’ (18)

The rich, close-toned palette of Andrej Rublev, the greatest master of Russian Renaissance painting, has inspired a vivid
modern ekphrasis by the traveller and art historian Robert Byron. Of the hues of the robes and cloaks in The Trinity he
writes: ‘On the central angel these garments are respectively of rich flat chocolate, tinged with red, and of a brilliant
lapidary blue... The angel on the right wears a robe whose tint is of this same blue, but whose intensity is less. Across this
is draped a cloak of dry sapless green, colour of leaves at the end of summer, whose high-lights are rendered in light grey-
green shading off into pure white... The reddish mauve and the pale slate, the leaf-green lit by grey-green and white, are
seen to compose, on examination of the miracle, all the colours of the pearl spectrum. (19)
Even formalist critics have sometimes been tempted to ascribe literary
meaning to colour. Perhaps because
of the German rendering of emerald green as ‘poisonous green’ (Gifigriin),
the characteristic Parisian green of the
woodwork and rail in Manet’s The Balcony has been identified
bya xerman scholar as heightening the sense of
anxiety conveyed byManet’s
M figures, and establishing a mood of oppression. (20)
 COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

It hardly needs to be emphasized that the Capacity to convey visual sensation

with this degree of nuance will draw untold benefits from the reading of descriptive
fiction.
On the other hand, several historians of art have sought to avoid the snares of
subjective language by recourse to one or other of the colour-order systems avail-
able since the early years of this century. Some early German monographs made use
of home-made colour charts,'*’ but soon after Wilhelm Ostwald published his first 132
manuals of colour during the First World War, one gallery at least, the Fiirstlich
Furstenbergische Sammlungen at Donaueschingen, attempted to introduce refer-
ences to his numerical colour-solid into its catalogue entries on paintings, if only as
a supplement to lengthy verbal analyses.'*° In recent times the American Munsell
system has found some favour among art historians in the United States.'*” But it is
clear that glossy or matt colour-chips can only approximate the nuances encoun-
tered in artefacts themselves, and that these nuances are equally subject to the reser-
vations about condition, setting and lighting that I have outlined in my discussion
of visual analysis above.
The colour-reproduction, whose history is only just beginning to be written, is
another tool with which some art historians have hoped to outflank language. The
development of a theory of three ‘primary’ colours in the seventeenth century pro-
vided the basis for mass-produced colour-reproduction that could imitate paint-
ings, and the first technician to exploit this possibility was the German J.C. Le Blon
(see pp. 138-9)."** Although the rarity of Le Blon’s prints today may suggest that
they were mistaken for paintings, the technical difficulties of his and his successors’
processes'*? meant that very little could be done in the way of colour-facsimiles
until the development of chromo-lithography in the nineteenth century, and even
here, the results were far from impressive until the 1890s.'°° Colour photography,
announced as early as the 1840s, did not become a viable reproductive technique
until the early years of our century;'?' and it took almost as long — until the 1950s —
for it to be widely accepted as a research tool, although Aby Warburg and, surpris-
ingly enough, Bernard Berenson used it in the form of lecture-slides around the
time of the First World War.'®? The English art magazine Colour, which started then,
depended upon the extraordinary new developments in mass-produced colour-
reproduction; and in 1920 it carried testimonials to the reproductions’ fidelity from
a number of‘great artists’.'> But for the scholar, acceptance of colour either in
books or in slides came very much more slowly: in the early 1930s the possibility of
colour-documentation through photography still seemed to be in the future.’
Twenty years later a conservationist wrote that colour-reproduction seemed ‘fast
approaching perfection’as a research tool,'’> but there was still only a grudging
acceptance in other parts of the profession.'”” In the early 1950s, when UNESCO
began its catalogues of good colour-reproductions, the Skira series Peinture-
Couleur-Histoire, the first series of art books, it seems, to print all the illustrations in
colour, appeared to Roberto Longhi to usher in a new era when all art archives
would be stocked with colour-photographs. '*”
The case of colour-slides is somewhat different, although in the United States
they were widely recognized as teaching aids as early as the 1940s, not long after-

65
COLOUR IN ART AND ITS LITERATURE

commercial colour film became generally available.'®* This was not the case in Europe:
Edgar Wind never used them at Oxford in the 1950s,'”? and when I first lectured at
Cambridge a decade later they were the exception rather than the rule. This is not
the place to argue the pros and cons of photographic colour-reproductions, whose
limitations are as well known to technologists as to their clients;*”° it is only neces-
sary to point out that, as Wind recognized, these limitations are themselves part of
the history ofcolour in art.

The history of colour

It will be clear from my comments, ommissions and emphases in this largely biblio-
graphical essay that I think that some lines of inquiry have proved, or are likely to
prove, more fruitful than others. Like Michel Pastoureau, I believe that the study of
colour in Western art must proceed along broadly anthropological lines. But in
many Cases its raw materials and artefacts and their documentation are more sophis-
ticated and complex than those familiar to anthropologists, so that their methods
cannot always be usefully brought to bear. Like Pastoureau, too, I believe that an
overview of the history of colour is essential if we are to overcome the standard
misunderstandings of local and period-specific aspects of colour in art (for example
the notion ofa fixed set of colour-values in medieval art, or of the scientific compe-
tence of Seurat).
Historians of colour must also face the possibility that throughout much of
European history their interest has, indeed, been a very marginal one; that, for
example, coats of arms were often presented in a monochromatic form on tiles and
seals, and that when they came to be engraved, there was little attempt, until the
early seventeenth century, to convey the identity of the colours of blazon by
graphic signs. But this possibly marginal concern must itself be a fact of the history
of colour; and even the shifting identity of certain hues (such as yellow/gold,
red/purple) must be understood as part ofthe historical experience ofcolour itself.
In this sense disputes about colour in all periods can be particularly valuable to the
historian.
Colour seems to me to be of special importance to the art historian precisely
because it obliges him or her to engage with so many other areas of human experi-
ence. Because it is almost invariably itself, and very rarely a representation of itself,
and because it is the stuff from which representations are made, colour must be be
experienced concretely in artefacts. Thus it offers a corrective to that lively branch
of our subject that, despite the voguish topic of*the gaze’, has sought in recent years
to exclude visibility from its discourse and to focus on ‘text’. In short, colour must
redirect the history of art toward the assessment of the visible; and this alone should
put it high on any future art-historical agenda.

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 Part Tivo
4 - Colour in History — Relative
and Absolute

T HAS SOMETIMES SEEMED THAT our mental images of colour as expressed in

language, and the colour-perceptions deriving from our experiences of nature
and visual art, are incommensurably distinct. A bibliographical essay on colour in
literature, published in 1946, could discover from a total of nearly twelve hundred
items, chiefly psychological and literary, only some thirty relating to the visual arts,
and the compiler concluded that there could indeed be little interchange between
colour in art and colour in literature:
The colors of the painter are relatively unambiguous and stable. The hues may be
defined with considerable exactitude and the composition often may be brought
down to simple formulas. In this regard the painter’s colors have little in common
with the vague, suggestive and elusive means of expression in language.'
One reason for his reaching this conclusion was probably that most of his references
in visual art were to the only substantial school of colour-studies, namely the
German post-W6lfflinian one which has been crowned by Wolfgang Schéne’s Uber
das Licht in der Malerei (see pp. 36-41 above). It is a school whose objective has been
in the main to discuss absolute colour, to develop an adequately subtle descriptive
vocabulary of colour-analysis which may be applied by the modern observer of
earlier art; Schone’s key concepts, for example Eigenlicht (autonomous light) and
Beleuchtungslicht (illuminating light), were deliberately framed without reference to
ideas of light contemporary with the art he was treating.* The study of colour in art
must inevitably depend upon accurate and sensitive observation — something that is
often made difficult in practice by poor preservation or unfavourable viewing-
conditions — but it is no less inevitable that colour-observation is at the same time
colour-interpretation; that colour is not simply a sensible and measurable datum,
but that, like space or physiognomy, it has a history, and that the reconstruction of
this history is an act of historical imagination which must draw, not simply on the
surviving monuments, but also on a wide range of contemporary writing: imagina-
tive, philosophical, scientific, and above all, technical. Given the still exiguous litera-
ture of colour in art we cannot expect to contribute to a running debate. What this
chapter does offer is a number of synchronic and diachronic ways of looking at the
uses of colour in medieval and modern art.
Something like a framework for this study has already been offered in linguistics,
where there have recently been attempts to arrange the development of colour-
terminology in many languages into an evolutionary scheme. In an analysis of inter-
views with native speakers of twenty languages, and written studies of a further

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

seventy-eight, Berlin and Kay in 1969 drew up a list of eleven basic colour-categories
which they suppose to have entered these languages in the following order: white
and black, red, green or yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey.’ While
as we have seen their study has been criticized both on account ofits method and
for its handling of detail, it agrees substantially with independent studies of three
obsolete languages of special interest to students of early medieval art: Classical
Greek, Latin and Old English.+

Iconography in the early Middle Ages: brightness versus hue

In the present chapter we are not concerned with the evolution oflanguages, but
we are concerned with the scale of values which seems to underlie such an evolu-
tion — with the fundamental opposition of white and black, or lightness and dark-
ness, and the third basic discrimination of red, all of which offer us a standard against
which the detailed colour-preferences of the early medieval period may be tested.°
It will become clear that the conception of colour in this period was, like Berlin
and Kay’s examples, essentially a brightness or value-based one. The modern under-
standing of colour depends upon a three-dimensional model — for example the
Munsell system — co-ordinating hue, brightness or value, and saturation or purity.
When we think of colour, we think in the first instance of hue: we discriminate
colours by their redness, blueness, etc. In the period that I shall deal with here, this
hue-based conception had not yet been developed; colours were chiefly recognized
as degrees on a scale of brightness, for their position between white and black, or
light and dark. And this scale itself was not established by an exact notation of
degrees of reflectivity, in the modern way, but as much as anything by a process of
association.
The dangers of approaching a value-based conception of colour with assump-
tions based on hue may be illustrated by the philological studies of two obsolete
medieval colour-terms, perse and pandius. Students of perse in the Romance lan-
guages have shown that the term was applied to a wide range of hues, from blue-
black through light blue to a shade of red.° Since several of the earliest usages are
in the context of textiles, it may be that, like a number of other medieval ‘colour’
terms, perse refers simply to cloths, in this case regarded as of Persian origin.’
Pandius, which occurs in the early technical literature of colour-making, has been
found by experiment to include hues as various as fiery red, ice-blue, and a sandy
yellow with an olive cast. One treatise alone, the eighth- or ninth-century Composi-
tiones Lucenses, lists recipes for green and purple pandius, as well as one for pandia
omnia. The most recent study of the term has sought to derive it from the Greek
opantios = manifold, rather than from pandios = divine as had hitherto been sug-
gested," but although some of the colours produced by recipes for pandius are
decidedly dull, it is perhaps premature to dismiss an interpretation which may well
have pointed to some other quality than hue, for example lustre.
The early medieval assumption that colour was not primarily a matter of hue will
come as no surprise if we consider the Classical tradition of colour-science to which

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 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

it was heir. Classical colour-theory had passed on very little about the nature of
colour that could be regarded as certain. Medieval readers of the then best-known
of the Platonic dialogues, the Timaeus, can hardly have been other than confused:
But in what proportion the colours are blended it were foolish to declare, even
if one knew, seeing that in such matters one could not properly adduce any
necessary ground or probable reason...Should any enquirer make an experi-
mental test of these facts, he would evince his ignorance of the difference
between man’s nature and God’s — how that, whereas God is sufficiently wise
and powerful to blend the many into one, and to dissolve again the one into
many, there exists not now, nor ever will exist hereafter, a child of man suffi-
cient for either ofthese tasks. (67D-68D, trans. Bury)
The more empirical Peripatetic tradition was hardly more reassuring:
We do not see any of the colours pure, as they really are, but all are mixed with
others; or if not mixed with any other colour they are mixed with rays of light
and with shadows, and so they appear different, and not as they are...
(De Coloribus, 793b, trans. Hett’)
In Greek thought the idea of colour (chroma) was itself related on the one hand to
skin (chros), that is, to the surface rather than to the substance, and on the other to
movement and change.'® A sixth-century Christian commentator on Aristotle,
Johannes Philoponus, denied that colour was itself an indication of substance, and
in the twelfth century a south-Italian theorist came to the remarkable conclusion
that even taste was a better guide than colour to the real nature of things."
This theoretical uncertainty was fully supported by the experience of ancient
and medieval technology. The most important colour-technology in the ancient
world was the manufacture of purple dye from the murex, or whelk. The process
involved a photo-chemical development in the dyestuff, which passed through a
sequence of colours from yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue and red,
to violet. The technical literature, from the Peripatetic De Coloribus of the fourth
century Bc (79sb10, 79745) to the Onomastikon of Julius Pollux, compiled in the
second century AD (I, 49), laid particular emphasis on this colour-change.'* A similar
colour-sequence also characterized another technology which was developed in
Antiquity and much amplified during the Middle Ages, namely alchemy, by virtue
of which base and unstable substances were supposed to be transmuted into the
stable substance, gold, by a process whose stages were marked by the successive
appearance of black, white, yellow and violet, or, later, black, white, perhaps yellow,
and red."3 The identical substance might be characterized by entirely different
colours: in the manufacture of stained glass the same copper oxide was used to
colour white glass red and green, simply by varying the time of heating, and this too
was noticed in the early literature of glassmaking.'t The dominant red-green tonal-
ity of the earliest surviving figurative glass (c.1135), in Augsburg Cathedral, suggests 15
what a very significant process this was. Thus the world of colour in the early
Middle Ages was an essentially unstable one in respect to hue: the only fixed points
are those of light and dark. What are the consequences of this for the history of art?

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

Colour as symbol

The most obvious consequence of this pre-eminence oflight and dark is that we
shall not be able to expect an early medieval colour-symbolism or iconography
based upon hue, and the few serious attempts made by historians of art to establish
such an iconography do not carry much conviction.'’ This is not to say that there
were no instances of the use of hues symbolically during the early Middle Ages;
there is, indeed, an abundance of them, and they are often mutually incompatible: in
a single twelfth-century manuscript of Joachim of Flora’s Liber Figurarum, even the
colour-symbols ofthe Trinity are not constant: Christ appears as blue and the Holy
Spirit as red in one context, but in another, these equivalents are reversed."° As in
the case of the interpretation of colours in primitive societies, their connotations
must be inferred from their cultural or ritual context, rather than the context from
the colours.'” In an area where we might have expected a uniform system of colour-
values to have established itself at an early stage, namely in the Christian liturgy,
we find what the linguistic studies of colour-terminology have already suggested:
although by the early twelfth century, black, white, red, yellow, blue and possibly
green vestments were in use in the Western Church, only black, white and red
had achieved any general acceptance for specific offices. Black, wrote Innocent II
about 1200, is emblematic of penance and mourning, and was thus used for Advent
and Lent, white of innocence and purity, and was used on the feasts of the Virgin,
and red was used for the feasts of both Apostles and Martyrs, since it symbolized
both blood and the Pentecostal fire."*
Yet there are some remarkable constancies in medieval colour-usage. The white
robe of Christ in the Transfiguration — one of the very few colour-traditions
recorded in the Byzantine Painter’s Manual of Dionysius of Fourna'? — seems to pre-
dominate in the painted iconography from the sixth century onwards (Sinai, apse
mosaic in the Monastery ofStCatherine), although there are examples of the use of
gold (e.g. Chios, Nea Moni), and an interesting variant appears in the eleventh-
century mosaics of Daphni, in the twelfth-century wall-paintings at Nerezi in
Macedonia and in a thirteenth-century iconostasis beam at Sinai, where His robes
are pale red and green. This pair was important in a tradition of rendering the
rainbow in medieval art and thought: in a literary convention which goes back at
least to Gregory the Great (Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam, VII), and a visual
one which is seen as early as the miniature of the Flood in the Vienna Genesis, this
type of bow presents the colours of fire and water, and it was glossed as a symbol of
the destruction of mankind by water at the Deluge and by fire at the Last Judg-
ment.*° The combination of colours was also used in the rainbow mandorla and
throne of the Maiestas Domini type, in the West as early as the Carolingian period,
and it is surely from this connotation ofChrist as God and Judge that it passed into
renderings of the Transfiguration, where He appeared, according to the Gospel
accounts, as an aweful manifestation of light.*" I shall discuss other readings of the
same episode later in this study.
There is, too, a surprising uniformity in the rendering ofthe robes ofSt Peter in
both the Eastern and Western Churches over a period of many centuries. His usual

7O
 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

dress was a blue tunic and a yellow cloak, or pallium, although in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries in the West this cloak was increasingly coloured vermilion or (in
the north) pale greenish-blue.” But the blue and the yellow were clearly considered
less as simple hues than as families of related hues. The blue might be a positive blue
(Chios, Nea Moni), or a pale green (eleventh-century mosaics at Hosios Loukas).
The yellow might be a clear yellow ochre (fourteenth-century wall-paintings at
Sopocani in Serbia), a pale chocolate-brown (Sinai apse) or a pale pink (thirteenth-
century Psalter, Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Cod. 346) — hence perhaps the
later transition to vermilion. There are discrepancies of hue even within the same
building: in the mosaics ofS.Marco in Venice Peter’s cloak varies from brownish-
grey to pale green and yellow ochre, and his tunic from blue to purple; at Hosios
Loukas, in the scene of Doubting Thomas among the wall-paintings of the crypt,
he wears a pale green cloak over a blue tunic, but in the contemporary mosaic
of the same subject upstairs, he is in a dull-brown cloak over pale green. In the
Nea Moni on Chios he has a deep blue tunic and a greyish cloak in the scene of
the Raising of Lazarus, but as he cuts off the High Priest’s servant’s ear he wears
greenish-yellow over deep purple. The medieval spectator would clearly have been
able to recognize Peter more readily by his physiognomy, which had been estab-
lished as that of ‘an old man with hair and beard cut short’ by the end of the fourth
century,* than by the colour ofhis robes: in the scene of Foot-washing in the Nea
Moni three other Apostles wear exactly the same combination of colours as he.
Yet it was none the less clearly felt appropriate that he should be clothed in robes of
the same general family of hues.

Red and purple in the scale of colours

How are we to reconstruct these medieval hue-families? There is no difficulty in
establishing the fact that the termini of the colour-scale were black and white, but it
is far less easy to locate the other hues between these two poles. Green was some-
times seen as the median colour: Innocent III justified the use of green vestments |
for minor feasts on the rather puzzling ground that it was intermediate (medius)
between white, black and red, a remark which suggests he was thinking in terms of
a planar rather than a simply linear scale; and a slightly later writer, William of
Auvergne, claimed that green was more beautiful than red precisely because it ‘les
between the white which dilates the eye, and the black which contracts it’.** Later
theorists of colour — Roger Bacon is the earliest I have noticed — have regarded red
as the median colour, but in the Byzantine dictionary compiled about 1000 by
‘Suidas’, red is clearly associated with the light end of the scale and placed directly
after yellow in the tonal sequence: white, yellow, red, brown, blue, black.* This is a
thoroughly Antique view of red, which had been seen as a surrogate for white or
gold, and the most highly-prized gold had been that with a reddish cast.*° The close
affinity of red and gold had been perpetuated in medieval art by the procedures of
grounding gold in mosaic, panel- and miniature-painting with red, and even by the
making of gold thread round a red core. It can be seen iconographically in the two

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

scenes of the Crucifixion at Hosios Loukas: in the mosaic of the church the haloes
are gold; in the Deposition mural in the crypt they are red.
What may seem even more surprising to the modern observer is the Antique and
medieval location of purple at the light end of the colour-scale. According to his
commentator Theophrastus, Democritus referred to a purple (porphurios) which
was a mixture of white, black and red: red constituted the largest proportion, black
the smallest and white the intermediate. “That black and red are present is patent to
the eye; its brilliance [phaneron] and lustre [lampron] testify to the presence of white,
for white produces such effects.*” The beauty ofthis colour as a dye was also attrib-
uted to its surface lustre by Pliny and by Philostratus, who in his Imagines (I, 28)
noted, ‘though it seems to be dark, it gains a peculiar beauty from the sun and is
infused with the brilliancy of the sun’s warmth’. Pliny’s account in the Natural
History is the fullest and the most interesting: of the Tyrian purple manufactured
from murex he wrote, ‘it brightens [illuminat| every garment’ (IX, xxxvi, 127); and
although he claimed that a frankly red colour was inferior to one tinged with black
(Rubens color nigrante deterior: (X, xxxviii, 134), he later explained precisely how this
blackness was achieved. Distinguishing between two types of shellfish yielding
dyestuff, the small buccinum (2purpura haemastroma) and the purpura (?murex bran-
daris), he explained, ‘the buccine dye is considered unsuitable for use by itself, for it
does not give a fast colour, but it is perfectly fixed by the pelagian [purpura] and it
lends to the black hue of the latter that severity [austeritatem] and crimson-like
sheen which is in fashion’ (nitoremque qui quaeritur cocci: ibid.).“The Tyrian colour is
obtained by first steeping the wool in a raw and unheated vat of pelagian extract
and then transferring it to one of buccine. It is most appreciated when it is the
colour of clotted blood, dark by reflected, and brilliant by transmitted light’ (colore
sanguinis concreti, nigricans adspectu, idemque suspectu refulgens: LX, xxxvili, 135). In a
later passage (IX, xxxix, 138), Pliny noted that a paler shade of purple was fashion-
able in his own time (laudatus ille pallor).
Pliny’s account was well known in the Middle Ages. Descriptions of the
amethyst — whose colour Pliny had cited to characterize the best purple (IX,
XXXvill, 135) — by Isidore of Seville, Bede and Marbod of Rennes related it, as he had
done, to the colour of a rose.** Pliny’s formula, ‘that precious colour which gleams
with the hue ofa dark rose’ (nigrantis rosae colore sublucens: 1X, xxxvi, 126) may derive
from a Greek source, for a version of it appears in Greek in some eighth- or ninth-
century technical treatises, the Lucca MS and the Mappae Clavicula.*? The stress on
lustre which is such a feature of his account also emerges from some late Antique
Greek technical literature, and from that of the medieval West. The Stockholm
Papyrus of the late third or early fourth century Ap has three recipes for dyeing
with other purple dyestuffs which refer to lustre; one of them has the prefatory
remark, ‘keep this a secret matter, because the purple has an extremely beautiful
lustre’.*° And the craftsman known as the Anonymus Bernensis, who discussed egg
tempera in the late eleventh century, claimed that his preparations would give a
shine to red, that is ‘almost the effect of the most prized purple’.3' Rabanus Maurus,
in his ninth-century encyclopaedia De Universo (XXI, xxi, Patrologia Latina, CXI,
col. 579), derived the very word purpura in Latin usage from puritate lucis. Thus the

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 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

linking of purple with red, and hence with light, is rooted in the early medieval
conception of this colour; and it may be sensed in the sumptuous ‘purple’ codices of
the Carolingian period (for example the Centula Gospels at Abbeville and the
Coronation Gospels in Vienna), which interpret the hue in a remarkable range of
fiery reds and pinks.

Medieval blues

The question of the enormous prestige of purple in Antiquity is too large a one to
be entered into here; but it is worth noting that Bede characterizes the purple
amethyst as emblematic of Heaven, and in this he is following Classical prece-
dents.*° This heavenly connotation of purple passed during the Middle Ages
increasingly to blue (quite apart from the more purely naturalistic identification of
blue with Heaven in the mosaics of Ravenna and Rome), especially in its precious
form of lapis lazuli, although the purple cast of this latter was prized as late as the
fourteenth century.*? In one of the very rare attempts to trace the history of a
_ colour, Kurt Badt has pointed to the double nature ofblue as a hue related both to
light and to dark.*#The later medieval appraisal of blue, which may well be linked to
the development of stained glass, tended to move the colour from the dark to the
light end of the colour-scale, for there can be no doubt that, for the early Middle
Ages, blue was seen as essentially akin to darkness. An essay on the red and blue
angels in a mosaic panel in S. Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna has shown brilliantly
that the red figure, who is on the side of the sheep, represents the fiery nature of the
good angels, and the blue, on the side of the goats, the dark angel of evil, whose
element is the air.** The concern to associate the ‘primary’ colours and the four
elements is one which goes back to the earliest period of Greek colour-theory, but
these early systems do not include blue, and air is designated red and fire yellow,
for example, in the scheme of the second-century AD astrologer Antiochus of
Athens.*° But in a study with the playful title, “What color is Divine Light?’, Patrik
Reutersward discovered that this light could be both red and blue.*”7 The examples _
of blue light he adduced are all late; an earlier one is on the eleventh-century
Crucifixion book-cover of Aribert in the Cathedral Treasury at Milan, where the 12
cross (and Christ’s mandorla above) is in two shades of blue, and Christ himself
is characterized in an inscription as Lux Mundi.**
One of Reuterswird’s examples, the Transfiguration in a fourteenth-century
manuscript of John Cantacuzenos in Paris, is of a type which goes back to the sixth-
century apse mosaic of St Catherine’s on Mount Sinai. The treatment of Christ's
mandorla in this mosaic, and in many subsequent versions of the theme such as
those at Daphni, is an unusual one, for it is dark at the centre and becomes progres- 21
sively lighter towards the edges: precisely the reverse of what we expect from a
source of light, whose effect grows weaker the farther it extends. Where the rays
emitted from this mandorla touch the cloaks of Saints Peter and James, they turn
the pale chocolate-brown and purple of the material to a pale blue. This inconsis-
tency might not itself be a very significant one; other scenes in the mosaics of St

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

The dark blues of the mandorla surrounding the transfigured Christ suggest the “dark cloud of
unknowing’ which had been given great prominence in the theological writings of the Pseudo-
Dionysius. The Transfiguration, c. 1100, church of Daphni. (21)

Catherine’s themselves show the more expected sequence, from light in the centre
to dark at the edges;#° but if we look at a twelfth-century Byzantine commentary
on this iconographical type of the Transfiguration, we see that it may well illustrate
a rather precise doctrinal idea. Of the (lost) version of the subject in the Church of
the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, Nikolaos Mesarites wrote:
The space in the air supports a cloud of light and in the midst of this bears
Jesus, made more brilliant than the sun, as though generated like another light
from his Father's light, which, as though with a cloud, is joined to the nature of
man. For a cloud, it is written, and darkness were about Him (Psalm 96-7: 2)
and the light produces this [cloud] through the transformation of the higher
nature to the lower, because of this union which surpasses all understanding,
and is ofan unspeakable nature... *!
There are elements in the Gospel accounts of the Transfiguration which support
Mesarites’s view that the union of God and man in the transfigured Christ was
productive of darkness, and that it was a phenomenon beyond understanding.
Matthew (17:5,6) records the bright cloud that overshadowed the Apostles after the
appearance of Christ, and from it God’s voice proclaiming His Son:‘And when the
disciples heard it they fell on their face and were sore afraid.’ The frightened, falling

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 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

The hand of God transmitting the Tablets to

Moses emerges from a cloud whose centre is
far lighter than the darkness that shrouded
the transfigured Christ in the Daphni mosaic
(21), even though Moses ‘went into that
darkness where God was’. Moses receiving
the Law, c. 560, monastery ofSt Catherine,
Sinai. (22)

postures of the three Apostles in this type of the scene suggests that this was indeed
the moment represented, and that the dark mandorla is a solution to the problem of
representing the obscured Christ without in fact obscuring Him from the specta-
tor. Mark (9:7) and Luke (9:34) emphasize the darkness of the cloud which over-
came the disciples, and Mesarites himself refers in this passage to the Old Testament
tradition ofthe ineffable darkness surrounding God.* It was a tradition particularly
associated with Mount Sinai, for it was there that Moses ‘went into that darkness
where God was’, to receive the Tablets of the Law (Exodus 20:21), an episode repre-
sented on the triumphal arch at St Catherine’s, where, however, the cloud from
which God’s hand emerges takes a more rational course, from light to dark. The
tradition had been revived in the fourth century by Gregory of Nyssa, but it was
especially developed at the end of the fifth in the body of writings attributed to
Dionysius the Areopagite.* The Dionysian ‘negative theology’ gave particular
prominence to the concept of God as darkness: ‘Intangible and invisible darkness’,
wrote the Pseudo-Dionysius in his treatise On the Divine Names (VI, 2),"we attribute
to that Light which is unapproachable because it so far exceeds the visible light’;
and in his fifth Epistle:‘the Divine Darkness is the inaccessible light in which God is
said to dwell’ (10738 f). In his gloss on the four horses of the Apocalypse (Revela-
tions 6:2ff), he attributed the blue (kuanos) of the dark horses to the ‘hidden depths

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

[chruphion| of their nature’.*t The link with Sinai is an interesting one, for the
mystical role of Moses on the mountain is underlined in the Dionysian Mystical
Theology (I, 3), and the author also cites the episode of the Burning Bush (Celestial
Hierarchy, 1, ) — which was located in the Monastery of St Catherine itself, and is
the subject of another mosaic scene on the triumphal arch — as a further symbol of
the nature of God, for fire ‘burns with utter brilliance and yet remains secret, for in
itself it remains unknown outside the matter which reveals its proper operation’
(Celestial Hierarchy, XV, 2).
The identity of Pseudo-Dionysius is still mysterious: the first references to him
appear in Syria (Antioch) about 520; his writings were defended as Apostolic by
John of Skythopolis about a decade later.** None of the seven manuscripts from the
Corpus in the library of St Catherine’s is earlier than the eleventh century,*° but
there may be good reason to associate the apparently novel programme of the apse
mosaics, which date from after 548, with his views.
Because ofhis ostensible Apostolic connection, as the philosopher converted by
Paul in Athens (he also claimed to have been present at the death of the Virgin, and
is sometimes included in this scene, for example in the Martorana at Palermo),
Pseudo-Dionysius was perhaps the most discussed theologian of the Middle Ages,
especially in the West, where the Corpus was translated several times before the
twelfth century. Later commentators, however, tended to stress the exoteric rather
than the esoteric aspects of his doctrine, and in this sense they interpret the Nature
of God increasingly simply in terms of light.‘? Similarly, some twelfth-century
accounts of the Transfiguration no longer allude to the element of darkness,** and
in the representations of this subject in the Life of Christ window at Chartres (c.
1150) and in some late Byzantine versions (e.g. ceiling painting in the Church of
the Hodgetria at Mistra of the fourteenth century, and Asinou, Cyprus, Panagia
Phorbiotissa of the fifteenth century), Christ’s mandorla is red. In the twelfth-
century mosaics at Monreale, and on a possibly contemporary iconostasis beam in
St Catherine’s on Sinai, there is no mandorla at all: the rays emanating from Christ
are simply rays of golden light. And blue itself, as I have suggested, came increasingly
to be seen as emblematic of Heavenly light.
I have tried to show in the first part of this chapter that our understanding of
colour in remote historical periods, and of the symbolic language that has been
attracted to colour, must be an historical and a relativistic understanding. What I
propose to do in the second part is precisely the opposite: to suggest that there may
indeed be colour-preoccupations in painting which remain constant over a period
of many centuries.

The point ofpointillism

Fifty years ago, Otto Demus noticed a remarkable technical device in some Byzan-
tine mosaics which he interpreted in terms familiar from the study of French
Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painting. In a discussion of the figure of the
24 Virgin in the Crucifixion scene at Daphni he suggested that the oddly serrated edge

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 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

Crucifixion scene, c. 1180, church of Daphni. The ‘staggering’ ofthe dark cubes defining the Virgin’s
chin (left) creates a soft and shimmering flesh-tone. (23, 24)

of the shadow along her upper jawline was due to an attempt by the setter 23
to mix optically the tones which he could not make from a rather restricted range
of individually coloured cubes.*? In a slightly later study he expanded the analogy
by referring to the way in which fifth-century setters (e.g. at S.Vitale in Ravenna)
used several small cubes for each detail to be represented, ‘very much in the way of
nineteenth-century pointillism. Like illusionistic painting in general, this technique
of mosaic was meant for the distant view. Looked at from a distance, the colour-
dots appear as modelled forms...’. “The evolution from the fourth to the eighth
century’, he concluded, ‘may be likened to the stylistic developments of modern
French painting from Monet to Seurat.*° The analogy, as Demus’s own examples
suggest, is not perhaps a very helpful one for the understanding of the develop-
ment of early mosaic style: an ‘Impressionist’ and a more regular, disciplined ‘Neo-
Impressionist’ method of setting seem to have co-existed ever since Antiquity, and
to be characteristic of places rather than of times; but it is an analogy which deserves
examination from the point of view of the rationale of the technical device it so
sensitively describes.
The paintings which were nicknamed ‘Neo-Impressionist’ at the last Impres- 104
sionist exhibition of 1886 have a very good claim to being the first modern pic-
tures, in that they show an unprecedented unity of method and style: in them oil
paint, which had been developed as a supremely flexible medium for representing
appearances, was wilfully deprived of this capacity, and used to make layers of dots

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

and short strokes related, in size, shape and even colour, far more to each other than
to the subject-matter of the painting, which was for the most part left to the specta-
tor to reconstitute for himself. Georges Seurat, the leader of the group who pro-
duced these works, claimed that his paintings were simply a matter of method,”
which he preferred to call Chromo-Luminarism, or ‘optical painting’, and the origins
of this method have been hotly debated. The sketching-techniques of Delacroix
and ofSeurat’s master, Henri Lehmann, the more regular and divided brushwork of
late Impressionism, the teaching of Charles Blanc and Thomas Couture and the
colour-theories of M.-E. Chevreul and Ogden Rood, early colour-photography,
Japanese prints, and a method of colour-printing developed during the 1880s
have all been advanced to account for the astonishing procedure which made its
27-8, 104 appearance in Seurat’s Grande Jatte of 1884-6.* Although critics of later Neo-
Impressionism, where the paint is applied in far larger and more homogeneous
colour-patches, occasionally related it to mosaic,*' and although the discussion of
mosaic methods in France during Seurat’s lifetime — an interest much stimulated by
Garnier’s use of the medium at the Paris Opéra — sometimes interpreted it in optical
terms,** I do not propose to burden these richly suggestive sources still further by
proposing medieval mosaic as yet another precursor of Neo-Impressionist dotting.
I have not discovered that Seurat was aware of it, and the chief propagandist of
the movement, Paul Signac, seems to have been surprisingly uninterested in the
medium when he visited Venice and Constantinople in the early years of this
century.°> To the earliest practitioners and supporters of Neo-Impressionism, there
was no doubt that the essential rationale of the method was to be found in the
science ofoptics: a friendly and well-informed critic wrote in 1886 of their ‘intran-
sigent application of scientific colouring’;*° and Camille Pissarro, a convert from
the older Impressionist movement of the 1870s, referred to Seurat in the same year
as the first painter to have the good sense to apply to painting the discoveries of
Chevreul.*’We must leave aside here the question of how far these claims to being
scientific were justified (see Chapter 16),°* and return to the mosaicists ofthe early
Middle Ages to ask whether, and in what sense, they may have shared the Neo-
Impressionist preoccupation with optical phenomena.
The crucial justification of the Neo-Impressionist dot was the phenomenon of
optical mixture: the light reflected from contiguous patches of two or more colours
will mix on the retina to form a third colour, more luminous, it was claimed, than if
it had been mixed beforehand on the palette.°° It was a phenomenon known to
Antiquity, and it had been treated in some detail by Ptolemy in the Optics, written,
probably in Alexandria, in the third quarter of the second century ap. Ptolemy
discussed two causes of optical fusion, the confusion of images caused by distance,
and that caused by motion:

Now we see... how, because of distance or the speed of movement, the sight
in each ofthese [cases] is not strong enough to perceive and interpret the parts
individually. For if the distance of the objects to be perceived should be such
that, even though the angle [of vision] which includes the whole be of the
appropriate size, the individual angles which include the various colours

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would none the less be imperceptible; and it would appear, by the grouping
together [comprehensione] of parts which cannot be distinguished individually,
that the perception of each of them is gathered into one perception |omnium
sensibilitas congregabitur],
forthe colour of the whole object will be unified, and
different from [that of] the individual parts.
Something similar occurs through movement at high speed, as in the case of
a [spinning] disc [painted] with several colours, since a single visual ray cannot
fix [for long] on one and the same colour, as the colour flies [recedit] from it on
account of the speed of turning. And so the single visual ray, falling on all the
colours [in succession], cannot distinguish between the original one and the
most recent one, nor between those which are in different places. For all
the colours, spread over the whole disc, seem to be one colour at one and the
same time, and what is in fact made up of a mixture of colours, one uniform
colour. ..if lines are drawn across the axis of the disc, when it is in motion the
whole surface will appear to have a single uniform colour...

Although this latter discussion of mixtures on a spinning disc is of the greatest

interest for later techniques in colour-experiment, some of which were of direct
concern to the Neo-Impressionists, for the present we are more concerned with
optical mixture by distance, for, as Ptolemy’s most recent editor has implied,“ his
studies in this regard may well have been stimulated by the experience of mosaic
decoration.
Late Antique mosaics have survived almost exclusively in the form of pavements,
where the viewing-distance is small and the cubes generally rather large, but we
know from literary references that the medium was used widely on the walls and
vaults of large bathing-establishments, and at least one such building, dating from
Ptolemy’s time, has been excavated at Alexandria itself.°* Given the rarity of surviv-
ing wall- and vault-mosaics® it is not surprising that few Antique examples of the
optical device noted by Demus in some Byzantine work have come to light so far;
and the method of ‘staggering’ tesserae, or arranging them in a chequerboard
pattern to create a tone optically, does not seem to have been employed in Antiq-
uity where it might most be expected, namely in the rendering of brilliance. The
‘rainbow’ pavement at Pergamon (early second century Bc) does not use the device:
the tesserae are set in rows graduating tonally into each other, but it is a device
which became common in pavements during the Middle Ages. If we look at the
uses to which ‘staggering’ was put, we find that for the most part it was expected to 26
convey softness and brightness. It was employed for the modelling of soft surfaces:
flesh,” animal- and fish-skins, tree-trunks” and water,® and also to convey the lustre
of haloes: two kinds of iridescence and movement in colour for which the phe-
nomenon oflustre, produced by the near but not complete fusion of colour-patches
in the eye, was especially valued in the nineteenth century.” An understanding of
the related case of optical fusion, called colour-spread, is also implicit in the wide-
spread use of a scattering of contrasting cubes in gold grounds, to vary the surface-
effect and to give, in the instances where they are red, that rosy cast which was so
prized in gold.”°It is also clearly behind the apparently random use of vermilion

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

The mosaicist of the rainbotv

of The Covenant of Noah in
Monreale Cathedral conveys the
almost imperceptible transition
from hue to hue by means of
the shimmer of ‘staggered’ edges
(below). (25, 26)

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 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

touches in flesh, a procedure not unknown in Antiquity, but which became such
a striking characteristic of Italian mosaic, from the Chapel of S. Aquilino in S.
Lorenzo at Milan and the nave mosaics of Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome to the
ninth-century Roman mosaics of Sta Prassede.”!

The mind of the mosaicist

All these examples demonstrate a thoroughly calculated use of some ofthe optical
effects described by Ptolemy — attempts at optical-mixing which can hardly have
been arrived at empirically since they are often very apparent to the unaided eye.
But they do not necessarily imply a knowledge of the Optics on the part of those
who planned or executed mosaic-decorations. The Neo-Impressionist method was
evolved in an atmosphere where science — as the Goncourt Journal put it on 8
January 1890 —‘has become the taste of all minds, from the highest to the lowest’;
can we suppose the same for patrons and craftsmen in the early Middle Ages? We
can, I think, presume something of the sort among the educated consumers of this
Most luxurious form of art: as I hope to show later in this chapter, analogies
between the operations of nature and the procedures of the artist had been com-
monplace among writers on the physical sciences since pre-Socratic times, and
these writers were not unfamiliar to educated men in the early medieval period.
More problematic is the relation between the knowledge implicit in these effects
and the craftsmen who achieved them, for they are functions of technique, and
technical interests have generally been considered to be exclusive to the workshop
rather than cultivated in the study. There are good reasons for thinking that,
however justified by medieval theory, this is too rigid a division to correspond with
early medieval practice: the twelfth-century De Diversis Artibus of Theophilus, for
example, is clearly the production, not only of a practising craftsman, but also of a
man with some literary background. But in the present case it may be helpful to
review the evidence which suggests that, in the making of mosaics, designer and
setter collaborated very closely with each other, and that on occasion they may have
been one and the same.
Diocletian’s Edict on Prices of AD 301, which was once thought to show a divi-
sion of labour between the highly paid designer, the lesser artist who transferred the
design to the wall, and the humble setter,” is now known to have no special refer-
ence to mosaic practice;” and a twelfth-century inscription in Bethlehem styles a
single artist as ‘designer and mosaicist’ (historiographos kai musiator).”* Recent restora-
tions of Byzantine mosaics which have involved a study of their underpaintings
have shown, on the one hand, that these underpaintings were sometimes as elabo-
rate as frescoes, and on the other, that the mosaic-setters, who worked directly on
the wall, rather than, as was formerly assumed, on the basis of cartoons in the work-
shop, were sometimes very free in their interpretation of the detail painted on the
plaster.?> This suggests that mosaicists worked in continuous consultation with
designers, and may have made modifications on their own initiative even if they
were not designers themselves.

8I
COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

Further light may be thrown on these arrangements by the earliest literature on

mosaic-technique. Brief instructions for making mortar (temperamentum) and
setting cubes (tabsell’) which have been found, curiously interpolated together with
medical and other recipes, in a Carolingian Grammar and Vocabulary now in
Leyden, distinguish between the pictor, who supervises the laying of the mortar, and
the artifex, who does the laying and the setting itself; but they also confirm that
setting was done in situ, and in sections (pars parva tonicetur), like the giornate of the
fresco-painter, to allow for the rather fast drying of the mortar.” Fifteenth-century
accounts of mosaic-practice in Venice show the survival of this giornate method, as
well as of other traditional procedures, and it may well be that the possibility
expressed there, that designing, underpainting and setting might be carried out by
one craftsman, was also traditional.”’ All this tends to re-establish the medieval
mosaicist as a craftsman capable of making his own aesthetic, as well as purely tech-
nical decisions, and thus open to the sort of understanding which lies behind the
remarkable optical devices he employed. This is not to suggest that he either
wanted, or was able, to read Ptolemy’s Optics — which in any case seems to have been
little known in the West between the fifth and the ninth centuries” — but that both
the scientist and the craftsman were exploiting a body of shared optical knowledge.
What was the mosaicist hoping to achieve by the use of such optical devices?
I have mentioned some instances where the techniques were employed to convey
an especial softness or a flickering brilliance demanded by the subjects to which
they were applied, and they are thus a symptom of that realism in Byzantine art
which has been brought out in some recent studies of contemporary Byzantine
criticism.”? The variation in the size of tesserae according to the degree of subtlety
appropriate to different parts of the subject, and the use of the smallest cubes for
flesh, which is such a feature of Greek as opposed to Italian methods, also demon-
strates a nice sense of the way in which modelling may be made softer by the effect
of greater optical fusion at a constant viewing distance.*° Seurat also followed such a
procedure, for example in the heads of the Poseuses;*' but Seurat is generally more
homogeneous in his use of the brushmark, and where he does make striking varia-
tions, as for example in La Grande Jatte, this is not done to describe differences in
surface-textures so much as to establish sharp contours by making the dot smaller
(and hence the colour-area denser) towards the edges. In this large canvas:
Seurat varied the method considerably. In the plane of the sunlit grass, for
example, the paint is applied in short strokes laid over one another. Through-
out the picture this becomes his favourite manner. Another means is by close,
7-8 almost parallel stitches, observable on the monkey and on many of the bustles;
these stitches follow the contour and help to give an effect of roundness to the
form.The bouquet which the seated girl holds up before her is painted in flat,
uneven strokes. Here and there only, at significant edges or as boundaries to
contrasting planes, are the colours broken into complementary dots.’
And yet it is clear that the medieval mosaicist was not simply concerned with
realism: he showed, among other things, a remarkable vagueness in the matter of
viewing-distance, which is of course the key to optical fusion. The fifth-century
 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

Seurat’s varying brushmarks

in La Grande Jatte of 1 8
.o
1
+

ranging from the pa u¢ oi

o=

Ses
oeop aeee
stitches used to firm t GcuP)
328
)
ovo o

OS,
aoaf
foal
Rls:
G
ob
Nees
bs
(5)&n=Ome
vy
ges Ese
grass. (27, 28)

lag)
COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

figure-mosaics of Haghios Georgios at Salonika are some of the most refined pro-
ductions of Greek craftsmanship, yet they are placed some sixty feet (c. twenty
metres) above the spectator’s head, and their workmanship cannot be appreciated
by the unaided eye, whereas the astonishing broadly handled ninth-century mosaics
in the Chapel ofS.Zeno in Sta Prassede in Rome are only a few metres above eye-
level. The fine ‘chequerboard’ shadow on the neck of the Virgin in the Deesis panel
at the Church of Christ in Chora (Kariye Djami) in Istanbul can never be made to
fuse into a tone in the rather cramped narthex where it is seen. Totally different
setting-styles and textures are to be found in the same work, from the second-
century BC pavement in the House of the Masks on Delos, where the minutely
detailed inset panel of Dionysus is flanked by coarsely executed centaurs, to the
sixth-century triumphal arch in S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Rome, where the heads
of Sts Pelagius and Lawrence are in a broad ‘local’ style while St Paul is clearly by a
craftsman trained in the more refined, linear manner of Byzantium.”
And yet, this anomaly is itself very close to Neo-Impressionist practice. Although
the critic Fénéon once claimed that the dots could be fused by retiring “deux pas’,**
it is clear to the viewer that they do no such thing, and that the Neo-Impressionists
are direct heirs to that tradition of painterly painting, whose aesthetic enjoyment
derives from an interplay between the forms represented in the subject and those
which are entirely in the medium of representation, and which invite a continual
advance and retreat on the part of the spectator. It is a tradition whose earliest for-
mulation is perhaps in Vasari’s account of late Titian, and whose locus classicus is
Reynolds’s somewhat grudging admiration of Gainsborough’s last, broad style, but
which in France had been ushered in above all by the arrival of Constable’s Hay
Wain at the Salon of 1824."
The attitude is, at least in germ, one which goes back to Antiquity, to Horace’s ut
pictura poesis: some poems, like some paintings, are best studied at a distance, others
examined closely; and there are hints of precisely this ‘painterly’ attitude to mosaic
in Byzantium itself. Several writers of the ninth century play on the dual identity of
mosaic, as material and as representation: a biographer of the Emperor Basil I
described what appears to be a bedroom in his palace in these terms:
In the very centre of its pavement by means of the stone-cutter’s art is repre-
sented the Persian bird |i.e. the peacock] all of gleaming tesserae, enclosed in
an even circle of Carian stone, from which spokes of the same stone radiate
towards a bigger circle. Outside the latter there extend into the four corners of
the building streams, as it were, or rivers of Thessalian stone (which is green by
nature) encompassing within their banks four eagles made of fine, variegated
tesserae, so accurately delineated that they seem to be alive and anxious to fly.*®
There is good reason for thinking that the early medieval spectator was impressed,
not simply by precious materials, but also by the craftsman’s power to transform them
into images, and he often repeated Ovid's tag to this effect: materiam superabat opus.’?

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Atoms and mixtures

A clue to some of the larger assumptions that lie behind the early mosaicists’ use of
the techniques of optical mixing may be found ina deceptively casual conceit pre-
sented by the Patriarch Photius in a sermon on the Church of the Virgin of the
Pharos in Constantinople:
The pavement, which has been fashioned into the forms of animals and other
shapes by means of variegated tesserae, exhibits the marvellous skill of the
craftsman, so that the famous Pheidias and Parrhasius and Praxiteles and Zeuxis
are proved in truth to have been mere children in their art and makers of fig-
ments. Democritus would have said,I think, on seeing the minute work of the
pavement and taking it as a piece of evidence, that his atoms were close to
being discovered here actually impinging on the sight.**
Although no mosaic pavements of the ninth century have come to light in Con-
stantinople, we know from those in the Imperial Palace, which date perhaps from
two centuries earlier, that the Imperial court (and the Virgin of the Pharos was a
Palatine Chapel) commanded at a very late date mosaic craftsmanship of a finesse
unmatched elsewhere. But the real interest of Photius’s remark lies in its reference
to Democritus and his atomic theory, for this theory was intimately bound up with
the idea of the mixture of elements, with the theory of colours, and in a tradition
which goes back at least to Empedocles, with the analogy between the organization
of nature and the processes of the painter.*? Democritus himself wrote treatises on
colour and on painting, although neither of them has survived.” The clearest state-
ment of the relationship of the atomic structure of matter to optical mixture 1s in an
account written in the third century AD by Alexander of Aphrodisias:
Democritus, therefore, considering that [chemical] ‘mixture’, so called, occurs
by the juxtaposition of bodies, which are divided into minute particles and
produce the mixture by the positions of the particles alongside of each other,
asserts that in truth things are not mixed even in the beginning, but the appar-
ent mixture is a juxtaposition of bodies in minute particles, preserving the
proper nature of each, which they had before the mixing. They seem to be
mixed because, on account of the smallness of the juxtaposed particles, our
senses cannot perceive any one ofthem by itself."

The extent and accuracy of Photius’s knowledge of Democritus must remain

doubtful until the contents of his large library has been analysed in detail; perhaps
it was no greater than his rather shaky grasp of ancient art and artists. But the
Patriarch did show a particular penchant for scientific analogies, and Democritus’s
views on the relationship of colour to the elements, for example, had been widely
discussed in Antiquity — by Theophrastus, by Aétius and by Galen, as well as by
Alexander — and they were summarized in the chapter on colour in the Eclogues of
Johannes Stobaios (fifth century aD), of which Photius owned a more complete
version than any that has survived.” Just as in his atomic theory Democritus had
sought to reduce the structure of matter to its simplest constituents, so, following

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

Empedocles, he reduced the number of simple (/apla) colours to four: white, black,
red and yellow (or green), which were themselves simply the function of particular
arrangements of atoms:
Such are the figures which the simple colours possess; and each of these
colours is the purer the less the admixture ofother figures. The other colours
are derived from these by mixture.”
This emphasis on the primary and on purity in colour is an interesting one, and is
clearly also related to Neo-Impressionist practice. In 1885 Seurat seems to have been
working with a palette of three primary colours (colorations), red, yellow and blue,
plus white; later, in order to avoid palette-mixtures with anything but white and so
retain the greatest purity, he used eleven colours, including a violet, two greens and
two oranges, arranged on his palette in prismatic order, next to a row ofthese same
colours mixed with white, and then a row of pure white.**
More important, Democritus’s emphasis may be related to a preoccupation with
unmixed purity of hue which seems to characterize the early medieval approach to
painting. Mixture in general had been stigmatized as violent and morally reprehen-
sible by Plutarch, who referred to the workshop-term ‘deflowering’ (phthoras) which
was still in use in the Middle Ages;% for the craftsman himself it seems rather to
have been a matter of chemistry, but the effect on practice was essentially the same.
When the compiler of the most complete (probably late twelfth-century) manu-
script of the Mappae Clavicula prefaced the treatise with a jingle claiming that the
first stage of the artis pictorum was to know how to make colours, and the second to
know how to mix them, he did not understand by mixtione the blending of pig-
ments on the palette, but the laying of one colour over another, when the first was
dry, in order to model drapery.°® Medieval painting-instructions of this sort invari-
ably specify a pigment rather than an abstract ‘colour’; and with the exception ofa
green made from orpiment and black, which appears in the Mappae Clavicula and a
number of later manuscripts, and one or two instances in Theophilus (who, perhaps
because he was not himself a painter, seems to have had a more relaxed attitude to
mixture), I have come across no colours mixed by the artist in this context. Mix-
tures are, however, occasionally described as a process of glazing one transparent or
semi-transparent colour over another, which is, again, a form of optical mixture.%”
In two cases where the physical composition of samples of medieval fresco has been
analysed — some thirteenth- and fourteenth-century examples in Trebizond and
Istanbul — it has been discovered that the pigments used had been mixed only with
black and white (the most ‘primary’ colours), never among themselves, and this
agrees precisely with the treatises on method.°*
Thus the early medieval painter had little or no recourse to the palette for the
immediate preparation of mixtures, and this tool seems to have made its appearance
only about 1300 (see the following chapter), by which time a great relaxation of the
early inhibitions about physical mixture had made itself felt in the technical litera-
ture, and, most importantly, in the methods of painting themselves.’? Curiously
enough, it was in flesh-painting that physical mixtures seem to have been most
commonly used, in those greenish shadows whose blending is described by

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Theophilus and several later writers. This flesh-green was taken over by mosaicists
from the painters — a particularly strident example is in the thirteenth-century
mosaics at Arta'°° — and used, of course, in just those places where optical mixture
was also most cultivated. For mosaicists as for the Neo-Impressionists, optical
mixture was an aid to purity; for both, it was close to the elemental operations of
nature (Signac quoted Ruskin to precisely this effect),'°! and the mosaicists chose to
use it chiefly in areas where purity and luminosity were the most important aims.

The luminous imperative

It was an urge towards luminosity which gave direction to the technical innovations
of both the Early Christian mosaicists and the French painters of the 1880s. This
urge is expressed especially clearly in the language of those rather neglected state-
ments of medieval aesthetics, the inscriptions or fituli which so often accompanied
mosaic decoration, especially in the West. It is a language full of terms for radiance,
brilliance, sparkle, and it reinforces the imagery oflight (Christ as Sol Invictus, amid
the rosy clouds of morning; the Virgin as Stella Maris) which is such a feature ofthe
earliest mosaic programmes.'*’ But there is an essential difference in the means of
rendering this luminosity available to the mosaicists and to the painters of the nine-
teenth century. The medieval artist had no conception ofthe dependence ofcolour
on light, except in the sense that light was necessary for colour to be perceived.
Light was regarded as homogeneous — hence its supreme aptness to the task ofrep-
resenting the Godhead — it was not analysed in terms of colour (i.e. of constituent
hues), and the possibility of using two colours to reconstitute white light — the
principle of complementarity which is so crucial to Seurat’s method'®} — was a dis-
covery of the eighteenth century. It is remarkable that in the most important
medieval development of Ptolemy’s procedure for disc-mixture, a series of experi-
ments carried out by the Arab philosopher Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) in 1038, the
emphasis is entirely on values, not on hues, and Alhazen did not even care to state
which colours he used.’
With the exception of the rather special case of flesh-modelling, imitated from
painting, where green shadows had been used on occasion since Antiquity, and in
the case of the red cubes interspersed among the gold, Ihave found no instances in
mosaic-mixtures which are not clearly tonal in emphasis: the mosaicist achieved
luminosity, not through the use of contrasting colours, but by employing materials
with a high reflectance: glass, and increasingly, metallic surfaces of gold and silver.
These surfaces were manipulated to give a soft and irregular texture; sometimes, at
points of great emphasis, particularly in haloes, the tesserae were raked at angles of
up to thirty degrees to the plane, so that the light that caught them would be
reflected more directly down to the spectator.'°* This studied irregularity is the
most original development away from the techniques of Antique pavement mosaic,
which had been entirely flat, and even ground and polished to give a completely
uniform lustre.’ It implied hand-setting, cube by cube, on the wall or vault itself. It
also implied a lighting far softer and more mobile than that which these mosaics

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COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

Seurat’s Les Poseuses (1886-7), showing the artist’s cramped studio-space, with La Grande Jatte viewed
obliquely in the corner behind the models. (29)

generally receive now: the even glare of modern Italian floodlighting is especially
inappropriate to them. The Early Christian and Byzantine sources insist on a prolif-
eration of lamps and candles, and it seems a good deal of emphasis was placed on
nocturnal offices. But the technique implied, too, that the spectator was not static;
he was constantly moving his eyes about over the mosaic surface, which is, indeed
the only way a surface part-matt and part-highly reflective can properly be seen.
Movement is a feature of both Byzantine and Western Ekphrases. In the sermon by
Photius from which I have already quoted, there is a remarkably vivid account of
the spectator’s reaction on entering his church:
It is as if one had entered heaven itself with no one barring the way from any
side, and was illuminated by the beauty in all forms shining all around like so
many stars, so is one utterly amazed. henceforth, it seems that everything is in

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 COLOUR IN HISTORY — RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE

ecstatic motion, and the church itself is circling round. For the spectator,
through his whirling about in all directions and being constantly astir, which
he is forced to experience by the variegated spectacle on all sides, imagines
that his personal condition is transferred to the object.”

The arrangement of small narrative scenes, where they exist in mosaic (as for
example along the naves of Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome and S. Apollinare Nuovo
in Ravenna), also require a good deal of movement on the part of the spectator.
Nothing could be further from the viewing-conditions of Neo-Impressionist
pictures, where the spectator moved at right-angles to their surface. In Seurat’s
Poseuses, set in the painter’s own studio, where we see the picture of La Grande Jatte 29
in the left background, the heavy white frame is pressed into the corner of the
room, and the large canvas will rarely have been seen at an angle (as it is in the
Poseuses itself) .'°* The Neo-Impressionists cultivated a uniformly smooth surface so
that there should be no shadows cast from ridges of paint, and their practice of
putting their paintings under glass, rather than varnishing them, had the effect (at
least with their customarily small works) of anchoring the spectator to a single
-viewpoint.'® It is worth noting that the Classical ideal of an impeccably even
mosaic-surface of tightly-packed tesserae, even for walls and vaults, re-emerged in
fifteenth-century Venice, where the mosaicists of the Mascoli Chapel in S. Marco
were using a single-point perspective system with a narrow angle of vision, quite
unlike the more casual perspective arrangeinents of the early Middle Ages.''® The
codifier of this novel perspective scheme was Leon Battista Alberti, who also
attacked the use of real gold in panel-painting on the grounds that it had a variable
value, a phenomenon due, of course, to its high reflectivity and the varying angles
from which it was seen in different parts of the panel by the static spectator.'!
Alberti and the artists of the Mascoli Chapel mark the beginning of an attitude
towards looking at pictures to which the Neo-Impressionists were heir; cabinet-
pictures are, after all, not architectural mosaics, and their conventions cannot be
entirely interchangeable. The cultural and ritual context is decisive. Which is
perhaps to say no more than that, however enticing the idea of the universal pattern
of optical responses in the history of art, we must be historical relativists in the end.

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 5 - Colour-words
and Colour-patches

ROBABLY THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE shopping-list for a medieval scriptorium

Pi to be found in the very popular Latin vocabulary De Nominibus Utensilum,
compiled for schoolboys by the English scholar and teacher Alexander Nequam,
and probably written at Paris around 1180. Nequam’s book checks off the scrapers
and pumice needed for preparing parchment, the lead-weighted cords for ruling
lines, the chair and footstool for the scribe and the chafer for warming his hands,
the knives for cutting pens, the boar- or goat’s-tooth burnishers for smoothing the
parchment after making corrections, the magnifying lenses, the stoves for drying
the ink on overcast days, the skylight, the linen or skin blind, and finally, the various
black and coloured inks.'

Scribes and spectacles

Perhaps the most immediately striking feature of this list of tools is the inclusion of
what may be interpreted as two types of magnifying lens, cavillam et spectaculum,
which were to be used ‘lest uncertainty should occasion costly delay [ne ob errorem
moram faciat disspendiosam]’. Cavilla is recorded as a ‘magnifying glass’ around 1200,
and spectaculum as a lens about the same time; yet there is also an ambiguity in the
meaning of cavilla, which a modern translator has interpreted as ‘line-marker’,
probably because it is also a term used to refer to a ‘pin’ which, according to an early
dictionary, was used to perforate the parchment.’ But it is equally clear that in
several of the MSS, both in the Latin and the frequent Anglo-Norman glosses,
cavilla and spectaculum were regarded as synonymous.}
The early history of magnifying lenses is still very obscure.Their use to bring distant
objects nearer seems first to have been described clearly by Robert Grosseteste
in his study of the rainbow in the 1230s, and as an aid to weak eyes in reading by
Roger Bacon in his Opus Maius of the 1260s.* Until very recently the origin of
spectacles has been traced to Tuscany and northern Italy towards the close of the
thirteenth century; but it now seems plausible to push their development further
back, and specifically into the context of manuscript-production in northern
Europe.° Nequam’s reference to two kinds of magnifier (although at least one of the
thirty or so surviving MSS of his vocabulary identifies them as the same)’ might
well indicate a distinction between a hand-held magnifying-glass (cavilla) and a type
fixed close to the eye (spectaculum) which would allow the scribe or illuminator to
keep both hands free. This is indeed what appears in one of the earliest representa-

go
 COLOUR-WORDS AND COLOUR-PATCHES

Tomaso da Modena’s portraits of the cardinals Hugh de St Cher and Nicholas de Fréauville, showing
the one (left) wearing spectacles, leaving both hands free for writing, and the other (right) reading with
a magnifying glass. These images of around 1352 are the earliest known depictions ofthe use oflenses.
(30, 31)

tions of a scribe wearing spectacles, Tomaso da Modena’s ‘portrait’ of Hugh de 30

St Cher in Treviso, of about 1352, which is one of a series of fresco ‘portraits’ of
Dominican cardinals, another of whom, Nicholas de Fréauville, is using a hand- 31
held glass.* Certainly spectacles figure prominently in some later portraits of manu-
script-illuminators, such as the miniature self-portraits by Simon Bening of 1558 in
the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York,? or the remarkable portrait of an unidentified illuminator by the Flemish

QI
COLOUR-WORDS AND COLOUR-PATCHES

Willem Key’s painting of an unknown Flemish illuminator of the sixteenth century. Wearing spectacles
such as those the artist is holding (left) had become a common practice among painters. (32, 33)

eS)bv painter Willem Key, dated 1565, now in the National Museum of Fine Arts at Val-
letta in Malta.
Whether or not the introduction of spectacles is closely related to the produc-
tion of manuscripts, their diffusion in the fifteenth century — when the convex
lenses for the myopic were supplemented by the concave lenses for the long-
sighted — does seem to be associated with the development of the printed book, and
consequent spread of reading and small print.'®

Nequam’s colour-terms

The considerable difficulty faced by the modern interpreter of these unfamiliar

terms for lenses is matched, and even surpassed, when attention turns to Nequam’s
terms for the illuminators’ colours. He lists only red and two blues, one simply a
‘dark’ (fuscum), but glossed in Norman French in at least four of the MSS as ‘bloye’. It
is striking that after the many very specific technical terms for the scribe’s equip-
ment, Nequam’s colour-terminology is remarkably vague. Black is admittedly only
incaustum or atramentum, the ancient ink made from carbon obtained by the com-
bustion of resins,"' which remained untranslated in the Norman glosses. But red is
 COLOUR-WORDS AND COLOUR-PATCHES

minium (red oxide of lead), which is used here to make mbeus or ‘Phoenician’
(puniceus or feniceus) letters. Puniceus is described in the early fifteenth century by
the French student of colour, Jehan Le Begue, as a reddish yellow, but he lists feniceus
separately as a rose-red.'* Minium is glossed in Nequam as vermiloun, and puniceus as
vermeilles or ruge; and vermilion was, of course, derived from natural cinnabar or
made artificially by processing mercury and sulphur.? We need not worry too
much here about the chemistry of these pigments, even though Nequam was
something of a natural philosopher,'*
but we should note that he and his glossators
were happy to qualify ‘red’ with a number of different terms. It may, however, be
significant that in the early French treatise on making paints by Peter of St Omer it
is advised that, in order to give the illuminator’s red some body, minium should be
mixed with vermilion, ut pulchriores sint (so that they may be more beautiful by
being less pale).'5
Nequam’s blues are similarly imprecise. His fuscum pulverum may conceivably,
from the phrasing of the passage, be the same as the azuram a Salamone repertam, that
is, lapis lazuli from King Solomon’s mines, a formulation which is remarkably early
for the reference to its origins in the Levant (Badakshan). The Norman glosses
translate it as asure. Peter of St Omer says that azurium or lazurium is also called perse,
and this may also offer a hint of a Levantine origin, although perse is still one of
the most contested colour-terms of the Middle Ages, and like fuscus (bloye) may
sometimes mean little more than ‘dark’ (see p. 68 above).'° In a list of equipment
for the scriptorium in a manuscript in Cambridge (Gonville and Caius MS 38s),
also attributed to Nequam, venetus is added to the blues, and green to the colours
required for painting capital letters.'7
Nequam’s colour-list, short as it is, thus introduces us to ambiguities both in the
Latin originals and in the Norman-French translations.We might have expected
that such ambiguities would have been an obstacle to communication in the scrip-
torium, especially since manuscript scholars are increasingly finding that instruc-
tions to illuminators were often in verbal form, and not simply dependent on visual
models.

Marginal notes

One of the most expansive areas of recent codicological studies is in the interpreta-
tion of marginal notes to scribes or illuminators, and many of those so far discov-
ered refer, either in Latin or in the various vernaculars, to the colours which were to
be used in decoration. Sometimes, as in a loose late-fourteenth-century leafin the
Bibliothéque St Genevieve in Paris (MS 1624), whole words were used, even the
enigmatic French term ‘fausse rose’;"* but far more commonly they are simply ini-
tials, or the first two or three letters of the words. They can tell us something about
the working language, or languages, of a particular scriptorium; they can show that
in a few cases illuminators -were either unable or unwilling to follow instructions
and, most important in the present context, they can tell us something about the
precision of colour-terminology in common use in the High Middle Ages.

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COLOUR-WORDS AND COLOUR-PATCHES

One unusual example is the use of a cross to signify red in a late twelfth-century
Psalter in London (British Library Harley MS 2895).'° This is surely a cross rather
than an ‘X’, and it probably refers to Christ, whose frequent depiction in red robes
was due to the traditional associations of red with light and royalty; and perhaps, in
the painterly context, to the process of manufacturing vermilion from sulphur and
mercury — well described by Peter of St Omer — which was regarded as re-creating
all metals, including the most precious, gold.*? So the meaning of colours was not
confined to their optical properties, but may be a function of their ‘chemistry’ or
composition; and it is also remarkable how often red was designated merely by ‘v’
(vermiculum, vermeille), even though this might be easily misinterpreted as green
(viridis, vert).
But it has also been pointed out that most colour-terms in the Romanesque MSS
which have been surveyed so far are not pigment-terms, but general colour-words:
minium and vermiculum are exceptions to this rule;*' The letter “p’ for pourpre or pur-
pureus may be an example of this; but this initial has been found set against grey
paint in the Bible of Manerius in the Bibliotheque St Geneviéve, where ‘AV’ and
‘N’ are also used, as well as ‘p’ for violet.” ‘N’ has been interpreted as ‘nubilus’ (cloudy),
and ‘AV’ as a mixture of azurium and vermiculum.* But although Le Begue described
violetus quite properly as a mixture of rubeo et perso, seu azurio, his rubeo is a vegetable
lake, and a mixture of vermilion and lapis lazuli is chemically very risky as well as
costly, so that ‘AV’ probably refers to the appearance of the colour, not its chemistry.
Purpureus need not refer to the hue we call ‘purple’, but ‘p’ might equally denote
perse or persus, that tricky obsolete term which was used to characterize dark greys
and violets as well as blues. The use of ‘w’ (waeden = woad) for purple-blue has been
noted in an Oxford MS (Bodleian MS 156);*4 and in some mid-thirteenth-century
English dyeing regulations woad (wayda) is reported as producing perse cloth.*
Here the English term for a known dyestuff gave the illuminator some guarantee
that a particular hue was in question. These ambiguities present problems to the
modern reader, but did they also present problems to the illuminators themselves?
How did artists in the scriptorium organize their colours? Did they organize them
at all?

The medieval palette

There is some evidence oflate twelfth-century interest in a perceptual colour-scale
in a text by the south-Italian physician and theorist Urso of Salerno, but his argu-
ment was not illustrated, and indeed he said that only a painter could make such a
scale.** The earliest known European artist’s palette, recently identified in a French
34 Bible of around 1300, like its successors before the sixteenth century gives no
opportunity for a particular arrangement, since it holds only two colours, a black
and a pink.’ Possibly the first visual diagram ofa set ofartist’s colours is the illustra-
35 tion to the article on colorin the Latin encyclopaedia Omne Bonum, compiled by the
Englishman James Le Palmer late in the fourteenth century and now in the British
Library. Le Palmer’s painter takes his colours from shells very like the hand-held

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 COLOUR-WORDS AND COLOUR-PATCHES

‘The earliest illustration of

a painter using a palette,
from the initial P ofa
French Bible of around
1300. Unmixed purity of
hue had been prized since
Antiquity, and evidence
of colour-mixing is rare
at the period. (34)

} OS “oe
DP. wera) shen QP’

James Le Palmer’s letter C (for Color) from the fourteenth- The late twelfth-century German illuminator Brother
century encyclopaedia Omne Bonum. The collection of nine Rufillus painting from a shell. Each colour is mixed
colours shown tallies loosely with the ten of the text. (35) individually with the medium. (36)
COLOUR-WORDS AND COLOUR-PATCHES

36 receptacle in the self-portrait of a named German illuminator, Brother Rufillus,

some two hundred years earlier;** and Le Palmer’s shells contain some nine paints,
including two pinks, two yellow ochres, two greens and two vermilions. Yet these
painted colours refer only rather loosely to the ten colour-terms listed in the text.”
The pinks might render rubeus and the vermilions mineus; the yellows might repre-
sent flavus, pallidus or croceus, the greens viridis and lividus, and the pale blue vinetus.
Black and white (nigredinis, candor) are listed in the text but not represented in the
image.*° Only a very small proportion of the colour-words in this text are pigment-
words, so that the illuminator would have had to choose appropriate pigments for
himself. It is now clear, too, that the instructions to illuminators which occur in
some later sections of the encyclopaedia refer only to subjects, and give no indica-
tions of the colours to be used.*!
Much of Le Palmer’s information derives from one of the most popular of
thirteenth-century encyclopaedias, by another Englishman, the De Proprietatibus
Rerum of Bartholomeus Anglicus (c. 1230-60); but an examination of the extensive
colour-vocabulary in this compendium tells us very little about Le Palmer’s choice
of terms. All his colours are in Bartholomeus, but their classification in the De
Proprietatibus Rerum is sometimes far from obvious. Candor, pallor, livor and flavor are
classed as white,}* but flavus is also a yellow, as are croceus and puniceus.*’ Jehan Le
Begue, who cited the De Proprietatibus Rerum in his table of colours, was naturally
puzzled by the discrepancy, and suggested, surprisingly, that puniceus contained less
red than did citrinus.** But in a later chapter of Bartholomeus puniceus is also identi-
fied with shellfish-purple; and again pheniceus, ‘therewith chief lettre of bookes
ben ywrite’, in the Middle English version of John of Trevisa (which, interestingly,
does not usually translate the Latin terms) is made of siricum, another word for
minium.* Mineus, according to Bartholomeus, is also called coccinus or vermiculus,
and is an earth from the Red Sea used by scribes and especially by dyers, although
coccus and vermiculus were not usually terms for mineral colours, but synonyms for
the animal-dye kermes.*° In the prevailing confusion, it is hard to see how painters
could handle colour by any means other than local conventions and rules of
thumb.°”

Red and green: the psychological effects of colour

There is, however, one important way in which Alexander Nequam seems to be
close to the later De Proprietatibus Rerum, and which may help to explain why the
colour-vocabularies of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are indeed so confused.
It is bound up with the widespread medieval view of the inherent instability of
colour-sensations (see p. 69). Nequam’s list of the equipment of the scriptorium
includes black or green blinds ofcloth or skin, and he offers a psychological expla-
nation of why the colours green and black rest the eyes, where white dazzles and
tires them.** A low-toned surface on which to rest the eyes had been used in scrip-
toria since Antiquity, when green had also been regarded as serving a similar func-
tion, and green gemstones were powdered for use as an eye-ointment.2? Following

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 COLOUR-WORDS AND COLOUR-PATCHES

the Pseudo-Aristotle’s interpretation of colours as arising from various mixtures in

the four elements, Bartholomeus observed (in John of Trevisa’s version):
Grene colour is most liking to the sight for comynge togyderes of fuyry
parties [fiery parts] and of eorthe. For briytnesse of fuyre that in grene 1s tem-
perat pleseth the sight. And dymnesse of eorthe and blaknesse, for it is noght
most blak, gadereth mereliche the sight and comforteth the visible spirit... 4°
Later he expanded on the place of green in the colour-scale, and its extraordinary
effect, not only on men but also on animals:
Thanne grene colour is mene bytwene rede and black, and draweth and
conforteth the yhen [eyes] to byholde and loke theronne, and restoreth
and conforteth the sight. Therefore hertes and othere wilde bestes loveth and
haunteth grene place, and nought oonliche for mete but also for liknge and
for sight. Therefore hunters clotheth hemself in grene, for the beste loveth
kyndeliche grene coloures and dredeth the lasse the periles of hunters whanne
they biholdeth on grene...#!
This is the subjective dimension of a quasi-objective theory of colours as embody-
ing proportions of the four elements, which were, of course, related to the mixture
of humours in the human and animal body. But Bartholomeus also argued that,
although red stood, strictly speaking, mid-way between black and white on the
colour-scale, it did not appear to do so, since it ‘accordeth more in blasynge [i-e. in
heraldry] with white than black’.

And therefore deep rede toschedeth [separates] the sight, as bright light doth,
and gadereth nouyt the sight, as blak doth. Therefore draperes that selleth
clothe hongeth rede clothe tofore the light, for rednesse scholde toschede the
spirit of sight, and men that seeth othre clothes of other colour schulde knowe
the worse the verrey colours.’
This was precisely the opposite effect to that of green.
Thus both Nequam and Bartholomeus showed an acute awareness of the fallibil-
ity of colour-judgment, which is amply reflected in the great variety of terms in use
in the scriptoria of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It would be thoroughly
consistent with this awareness of human frailty that spectacles should have made
their first appearance in the context of manuscript production. Only perhaps the
personal, ‘hands-on’ experience of the workshop and its tools and materials could
bring order to this chaos — if indeed that was ever seriously required.

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 6 - Ghiberti and Light

MONG THE LEAST STUDIED OF Lorenzo Ghiberti’s activities is his work as a

AG and jeweler, and as a designer of stained glass. This is hardly surpris-
ing, since none of his jewelery seems to have survived in the original — although
we may gain some idea of its style from an early cast — and the windows which he
designed for the cathedral in Florence between 1404 and 1443 are not always easily
seen, and have been frequently and heavily restored. What we know ofthe window
designs, as well as what may be inferred from written accounts of some of the
jewelery by Ghiberti himself, underlines his stylistic connections with the Trecento;
and this aspect of his work may rightly be felt to pale into insignificance beside
the brilliant and original achievements of the Baptistry doors and the figures for
Orsanmichele in Florence.’
Ghiberti’s theoretical Third Commentary, dealing with optics and the proportions
of the human figure, and by far the longest of his written works, is also relatively
little known. Compared, too, with the ideas of Leon Battista Alberti, Ghiberti’s
seem old-fashioned, although it would on the face ofitbe unfair to treat the imper-
fect and incoherent text which has come down to us as in the same category as a
treatise like Alberti’s Della Pittura.* An early scholar who gave detailed attention to
the Third Commentary, and who performed the useful service of listing Ghiberti’s
sources, dismissed it as a thoroughly unoriginal compilation.’ What has not been
done even now is to make a complete collation of Ghiberti’s words and those ofhis
authorities, or even to identify these authorities precisely. What I am suggesting
here is that, so far from copying haphazardly, Ghiberti was selective in his choice
and use of sources; that he modified and amplified them in the light of his own
interests and experience;> that this shaping experience was often that of the gold-
smith and glass-designer; and that the interrelation of practice and theory was at
one with the tendencies of his humanistic milieu.
Ghiberti had made his intention, when treating of optics, quite clear in the auto-
biographical section of the Second Commentary:
In order that I might always hold fast to basic principles, I tried to find out in
what way nature functions [in art] and in what [way] I could come close to
her; how visual images reach the eye; how the power of vision functions and
by what procedures; and in what way the theory of sculpture and painting
should be worked out.°
The emphasis on the ‘first principles of nature’ is identical to Alberti’s,? and there
are some indications that the Third Commentary was a specific response to Della

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 GHIBERTI AND LIGHT

All the jewelery designed by

Lorenzo Ghiberti is lost, but this
early cast of acornelian carved with
Apollo and Marsyas, set by him in a
modern frame, may give an idea of
his style. The setting was already
lost by the eighteenth century. (37)

Pittura, which had probably appeared in Italian in 1435 and in Latin a year later.
Ghiberti’s text is generally dated to the late 1440s, but it probably reflects his
reading over many years — he was certainly working on the First Commentary as
early as 1430.

Ghiberti and gemstones

Both Alberti and Ghiberti began by stressing the unique importance of the visible
for the artist, but whereas Alberti proceeds to discuss the geometrical properties of
the plane surface, Ghiberti considers light as the condition of vision, and treats of its
nature and its effect upon the eye. His opening theorems on the nature of light are
derived, as he himself acknowledges, from the beginning of the second book of
Witelo’s Perspectiva (c. 1280), but he amplifies Witelo’s bare statements with a series
of examples which proclaim his own direct interest in the subject. Distinguishing
light-giving, opaque and translucent bodies, he writes:
The first is the sun and fire and some precious stones; the second...is that
which is of earth or other hard or dark [tenebrosa] material. The third is the
translucent [diafano] body: air, water, glass, crystal, chalcedony, beryll.*

Some of these examples of light and translucent bodies come directly from Ghiberti’s
practice as a jeweler, the craft he had recorded enthusiastically in the Second Com-
mentary, where he recalled, for example, that

Pope Eugene [IV] came to live in the city of Florence; he had me make a mitre
of gold which weighed fifteen pounds, the gold alone; the stones weighed
five-and-a-half pounds. They were valued by local jewellers at 38,000 florins:

oo
GHIBERTI AND LIGHT

they were rubies, sapphires, emeralds and pearls...it was a magnificent piece
of work.?
Before the later Renaissance practice of facetting stones was widely developed they
were usually cut en cabochon: round or oblong with a smooth and rounded surface.
When they were treated in this way the coloured light did not seem to be received
and refracted in flashes, but to glow softly, as if generated from within, as Ghiberti
suggested in his example of light-giving bodies.
Most of the first part of his Third Commentary is devoted to an account, taken
from Alhazen, of the effects of the persistence of vision, of the after-images pro-
duced within the eye by strong light-stimuli, and of the varying appearance of
objects seen under different conditions of lighting. Here there are again indications
that Ghiberti was not merely copying what he had read, but had repeated some of
Alhazen’s experiments himself,'® and again he was ready to elaborate on his source
by reference to familiar examples. Discussing the dazzling effects of lustre, which
hinder the perception of form in delicate carvings, Ghiberti adapted his source so as
to modify its sense completely."!
Alhazen had been concerned with the problem of perceiving forms where there
was no contrast of colour, Ghiberti with the added complication of parti-coloured
gemstones, such as a chalcedony engraved with the Rape of the Palladium of which
he later gave a celebrated description:
among the [most] remarkable things I ever saw is a wonderfully engraved
chalcedony which was in the collection of one ofour citizens, by the name of
Niccolo Niccoli, a very energetic researcher and investigator of many and
excellent antiquities in our time, and into books of Greek and Latin writings.
And among his other antiques he had this chalcedony which was more perfect
than anything I had ever seen. It was oval in shape, and on it was the figure ofa
youth holding a knife. He was almost kneeling with one foot upon an altar, the
right leg resting on the altar with its foot on the ground, and foreshortened so
cunningly and with such skill it was marvellous to see. In his left hand he held
a small idol in a napkin; it seemed he was threatening it with his knife. This
carving was said by every expert in sculpture and painting, without exception,
to be a marvellous thing, and with all the measurements and proportions that
any statue or sculpture should have: it was praised to the skies by all the intel-
lectuals. You could not see it well in a strong light, because when fine and pol-
ished stones are deeply cut [essendo in cavo], the strong light and reflections
obscure the understanding of the form.This carving could be seen best when
the deeply-cut part was held against the strong light, when it could be seen
perfectly.”
This example, as well as the immediately preceding descriptions of the Antique
sculptures Ghiberti had seen in Rome, Padua and Siena, grew out of Alhazen’s
discussion of the need to view fine and delicate carving in a moderate light, a pre-
occupation which may well be understood as close to the heart of asculptor who
was concerned above all with chasing and gilding bronze, and whose supreme qual-
ities as a goldsmith were, according to Benvenuto Cellini — himselfofcourse a fine

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 GHIBERTI AND LIGHT

The admired chalcedony carved with the Rape of the Palladium has not survived, but another version
of the same subject, a cornelian formerly in the collection of Lorenzo de’ Medici, demonstrates the
problem discussed by Ghiberti, of reading gemstone carvings by (right) reflected and (left) transmitted
light. (38, 39)

goldsmith to a succeeding generation — an infinite finesse (pulitezza) and extremely

careful workmanship. We may imagine that these examples would have been
multiplied and integrated into the coherent treatise for which Ghiberti’s notes were
presumably intended.

The art ofglass

Nor were Ghiberti’s activities as a jeweler and his search for some theoretical dis-
cussion of the art in the Third Commentary unrelated to his work as a stained-glass
designer. Ever since Antiquity the art of the jeweler, and especially that branch of
the art concerned with the art of making artificial gemstones, had been closely
associated with the art of glass, and in the Middle Ages, with the art of making
stained and painted windows." In Italy, furthermore, it seems that within the craft
of glassmaking a relatively self-conscious body of art theory, not confined simply to
transmitting technical recipes, had emerged rather earlier than within the arts
of painting in tempera and fresco. The late fourteenth-century treatise on glass-
painting by Antonio da Pisa, who has usually been identified with the artist signing
and dating a window after a design by Agnolo Gaddi in the south aisle of Florence
Cathedral in 1395,'5 offers hints on professional conduct which remind us of the
contemporary Libro dell’ Arte of Cennino Cennini, and precepts on colour-contrast
and harmony which look forward to Alberti’s Della Pittura."°

IOI
GHIBERTI AND LIGHT

Antonio da Pisa’s workshop has been seen as very active in Florence during the
last quarter of the fourteenth century,'” and, although too little is known of its
personnel to determine whether the executants of Ghiberti’s designs came from
it, a number of the features in the windows designed by him are recommended
by Antonio — for example the ubiquitous blue grounds and the yellow capitals
and white or flesh-pink columns seen in the St Barnabas window of 1441 in the
Chapel of Sts Barnabas and Victor in the south tribuna of Sta Maria del Fiore."*
Between 1404 and 1443 Ghiberti submitted some thirty window-designs for the
Cathedral, not all of which were accepted or executed. Modern scholarship is
divided as to the extent ofhis freedom of operation in these designs and the degree
of his participation on their execution, and the documentary evidence is certainly
full of ambiguities.
The only specific reference to the nature of Ghiberti’s contribution speaks of
some designs of 1438 as being on paper (in charte di banbagia ),'? which may or may
not imply indications of colour. Antonio da Pisa had recommended the glass-
painter to study frescoes in order to work out his colour-schemes, which suggests
that the cartoons supplied to these painters were usually uncoloured; and Cennini
implied that it was rare for the non-specialist painter to work on the glass himself,
although he gave instructions how to do so.*° On the other hand, we know that
coloured cartoons were used in Florence, for in 1395 Agnolo Gaddi was paid by the
Cathedral pro pingendo designum dicte fenestre:*' and the first glass-painter to execute
a design by Ghiberti, Niccolé di Piero, who made the magnificent Assumption
for the oculus in the Cathedral facade in 1405, was soon to execute windows in
Orsanmichele after coloured cartoons by Lorenzo Monaco.” Paolo Uccello, who
had trained in Ghiberti’s workshop, was paid in January 1444 ‘pro suo labore in pin-
gendo unum oculum factum per dictum Bernardum |di Francesco|’: the Ascension for the
drum of the Cathedral, the design for which had prevailed over Ghiberti’s own in a
competition the previous summer.”
But whether or not Ghiberti chose his own colour-scheme, and painted on the
glass from his designs, the long series of commissions for the Cathedral windows
will surely have brought him into close contact with the glass-painters’ milieu,
where it is likely that he will have discussed technical and even aesthetic problems
common to the jeweler and glass-painter. And in the Third Commentary, quoting
from Roger Bacon (Opus Maius,V, 1, dist. vi, ch. iv) on the substantial and sensible
nature of images (species), Ghiberti included the observation that, ‘when the sun’s
ray passes through a glass [window] or through a strongly coloured [oiled] cloth, the
image of the colour appears upon the dark body |opposite]’.*4

The humanists and light

The central preoccupation of Ghiberti’s optics is light: its effects and how the eye
receives it; and it is a concern which seems to have affected no other artist of his
period so profoundly.” It is his achievement to have related the medieval science of
vision to the practice of sculpture and painting. But the discussion of light was by

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no means an uncommon topic in the humanistic circle in which he found himself

towards the end of his career. He had studied the chalcedony with the Rape of the
Palladium, which he later described so enthusiastically and so acutely, in the collec-
tion of Niccold Niccoli, and Niccoli was a humanist scholar of some aesthetic sen-
sibility, whose love of Antiquity was by no means purely antiquarian or merely
bookish.*° His scholarship and connoisseurship were of the sort that affected his
style of life. The bookseller and biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci described how he
“was accustomed to have his meals served to him in beautiful old dishes; his table
would be decked with vases of porcelain and he drank from a cup of crystal or of
some other fine stone’.’7 If it was through Niccoli’s researches that Ghiberti was
introduced to the complete Natural History of Pliny,whose history of ancient art in
that book provided the substance of Ghiberti’s First Commentary,” the scholar may
also have drawn Ghiberti’s attention to the account of the manufacture of artificial
gems in Book XXXVII ofthe same source, for this was an interest shared by both of
them.
Niccoli’s taste for Antique gems was recognized by another member of the circle,
the Calmodolese friar Ambrogio Traversari, whose travels on Church business were
,combined with the searching out of antiquities for his friend. Traversari clearly
knew his man: of a portrait of the younger Scipio in onyx, owned by the antiquar-
ian Cyriac of Ancona, he wrote to Niccoli that it was ‘of supreme elegance; never
had I seen a more beautiful one’.”? And it was to Niccoli that he wrote a remarkable
letter in December 1433, describing the beauties of the magnificent Basilica
Ursiana (c. 400; demolished 1733) and S.Vitale in Ravenna:

I first looked at the superb cathedral with its silver altar, from which rise five
silver columns, and with its silver baldaquin. As if this were not enough, there
are also marble capitals jutting from the altar, for the decoration of the church,
and which in ancient times were clad in silver, most of which has survived.
I must admit that I have not seen more beautiful holy edifices even in Rome.
There are rows of huge marble columns, and the interior of the building is
clad almost entirely with sheets of variegated marble and porphyry. I have
scarcely seen more beautiful mosaics anywhere. I inspected the highly deco-
rated Baptistry next to this large church, and then went to look at the most
astonishing and magnificent church of St Vitale the Martyr, which is actually
circular, and is decorated with every superior and excellent kind of mosaic.
There are columns around the circumference of the Sanctuary, and various
marble incrustations cover the inner walls. It has a raised platform [peripatum]|
from which the columns spring, and an altar of such shining [lucidam] alabaster
that it reflects images like mirrors...
In the monastery of Sta Maria in Porta Traversari found ‘a beautiful twisted por-
phyry urn’ which the simpliciores fratres held to be one of those used by Christ at Cana
of Galilee when changing the water into wine.’? His response to Ravenna may be
seen on the one hand as the revival of a peculiarly Early Christian and Byzantine
aesthetic;3' but it was also a response in sympathy with the Neo-Platonism of the
Niccoli circle, which Traversari was himself very active in promoting. For in the

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early 1430s Traversari was engaged upon a new Latin translation of the fifth- or
sixth-century Greek works of the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a translation
which he carried out in consultation with Niccoli, and which gained the warm
recognition of both his friend and other humanist scholars for its clarity and its
improvements on the ninth-century versions of Hilduin and Johannes Scotus
Eriugena.*? Pseudo-Dionysius’s writing was essentially theological, but his treatise
On the Divine Names included a chapter, ‘On the Good and the Beautiful’, which
became one of the most important texts in medieval aesthetics, and was extensively
glossed by, for example, Albertus Magnus and Aquinas.*} In this account, the quali-
ties of beauty (itself identified with good) are recognized as harmony (consonantia)
and luminosity (claritas), which are said to extend over the created world ‘in the
likeness oflight’3+Light thus becomes the chief manifestation of beauty, and clarity
and lucidity become the highest qualities in a work ofart.
The connection ofsuch an aesthetic outlook with the work of the glass-painter
and jeweler is inescapable: it has been long recognized in the patronage and propa-
ganda of Abbot Suger at Saint-Denis in the twelfth century.** But it was also an
attitude of some importance to Ghiberti, who had been in touch with the latest
translator of the Pseudo-Dionysius at least since 1430, when through him he had
sought to borrow another Greek manuscript for use in the First Commentary.*°
Ghiberti’s thoroughly eclectic discussion of optics in no way constitutes a mani-
festo of Neo-Platonism, although Plato is mentioned from time to time among his
authorities; but in proposing to give a scientific basis to the study and use of light in
the arts of sculpture and painting, and especially in the arts of gem-cutting and
glass-painting, he was adding substance to the aesthetic of light which was so alive
in the Niccoli circle; and in so doing, he contributed to that strand of artistic theory
which passed, not through Alberti, but through Marsilio Ficino (who re-translated
the Pseudo-Dionysius) to the synthesis of Leonardo da Vinci.

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 7° Color Colorado —
Cross-cultural Studies in the
Ancient Americas

pan COHERENCE OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE humanistic culture which we saw

in the last chapter is uncharacteristic. In Chapter 5 we saw that medieval
Western colour-language poses great problems of interpretation, and these prob-
lems are compounded in the case of exotic cultures confronted by Western trav-
ellers and conquerors in the Renaissance period. One of the central problems in the
modern study of cultures has been, of course, the problem of origins: the question
of whether similar cultural practices are to be understood as independent develop-
ments within particular societies; whether they can be accounted for by intrinsic,
,-quasi-biological mental characteristics common to the whole of humankind, or only
by the diffusion of ideas from a small number of geographical centres. Over the
past three decades the universalist model has tended to prevail in ethno-linguistics,
and the example of colour-vocabularies has been seen as central to it.’ What the
historian of art can contribute to this debate are considerations arising from the
history of the technology of artefacts, which bear on the question of how some
cultures understand colour, and how this understanding may be embodied in lan-
guage. Here I shall discuss instances from the linguistic usages and craft-practices of
some of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America around the time
of the Spanish Conquest, and in the nature ofthe case, most of my information will
be drawn from Spanish reports of these, to them, alien cultures.

‘Basic Color Terms’— the problems

Berlin and Kay’s seminal evolutionary scheme of linguistic development (p. 29

above) depends on the assumption that in any language there is a set of ‘basic’
colour-terms, which expands in a more-or-less regular sequence of seven stages,
over time, from two terms, for ‘black’ and ‘white’, to eleven, for ‘black’ ‘white’, ‘red’,
‘green’, ‘yellow’,‘blue’, ‘brown’, ‘purple’, ‘pink’, ‘orange’ and ‘grey’. Thus among the
Mexican languages examined in their study, all the indigenous colour-vocabularies,
in Ixcatec, Mazatec, Sierra Populca, Tarascan, Tzeltal and Tzotzil, were at their Stage
IV, with five basic terms, for black, white, red, green or else blue, and yellow or else
orange, where Mexican Spanish was at Stage VII, with a full complement of eleven.
Critics of Berlin and Kay’s scheme have drawn attention to the problems inher-
ent in their notion of‘basic’.? In their 1969 book they argued that a basic colour-
term must be monolexemic, that is, its meaning must not be predictable from the
meaning of its parts (as would be the case with, for example, ‘crimson’ among reds);

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that it must be psychologically salient (that is, in common use among all users ofa
language); that its application must not be confined to a narrow class of objects; that
it should not also be the name of a coloured object; and that it should not be a
recent loan-word.} In the absence of any agreement about what constitutes ‘recent’,
according to these criteria at least five of the eleven ‘basic terms’ in Spanish are prob-
lematic, since all of them derive from concrete objects and are borrowings from
other languages. Azul and anaranjado derive from the Arabic for a blue stone and
probably a fruit; café, gris and rosa derive from the French.*
Berlin and Kay’s method for establishing the corpus ofbasic colour-terms in the
various languages is similarly suspect.They first elicited a list of colour-terms from
each informant — sometimes only one informant for each language — and as most
of their informants were living in the San Francisco Bay area of California, the
question of the influence of bilingualism should have been addressed at every stage
of their enquiry.’ Berlin and Kay did indeed address it in the context of their most
important procedure, which was to ask each informant to plot both the focus
and the perimeters of each colour-category on a chart made up of Munsell chips
arranged in a broadly spectral order, but also showing light and dark values of each
hue. They argued that English usage could hardly influence the identification of
foci in a range of twenty genetically diverse languages; and in the case of Tzeltal,
where a group of forty informants was tested in their own region of southern
Mexico, no appreciable difference was found between the responses of monolin-
gual informants and those bilingual in Tzeltal and Spanish.°
Tzeltal, as a Stage IV language, has a single term, yas, covering green and blue,
although most of Berlin’s informants interpreted it as having its focus in the green
area; and all the twenty-six Mayan languages included in Berlin and Kay’s survey
also show this Stage IV characteristic of a common term for green and blue. It is worth
noting that a very prominent type of indigenous Mexican artistic practice is the
43 incrustation of objects with a mosaic of turquoise and jadeite, or the decoration of
earthenware with a turquoise glaze, probably in imitation of these precious materi-
als.’? The earthenware glaze might well be described by most English-speakers as
‘blue-green’, or, indeed, ‘turquoise’, and the coloured stones incorporate a range of
blue-green and green tones in the same object (and are of course made of the same
materials), so that a single term would certainly be appropriate to describe them. In
his wonderfully comprehensive Nahuatl encyclopaedia oflife in Mexico after the
Spanish Conquest, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun describes the dealer in turquoise,
green jade and blue obsidian under the heading of ‘green-stone-seller’ (chalchiuhna-
mac). Thus sixteenth-century Nahua usage comes close to modern Tzeltal usage,
even though it was perfectly possible in classical Nahuatl to find more than one
term even for ‘blue’.* According to the late sixteenth-century dictionary of Fray
Alfonso de Molina, which was consulted by Sahagun, classical Nahuatl had a
colour-vocabulary ofat least eleven terms, and would thus have been, like modern
Spanish, one of Berlin and Kay’s Stage VII languages.°
Berlin and Kay’s scheme of evolution depends upon the location of foci for
each basic colour-term; they found that the perimeters of colour-categories, where
they shaded into the areas of other colours, were far more fluid, and that even the

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same informant might draw these perimeters in different places on different occa-
sions. They were thus unable to use category-boundaries or total ‘colour’ area as
indicative ofthe identification of‘basic’ colours.'° But in excluding these peripheral
judgments they were surely disallowing what is precisely our normal experience of
colour-usage. Disputes about colour hinge, more often than not, on the identifica-
tion of these liminal areas as belonging to one colour-category or another. We still
have many difficulties in assigning particular nuances to one or other category, and
attempt to resolve them by discussion.
In everyday life we are, I suggest, far more concerned with nuances than with the
saturated ‘primary’ colours whose identification has been relatively recent, and
whose importance has largely been confined to the specialized contexts of the
painters workshop and the physical or psychological laboratory.'' The search for
the ‘primaries’ or ‘basics’ of colour, whose linguistic dimension is encapsulated in
Berlin and Kay’s enterprise, has proved to be remarkably inconsequential, and it has
been freighted with a heavy burden of ideology which seems far from the concerns
of the ordinary user of colour-language. Richness and variety are far more charac-
teristic of colour-vocabularies than restriction, and in Meso-America and South
America this richness is amply embodied in the artefacts, especially the feather-
work,"* textiles and painting which are so characteristic of the periods before the
Spanish Conquest.

Colour-terms and colour-products

Alfonso de Molina lists around fourteen Nahua colour-terms, and the Inca lan-
guages Quechua and Aymara each included some dozen in the sixteenth century.
Quechua, interestingly, had a particular term, and possibly two distinct terms, for a
combination of black and white; and it is striking how frequent was the black-and-
white chequerboard pattern of Inca textiles.’ The extremely complex forms and AO
colour-juxtapositions in the Aztec tonalamatl, as well as in Inca weaving, indicate 44
not only a taste for a great range of decorative colours, but also a capacity to dis-
criminate between them, and to contrast them with great skill. The taste for variety
in colour is witnessed by many ofthe early documents. In Hernan Cortés’s second
letter of 1520 to the Emperor CharlesV he reports of colour-vendors in the market
at Temixtitlan:‘They sell as many colours for painters as may be found in Spain, and
all of excellent hues.'t Sahagtin lists a dozen nuances of dyed fur available at the
market;' and he also retells a Nahua legend of the Golden Age of Tula, when cotton
grew already dyed in twelve colours. In his Spanish version of this legend he lists
only eleven hues, another indication that the Aztecs were no less capable than their
conquerors of handling an extensive range of colour-ideas."°
But perhaps the most vivid and compelling evidence of this highly developed
The complex interweaving forms of
colour sensibility is the artefacts themselves.
the tonalamatl demanded a careful distribution of colour-areas using less than a
dozen paints; but the technology of weaving ensured that, with a far more extensive
palette, the arrangement of colours in complex designs was the result of careful

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COLOR COLORADO

An Inca poncho woven with

a typical black-and-white
step-design. One Inca language,
Quechua, has specific terms for
both ‘black-and-white’ and this
chequerboard motif. (40)

44 planning, and planning, of course, involves a high degree of conceptualization. It is

the remarkably well preserved textiles from the desert cemeteries ofParacas in Peru
which have received most attention from modern scholars — textiles which seem to
have been constructed on the simplest of looms, but with an extraordinary degree
of craft-skill and imagination. The Peruvian techniques of weaving have hitherto
been more studied than their methods of dyeing, but it is at least clear that they used
a wide range of organic and inorganic dyestufts, including indigo, cochineal, and
the purple dye from a variety of coastal mollusc.'? The distinguished anthropologist
Franz Boas, in his implausibly titled Primitive Art (1927), gave perhaps the first
detailed analysis of the highly-controlled rhythms of Peruvian weaving,'* and this
type of analysis was developed by L.M.O’Neale in the case of acomplicated patch-
work fragment (Supe Middle Period), where in a repeated jaguar motif, she identi-
fied a total of seventeen nuances ofcolour.'?
Although there seem to be no very early written documents of craft-practice
among the Inca, an early eighteenth-century Jesuit manual of dyeing, which
records traditional Indian methods in Quito and Cajamarca, described the use of
more than twenty colorants, some of them labelled in Spanish, some in indigenous
terms.*° Many ofthese terms are evidently idiosyncratic and highly specialized, and
it would be quite misleading to suggest that they ever came into everyday use. But
they are evidence of acapacity for colour-discrimination and description among a
particular group in a given culture on a par with what has long been known in the
context of animal-husbandry, where the discrimination of hide-colours has been
crucial to effective economic activity. This capacity for extensive discrimination has
also been identified in the twentieth century among the Andean shepherds and

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 COLOR COLORADO

An Aztec cosmic map

distinguishing each of
the four cardinal
directions with a colour
— north (right) with
yellow, south with
green, east with red,
and west with blue.
(41)

herdsmen, who use a vocabulary of at least nineteen nuances between ‘absolute’

white and ‘absolute’ black.*' In colour-usage the tendency towards the construction
of ‘basic’ categories — reinforced by the reductive procedures of optical and physio-
logical science** — has been matched or, in my view, outweighed, by the tendency
towards an increasingly subtle discrimination in certain crucial areas; and this
pattern of development does not, it seems, conform to the model of cultural evolu-
tion proposed by Berlin and Kay.

Colour and direction

So far I have focused on colour-perception as embodied in language and in the

making of complex coloured artefacts; but of course the realm of colour in the Pre-
Columbian cultures of Central and South American is also, and pre-eminently, the
realm of symbolism. Symbolizing belongs to metaphor rather than to perception,
and is thus a linguistic, and specifically rhetorical, not an immediately psychological
function of the mind, which is one of the reasons why it has proved so difficult to
establish anything like a ‘basic’ universal system of colour-symbols. In the European
contexts I have studied, local and even individual usage has prevailed, so that even
the notion of ‘languages’ of colour-symbolism is problematic.*} Might not the same
be true of Pre-Columbian American cultures?
One of the commonest occasions for the use of colour symbolically was in the
attribution of colours to directions, a practice widespread in Asia and the Americas, AI
and notably among the Maya and Aztecs in Mexico. But in the many examples

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COLOR COLORADO

gathered by the anthropologist C. L. Riley, north could be symbolized by black, white,

red, yellow, blue or grey; south could be blue, red, black, white, green or yellow; east
might be white, yellow, blue, grey or green, and west be black, white, yellow, red,
blue or green.Among the Maya, both south and east were identified as red or yellow,
and in the records of the Aztecs we find north as black, white, yellow or red; south as
blue, red or yellow; east as red, green-white or yellow; and west as white or black,
yellow, red or green. Modern commentators on a single manuscript, the Codex
Borgia, have been puzzled that the colours given to the directions have varied from
page to page. Riley has summarized the problem in by now very familiar terms:
One ofthe most striking things about the colour-direction symbolism through-
out this entire Meso-American-Southwestern area is the remarkable lack of
uniformity in associations from one culture to another. Even within the same
group, two informants may give different colour-direction associations.”
She speculates that the discrepancies may be due to different usages for different
ritual occasions, and so they may; and they may thus yield to further investigation.
But, quite apart from the inherent fluidity of colour-perceptions, so that we can
never be quite sure in some cases whether we are looking at a red or a yellow, not to
mention a blue ora green,” this instability in Pre-Columbian colour-symbolism is
paralleled precisely in medieval and Renaissance examples in Europe, and may be
attributable to nothing more compelling than the individual imagination of the
artists responsible for colouring symbolic objects.

The significance of red

Few colours have been so heavily freighted with symbolic resonances as red. In the
Indo-European languages this may have been because ‘red’ has been seen as the
colour par excellence of life-giving blood. Indeed, the terms ‘red’ ‘rouge’ ‘rot’, or ‘rosso’
derive from the Sanskrit word rudhind meaning ‘blood’. In the Inca language Aymara,
a synonym for grana (Spanish: crimson), beside puca, was vila,a term for ‘blood’; and
Sahagun includes in his encyclopaedia an Aztec version of the widespread belief
that the bloodstone (eztetl) could be used in a process of sympathetic magic to
staunch menstrual or other bleeding.*? The Spanish ‘rojo’ (from the Latin russeus) is
a particularly interesting case because it appears to have arrived rather late in
common usage; ‘bermejo’, from the natural or artificial cinnabar ‘bermellon’ (ver-
milion), was by far the commonest Spanish term for ‘red’ in the Middle Ages.”*
Little seems to be known of the earliest history ofthe indigenous languages of Central
and South America, so that we are scarcely able to make judgments of meaning
based on an analysis of semantic change; but it is notable that a semantic link has
been proposed between an Aztec term for red ochre, tlauitl, and the verb ‘to illumi-
nate’ or ‘to shine’, flauia,in a way which has a clear parallel in Greek and Latin.?°
By far the most important red of this region was the dyestuff cochineal, known
in Nahuatl as nochetzli,in Quechua as llankapuca, or simply puca, in Aymara as chupica
and in Spanish as grana.*° In the classic seventeenth-century account of South

i ie)
 COLOR COLORADO

American weaving, Bernabé Cobo dwelt on the fine and multicoloured cloths he
found there, woven ofyarns dyed
yellow, black and many other colours, and above all crimson or grana, which
makes them famous throughout many parts of the world, and their dyes can
compete with the best to be found...3!
Cobo is echoing Sahagin who, at least for the benefit of his Spanish readers,
included an enthusiastic endorsement of the international fame of this Mexican dye:
This grana is well-known inside and outside this country, and it is big business.
It has been exported as far away as China and Turkey, and it is prized and
respected throughout almost the whole world.The grana which is already refined
and made into cakes is called strong [recia] or fine grana.They sell it in the market-
place in cake-form, and in this form it is purchased by painters and dyers...3
So valuable were these coloured grains, the dried bodies of the female insect Dacty-
lopius coccus cacti, that they were used as tribute money by the Aztecs: we have
records of such tribute to Moctezuma from the cities of Oaxaca and Cuyalapa
(?Coyolapan).*3
The use of the Spanish term grana for cochineal arose from a confusion with the
very similar European and African insect, coccus illicus, which also yielded the most
important red dye of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, kermes (Arabic: qirmiz),
not least in Spain, where it had long been harvested in Andalusia. Grana was simply
the Italian word for the grain-like bodies of the insects processed to make the dye.
Kermes was the colorant often used to dye the expensive woollen cloth known in
England as ‘scarlet’; and by the later Middle Ages, again notably in Spain, escarlata
had come to signify the red colour itself.34 Scarlet was enormously prestigious: the
thirteenth-century sumptuary laws of the kingdom of Castile and Leon restricted
its use to the king.* It was the natural successor to the Roman Imperial purple, and
had, indeed, by the end of the fifteenth century in Spain acquired the same
meaning as purpura.*° F
This prestige and these royal associations also characterized puca.When Francisco
Pizarro met the Inca Atahualpa at his residence near Cajamarca the Inca’s headdress
included his specifically royal tassel, ‘de lana muy fina de grana’.*” The second Inca
language, Aymara, had a particular phrase for ‘parading about the town dressed in
red’ (pucaq thaaratha), using in this instance the Quechua term puca for the dyed
cloth. Since it is a Spanish report of Pizarro’s audience with Atahualpa, and since all
our records of these linguistic usages are by Spanish-speaking lexicographers, it
may be that we are simply witnessing the attitudes of the Spanish conquerors,
whose colour-language was absorbed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
into indigenous usage.** But there is at least a hint that the traffic in ideas was not all
one way, in the case of the developing meaning of the Spanish term colorado.
Colorado, from the Classical Latin coloratus, had been used in medieval and
Renaissance Spanish sometimes to mean simply ‘well-coloured’, but usually in con-
nection with the pink colour of flesh (as in the English ‘to colour’, meaning ‘to
blush’).3° But during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially in Spanish

Ill
COLOR COLORADO

America, the term came to replace bermejo as a general term for ‘red’. Molina’s
Nahuatl dictionary records the phrase chichiltic tlapalli (chilli-red dye) for color
bermejo 0 colorado, but also shows that tlapalli was used alone to refer to grana; and
gives the term flapalteoxiutli for the ruby, which Sahagun, in his chapter on precious
stones, explained as made up of ftlapalli (red) and teoxiutl (fine turquoise), since the
stone was simply a chilli-red turquoise.*? Sahagiin also glossed flapalli as ‘good’,
‘fine’, ‘precious’ and ‘wonderful’, so that it was, like colorado, a general term for
colour which had come to mean specifically ‘red’, and red of the finest and most
precious kind.‘ Although this usage was in line with far earlier developments in
Europe (cf. scarlet) there is no reason to assume that it originated there, since the
technology that lay behind it had long existed in Central and South America; and
the spread of the new connotations of colorado in this region suggests that the
Spanish was itself inflected by indigenous ideas.
Critics of Berlin and Kay’s treatment of colour-vocabularies have remarked that
their experimental methods overlooked the practical contexts in which these
vocabularies developed. An historically oriented study of colour-language can help
to establish the ways in which particular terms come to be used, and how usages
change. The Munsell colour-charts which Berlin and Kay employed in their
research present a highly specialized view of colour-relationships, hence the diffi-
culties many informants had in knowing how to use them. Their spectral sequence
has become generally familiar only relatively recently, and the apparently ‘natural’
49 spectrum of the rainbow has always presented problems to perception.*
I have suggested in this study that the notion of ‘basic’ colours has been far from
common among the Central and South American cultures, which have made an
exceptional use of a variety of colours in their artefacts, and have developed an
extensive vocabulary to describe this use. Most of the historical examples of colour-
usage available to us are inevitably from the highest strata of these traditional soci-
eties; extensive access to bright colour was the prerogative of the wealthy and the
well-born, and it was usually only in the context of public ceremonial that colour
impinged upon the population at large. Hence the hierarchy of colour as a system
of values, with red at the top. There could scarcely be a greater contrast with Berlin
and Kay’s informants in and around San Francisco, for whom the spectacle of the
polychrome consumer society has become one of the more commonplace, if more
attractive aspects of modern life.
Modern ethno-linguistics, with its emphasis on ‘basic’ colours, has tended to
look for, and to find, its allies in physiological optics and experimental psychology,
where the method of procedure has normally involved a small number of subjects
and a straightforward notion of stimulus and response. We have learned a good deal
from this direction about the mechanisms of colour-perception; but we have
learned far less about the preferences and interests which shape the uses of colour in
human societies. Students of the development of colour-language cannot afford to
ignore the artefacts which usually offer the most vivid evidence of a concern for
colour-discrimination; and among the Aztecs and the Inca who had been the
subject of this study, the highly developad capacity to discriminate was clearly
intrinsic to the formal inventiveness of their art.
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Stained glass is above all

the medium oflight, and
Renaissance glaziers often
used lighter colours than
|E .
medieval glaziers (15). iag i \ : ig Ss ow
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\
Lorenzo Ghiberti made the
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Florence Cathedral (right). rs
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Some of da Pisa’s . i: A aa
recommendations for
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ih d
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Da Pisa went.so far as to =
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glass to make a window
i) on Se
joyful’. (42)
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Colour-terms and colour-products

The incrusted turquoise and jadeite of this Pre-Columbian Mixtec mask (left) will most likely be described as
‘blue-green’ by English-speakers, but in the various Pre-Columbian languages it could only have been ‘green’, for
green and blue were not discriminated. In Basic Color Terms Berlin and Kay categorize as at Stage IV of development
such languages in which green and blue are denoted by a single term. (43)

The figured textiles of Pre-Columbian America reveal colour-designing at its most complex and sophisticated. Woven
designs such as this tapestry Inca tunic (above), rhythmical with irregularly repeating motifs, offer the most compelling
evidence of colour-discrimination at a given period in a particular culture. (44)
Colour as substance, colour as light
Earth (c. 1570) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (left) is less playful than it seems. The ancient doctrine ofthe four elements
comprising substance, earth, air, fire and water — and the colour proper to each — were subjects much debated in the
scientific circles of Rudolph II’s Prague, to which the artist belonged. (45)
Artists were fascinated by Newton’s clear demonstration that light was the only begetter of colour, and his division
of the spectrum into seven. Claude Boutet’s painter’s circle of 1708 (above) was probably the first to be based on
Newton’s (58). But unable to match spectral red with pigment, Boutet substitutes two reds — fire-red
and crimson - omitting one of Newton’s two blues. To compound confusion, the colourist has evidently misread
two ofthe labels, ‘oranger and ‘violet’. (46)
 Nor owns itfelf a Cheat, tlhItexpires «
“Ts little Joys go out by- One,’ and-One ;sid fai 1
And leave poor Man, at length, in perfe& Night; —
Night darker, than. what, ew, involves the Pole.

O THOU, who doft permit thefe Ills to fall,

For gracious Ends, and wouldft, that Man fhould mourn! ,
O Tov, whofe Sind this goodly Fabric. fram’d,
Who know’ ft it beft, and wouldit, that Man fhould note L
What is this fublunary World? |A. Vapour ;
oe Vapour, all it holds; Ivelf a Vapour;
‘From the damp Bed of Chaos, by Thy Beam
Exhal’d, ordain’d to {wim its. deftin’d Hour,
In ambient Air, then melt, and difappear;
Earth's Days are numbred, nor remote her Doom ;
As Mortal, tho’ Jefs Tranfient, than her Sons;
Yet they doat on her, as the World, and They,
Were both Eternal, Solid ; Tuovu,a Dream.

| Tuey doat, on What? Immortal Views apart,” sui:

A Region of Outfides! a Land of Shadows!
A fmitful Field of flow’ry Promifes!
A Wildernefs for Joys! perplext with Done

Newton and painting

Newton’s ideas about colour have inspired one modern series of paintings: Frantisek Kupka’s Discs of Newton of
1912 (left). Kupka’s white segments may refer to the mixture of all colours to white on a spinning disc, although a
preparatory work in Paris including a black centre suggests that Newton’s Rings (61) may also be a source. (47)
The rainbow in William Blake’s illustration to Young’s Night Thoughts of 1797 (above) exemplifies the transient,
the sublunary world. As usual with Blake, this is a ‘Newtonian’ bow with seven colours. (48)
perishable nature of
 <I

In his poignant study of visual deprivation, The Blind Girl of 1856, Millais’s
exact rendering of
the landscape-setting did not extend to the secondary rainbow, where he
failed to notice the reversal
of the spectral colours until the mistake was pointed out to him by a friend.
Imperceptible transitions
of hue make the bow a particularly subjective scale of colour. (49)
 8 - The Fool’s Paradise

...that Triangular Glass call’d the fool’s Paradise, though fit for the wits of
wiser men, which representeth so lively Red, Blew and Green, that no colours
can compare with them...
(Christopher Merrett, 1662!)
if AN ESSAY OF 1983 THE DOYEN OF modern students of medieval and Renaissance
optics, David Lindberg, argued that ‘there was much in sixteenth-century optics
that was new, but nothing that was revolutionary’.* This was not a surprising
conclusion given that Lindberg dealt with only two sixteenth-century writers,
Francesco Maurolico and Giovanni Battista della Porta, and that his understanding
of the history of optics was essentially confined to its geometrical branch, which
traces a line from Euclid, through Robert Grosseteste and Theodoric of Freiberg to
Descartes and Newton in the seventeenth century. But there are of course several
histories of optics: one of them involves the medieval and Renaissance metaphysics
of light,’ and another, which I shall call ‘perceptualist’, runs from Aristotle through
Alhazen and Witelo to Leonardo da Vinci and on to Chevreul in the nineteenth
century (Chapter 15) and takes in Newton on the way. It is this ‘perceptualist’
history which is the subject of the present chapter.
These histories are not, of course, mutually exclusive; it is rather a question of
emphasis; but I think it has been generally understood that the geometrical optics
of the seventeenth century presented a quite new evaluation of the relationship of
light to colour: where for Aristotle light was the activator of colour, and where for
most medieval thinkers it was the vehicle of colour, for many scholars in the seven-
teenth century, notably Descartes and Newton, it came to be identified with colour
itself. Colour was inherent in light, and light was the efficient cause of colour in all
its manifestations, for colour was the inevitable consequence of the variable refrac-
tion of light. And so, by and large, it has remained. The ‘perceptualist’ account, on
the other hand, is concerned, not with the causes of colour, but with its effects, with
the way in which a radiant stimulation of the human visual system becomes identi-
fied as colour at all. In this account, which developed essentially within a tradition
of medical research, the experimentation of the sixteenth century had indeed a
major role to play.
The history of the rainbow, characterized in the classic study by Carl Boyer as
‘from myth to mathematics’, shows how a phenomenon which was traditionally
seen as an exemplar of the nature and meaning of colour, became from the seven-
teenth century a demonstration of the nature of light, to which the perceptual
characteristics of colour were largely irrelevant.t Seeing the rainbow continued 49

[21
THE FOOL’S PARADISE

to be a thoroughly uncertain business, since the number and order of the colours
was far from easy to ascertain, and this was true not only of the celestial bow, but
also of the terrestrial spectrum, created in the laboratory precisely for the purposes
of study.

The hexagonal stone

The study ofthe rainbow in the Latin West had been aided by indoor experiments
with the prism since at least the thirteenth century. The perspectivist Roger Bacon
had been particularly anxious to test the characteristics of the bow by experiment-
ing with various types of crystal, as well as by making observations of the bows
formed in the spray of mill-races or oars. The first modern theory, which proposed
that the colours of the bow were produced by double refractions in individual
drops, was elaborated by Theodoric of Freiberg in the early fourteenth century,
employing spherical flasks of the type used for the collection of urine for medical
diagnosis, as well as spherical berylls and hexagonal prisms of natural quartz crystal.*
Rock-crystal had long been associated with the rainbow; in Antiquity it was already
noted for its capacity to intercept the rays of the sun and project rainbow-colours
on to a surface.° The late-Antique encyclopaedist Solinus held that quartz was
mined in the Red Sea by the Arabs, and this was an opinion which passed through
Isidore of Seville into general currency in the Middle Ages. But by the thirteenth
century this stone was also being discovered in the Italian Alps, in Germany and in
Ireland.” Half a century before Theodoric, another German Dominican, Albertus
Magnus, who wrote on minerals as well as on the rainbow, described the effect of
light on a crystal he had himself found in the Rhineland:
If it is held up indoors so that part of it is in sunshine and part is kept in the
shade, it casts a reflection of abeautiful rainbow on the opposite wall or any-
thing else, and therefore it is called Iris...*
Albertus explained that the crystal was formed of water ‘from dried-out moisture
escaping from the material of a stone produced from red clay...just turning into
dew, hardening partly from vapour and partly from dewdrops melting away’, a view
which persisted into the sixteenth century.’ It thus provided a close analogy with
the raindrop, which Albertus, like Theodoric, regarded as the source of the colours
in the rainbow. But the natural hexagonal form produced internal refractions
and reflections which were far too complex for systematic study: as the scientific
Archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham, put it in the late thirteenth century, ‘the
colours are seen from every direction’;'® and already by this time the Polish scholar
Witelo, investigating the bow at Viterbo in the 1270s, was masking off some of the
facets of the stone in order to concentrate the refractions. Witelo gave what was at
that time by far the longest and most circumstantial account of experiments with
the hexagonal stone. He had a clear sense that the various colours of the spectrum
were functions of the various angles of refraction of the incident ray of light. He
covered two of the faces with wax so that this incident ray would pass through the

i)
 THE FOOL’S PARADISE

Theodoric of Freiberg’s refraction-diagram of c, 1304 showing the

passage of a ray oflight through a hexagonal crystal (to the eye or to
another surface, a-d). The perpendiculars to the faces of the crystal
(c-f and b-g) allow the angle of refraction to be calculated. Freiberg’s
important discussion on the rainbow was based partly on such prismatic
experiments. (50)

intermediate face in one half

of the crystal and emerge through the three remaining
faces. Witelo believed that the three colours of the spectrum, which, following
Aristotle, he identified as puniceus, xanthus (in Latin viridis or indicus) and alurgus,
were directly related to the three active faces of the modified crystal:
The variety of colours is a function of the shape of the body, since different
colours appear with whatsoever other crystal or transparent body of a different
shape, although they have the same order of colours as in the rainbow."
The colours produced by this modified crystal were stronger and brighter than
those produced by the unmodified stone; and Witelo even found it hard to accept
that the colours resulting from the passage of light through a spherical flask filled
with water were the true rainbow-colours, since they were not, he said, the same
three in number.”

The reduction of means

The arguments derived by Witelo from this ‘jolly game’ (/udus iocosus) with the
hexagonal crystal were developed more systematically by Theodoric of Freiberg,
who argued that the spectral image would be stronger if the rays of light were
allowed to pass through a minimum of denser medium; and in some of his experi-
ments he calculated in terms of three, rather than six angles in the prism.'? The
principle that nature worked by the simplest means was gathering momentum
during the thirteenth century. Bacon’s Franciscan predecessor Robert Grosseteste
had argued in his important discussion of the rainbow that ‘every operation of
nature is by the most finite, most ordered, shortest and best means possible’.'* This
economic attitude led in Theodoric’s time to the formulation of ‘Ockham’s Razor’
(the principle that entities must not be multiplied unnecessarily, an agument against
the real existence of universals), and it was of course very crucial to the mechaniza-
tion of optics in the seventeenth century, for example in Fermat's principle of least
time (the geometrical proof that the refraction of a ray of light in its passage from a
THE FOOL’S PARADISE

less dense to a denser medium shortens the distance travelled, and thus compensates
for its slower velocity in that denser medium)."°
Given that Grosseteste had proposed that sight and colour offered a paradigm of
the corporeal and incorporeal elements in the Holy Trinity, and that his follower
Bacon had urged the important theological significance of numerology, and had
indeed argued that the equilateral triangle gave insights into the nature of the
Trinity itself,"° we might well have expected that Witelo’s emphasis on the three
active faces of his crystal would have led, by the power of symbolizing as well as by
the principle of simplicity, to the development of the modern triangular prism.
Certainly, in the fourteenth century the notion of the three colours of the Trinity
was articulated very forcefully in a popular French devotional poem, Guillaume de
Digulleville’s Pilgrimage of the Soul (c.1355).But so far from appealing to the rainbow,
with all its traditional connotations of the Covenant between God and man, the
bridge between Heaven and Earth, Digulleville exemplified his triad of colours in
the unity of a single phenomenon, colour-change: the unchanging gold of the
Father, the scarlet (vermeil) blood of the Son and the comforting green of the Holy
Spirit, in the colours of the peacock and the shot-silk cloth which was also com-
monly associated with the colours of the peacock’s feathers.'7
Bacon, in his lengthy discussion of the crucial usefulness of physics and mathe-
matics in the Opus Maius, had adduced the equilateral triangle as a perfect image of
the Trinity precisely because it was a figure which could be found nowhere else in
nature. And of course, unlike the lense, whose early development was based on an
analogy with the crystalline lense of the eye, the triangular prism is in no way a
natural shape.'* Perhaps in the thirteenth century the association of the Trinity
with the triangle, a Manichean notion which had been roundly condemned by
St Augustine, was still too theologically suspect; it only became less so in the early
Renaissance, when the triangle appeared increasingly as the form of the halo of
God.This suspicion was in spite of the growing popularity in the later Middle Ages
ofthe triangular devotional image ofthe Trinity known as the Scutum Fidei (Shield
of Faith), which seems to have been devised by Grosseteste himself."
The triangular prism was thus an astonishing development: a purpose-built tool
for which there were no precedents either in nature or in the Ancient world. The
philosophical and theological contexts would have led us to expect its appearance
no later than the fourteenth century, but there seems to be no evidence for it before
the middle ofthe sixteenth.

The prism in the sixteenth century

Albertus Magnus in his Meteorology (III, iv, 19) appears to have distinguished
between the hexagonal rock-crystal called the iris, and a ‘crystallo angulosa longa’
which had the same properties as the iris; but he gave no further details.2° Witelo’s
Optics was well known in the early Renaissance — in Italy it was consulted by both
Ghiberti and Leonardo da Vinci, who may have been introduced to it by the
mathematician Luca Pacioli.*! Ockham’s logic of economy was also particularly
 THE FOOL’S PARADISE

lag Cee, TUE DMN TOMO OILCCUERY

La ny West fpee
oe‘Ait tenAger ata SE a mal
aoa oe ee sours
a Een f Mery

VAMAGE scosees Tstetnee =eet OT es

RE eee ep

Robert Grosseteste’s : bre weet

:
triangular diagram of the ; \\ é reutest one
AT me.
Tninity, the Scutum Fidei b ik Fane p we Acie eto Pali
(before 1231), with Father, vated Reet a ak wage ne py

Son and Holy Ghost united ied 4raatetree:

in God at the centre. (51)

cultivated in Renaissance Italy, where his works were studied and published at
Bologna in the 1490s.** Theodoric of Freiberg’s work was less known, although it
was summarized by Jodocus Trutfetter in his Philosophie Naturalis Summa, printed
at Erfurt in 1517. Trutfetter’s version is especially interesting, not least because it
gives some precocious attention to the shifting Latin vocabulary of the rainbow-
colours; and it also offers perhaps the earliest published analysis of the use of tonal
contrast by painters in order to create the effect of space.** But in the present
context what is most striking is Trutfetter’s description of the optical experiments
he conducted, using a darkened room with a single hole in the shutter to allow the
sun’s rays (radii solares) to enter and create colours by the interposition of various
optical devices. Trutfetter mentions a mirror, a cristallo longa ac angulosa, and also
the glass rod cited by Seneca in the first century AD (Natural Questions, I, vi, 7). He
also lists the hexagonal stone called iris.** But he does not refer to the triangular
prism; nor is it mentioned in the very popular sixteenth-century encylopaedia, the
Margarita Philosophica of the German Carthusian monk Gregor Reisch, which was
published in a dozen editions, including Italian translations, between 1503 and
1600, although Reisch, too, mentions the hexagonal stone.”5
It does not seem to be before the middle of the sixteenth century, and in Italy,
that triangular prisms came to be part of the equipment of optical experiment.
The Milanese physician and philosopher Gerolamo Cardano seems to be the first
to mention the ‘triangular crystal, or prism’ in his scientific encyclopaedia De

125
THE FOOL’S PARADISE

The earliest known diagram of

the triangular prism in action —
although the geometry 1s pure
fantasy. From the De Refractione of
1593 by Giovanni Battista della
Porta. (52)

Subtilitate, first published in 1550; and by the time of Giovanni Battista della Porta’s
wn
De Refractione of 1593, which may be the first text to illustrate this triangular form,
it seems to have become the standard shape.”°
The triangular prism was, however, not yet a shape widely known and used in
optical experiments. Perhaps the most substantial sixteenth-century discussion of
the prism and its uses occurs in the fourth book of Opticae Libri Quattuor, the
product of a collaboration between the French philosopher Pierre de la Ramée,
who had a strong interest in empiricism, and his German pupil Friedrich Reisner
(Risner) during the 1560s, although their work was not published until 1606.*’ Ina
chapter on the elemental structure of the rainbow Ramée and Reisner reviewed the
instruments used in creating artificial spectra, including the natural hexagonal
crystal which, according to Pliny, could not be matched by art. Sometimes its shape
was that of a truncated pyramid, sometimes that of aprism with six lateral faces and
two bases. Witelo’s prism, they argued, should be understood as a hexahedral paral-
lelepiped; and they made the especially striking observation that the pentahedral
prism (i.e. the new triangular form, with three sides and two bases) was the wonder
of France and Italy (quaquam et prisma pentaedrum tota Italia Galliaque his etiam mirac-
ulis celebratur).
Yet they were only concerned to examine the various properties of
the traditional hexagonal prism ofcrystal or glass.
Ramée and Reisner, following Witelo, argued that the rainbow-colours, which
they had already accepted as the Aristotelian puniceus, viridis and purpureus, were
three because the incident light underwent a triple refraction from the three upper
surfaces to the three lower. They described the effect of masking off first one, then
two faces of the prism, adducing Witelo’s experiment where two sides were covered
with wax and sunlight was admitted into a darkened room through a small hole.
The spectrum cast in this case was large (maxima) and very beautiful, with especially
bright colours as a result of concentrating all the refractions into one. They also
described the colour-generating properties of clear gemstones and Seneca’s glass
wands; but they gave no discussion at all to the characteristics of the new triangular
prism.**
 THE FOOL’S PARADISE

Scarmiglioni on colour
Around 1600 the triangular prism was being used in experiments by the English
mathematician Thomas Harriot and by an Italian physician working in Vienna,
S4
Guido Antonio Scarmiglioni, whose book, De Coloribus, published at Marburg in
1601, offers a very useful benchmark for the perceptual approach to colour at the
end ofthe sixteenth century — not because it is particularly original, but because it
presents a remarkably comprehensive overview of colour-problems in optics, in
psychology, in language and in art. Scarmiglioni was well read in ancient, medieval
and modern authors on colour, and he also seems to have conducted some experi-
ments himself. Of his life we know nothing but what he tells us in his short book,
which is apparently his only published work. But as a synthesizer, he is worth giving
more attention than history has accorded him so far.
Scarmiglioni was born at Foligno in Umbria and educated there, possibly at the
still-mysterious Accademia Medica, set up around the middle of the sixteenth
century and with some claim to being the first scientific academy.”? Scarmiglioni
related how the Archbishop of Naples, Prince Annibale di Capua, whom he served
as personal physician, sent him on a ‘serious mission’ to the Emperor Rudolph II.
While he was in Vienna he was invited by the Chancellor of the Archigymnasium
in Prague, Melchior Khlesl, who was Chancellor of the Jesuit College, the Clementi-
num, after 1579, to move to Prague to teach and practise medicine, which, as
Scarmiglioni writes in 1601, he had done ever since. By that time he was also
Professor of Theoretical Medicine in Prague and Vienna.*° The American National
Union Catalog tells us that he died in 1620. Otherwise he seems to be almost
entirely unknown to history.*!
It was the Prague lectures that Scarmiglion1’s pupils persuaded him to publish in
1601, and they are a very remarkable document. His wide reading 1s freely acknowl-
edged, but he was very conscious of his own originality, and many of his chapters,
after reviewing the opinions of others, advance his own contributions to the debate.
In some cases these contributions appear to be based on Scarmiglion1’s visual expe-
rience, for example of the mixing-practices of painters and dyers, of the spectrum
cast on the floor by light passing through the edge of a window-pane, or of the
colour of German beer.?? In this he was perhaps most clearly in the tradition of
Leonardo, but, unlike Leonardo, he was never really concerned with the problems
of geometrical optics, and although he was familiar with a number of scholastic
writers, including Albertus Magnus, he never cited the medieval perspectivists
who were.
One area in which Scarmiglioni went beyond the medieval optical tradition
was in his treatment of ‘real’ and ‘apparent’ colours.The rainbow had been for the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance a prime example of ‘apparent’ colours: those
colours whose existence was dependent on the position of the spectator viewing
them, and opposed to the ‘real’ colours inherent in objects themselves. These ‘real’
colours subsisted in matter by virtue of its being a mixture of the four elements,
earth, air, fire and water, and the four related temperaments, hot and cold, wet
and dry. This Aristotelian doctrine of the temperaments was still very active in

127
THE FOOL’S PARADISE

sixteenth-century thought, particularly, through its variant the four humours, in

the theoretical medicine of which Scarmiglioni was a professor.*? All his major
modern sources engaged with this question, although several of them were con-
cerned about a conflict between the theory and their own experience. How, for
example, asked Filippo Mocenigo, could fire, which was light and thus close to
white, be embodied in coal, which was black? And how, asked the physician
Girolamo Capodivacca, could cold snow be white? The Neapolitan polymath della
ww"i)
Porta, who also wrote on botany, used many examples from plant-life, including
one called the chameleon by the Greeks, to argue that colour and substance were
only tenuously relatedThe . visual characteristics of the four elements were indeed
much in evidence in Scarmiglioni’s Prague, where the Milanese painter Giuseppe
Arcimboldo had made a speciality of fantastic agglomerations of their respective
attributes.*
In De Coloribus, Scarmiglioni, who had also lectured specifically on the tempera-
ments,2° reviewed the ancient and modern doctrines of the colours of the elements
and could find little agreement among them. He claimed that the four tempera-
ments cannot produce colours, since they are not themselves visible qualities;
conversely, the essential causes of colours, opacity and transparency, are not among
the traditional qualities attributed to the elements.’? Scarmiglioni also argued that
light, for example, may manifest itself in many colours: the sun may be yellow or
red, the moon silver or blood-red, a flame blue (coerulea) or white.** Yet, unlike his
contemporaries, he was not content to let matters rest there; he boldly advanced a
theory that ‘real’ and ‘apparent’ colours were, in vision, essentially the same:
Apparent colour does not differ in respect of representation from real colour,
for green is equally seen in the emerald and in the neck of a dove, blue in the
sky...and in the peacock, in the triangular crystal and in the painted rainbow.
They are called apparent colours because they only appear from one angle
[situ] so that if the sun paints a rainbow in any falling drop of water, or thread
of a spider’s web seen from such an angle, it will be looked at from another
[angle] in vain.*?
And he explained that they are alike since they are all nothing but visible species,
those emanations from objects which entered the eye, and whose propagation and
characteristics had been the subject of much discussion in the Middle Ages.*°
Scarmiglioni adopted the traditional Aristotelian position that species rise from ‘light
and shadow’,*" but his subjective view that they were the cause ofall colours seems
to be original, and came to be reinforced by Decartes and Newton in the seven-
teenth century.
Scarmiglioni also argued that the Aristotelian notion of colour as activated by
light on the surfaces of bodies was manifestly untrue, since gold, for example,
looked yellow by moonlight but silver in the sun; thus the colour must be in
the light, not in the surfaces.** Similarly he came to the unusual conclusion that,
since colours are simply visible species, all colours must have equal validity.
Instead of adopting the then-traditional division of colours into ‘simple’ and
‘mixed’, he said that ‘all colours are equally simple’.*’ The important distinctions
 THE FOOL’S PARADISE

were between the ‘light’ (Jucidi) colours, as in the spectrum, and the ‘obscure’, as in
matter.** All this looks remarkably familiar from a seventeenth-century point of
view, but Scarmiglioni had reached his conclusions, not by the mechanical inter-
pretation of refraction, but largely, as he said, through quotidiana experientia, everyday
experience.
Scarmiglioni was, nevertheless, far from indifferent to the problems of colour and
refraction. We saw his reference to the ‘triangular crystal’ in the passage on apparent
colours quoted above, and there are other chapters in his book where he dealt with
the creation ofspectral colours, for example the weak spectrum cast by the edge of
the window-pane, and that produced by the triangular prism itself. Like so many
of his contemporaries, Scarmiglioni seems to have used the prism as a lense to
examine the prismatic fringes between the light and dark areas of surfaces. He was
clearly impressed by the bright cyan blue at the junction of light and dark, which he
called hyacinthinus, and by the appearance of red next to the dark, as light was
replaced by dark, so that, like his immediate source, Filippo Mocenigo, who was
also an experimenter with the triangular prism, he took the unconventional view
that, in a tonal scale of hues, red is closer to black than is blue.*°
Like Mocenigo too, Scarmiglioni thought that the appearance of colours
depended on the thickness of the prism; and Mocenigo speaks of reversing the
instrument, so that the red and the blue change places, while green remains con-
stant between them.*’ This was an interpretation close to that of Albertus Magnus,
and depended on the still very active notion that colours were the product of
obscuring or modifying light, in this case, by the glass of the prism. The manipula-
tion of the triangular instrument became a key procedure in seventeenth-century
optics, notably in Descartes, Boyle and Newton, whose observations, oncourse, $3
were far more precise and whose conclusions far more radical than any in the
sixteenth century.

The philosopher René Descartes’ prism-diagram of

1637. He shows a right-angled prism instead of the
more usual equilateral form — whether of crystal or
glass is not known. (53)

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THE FOOL’S PARADISE

Glass versus crystal

Giovanni Battista della Porta, like Scarmiglioni, referred both to glass and crystal
triangular prisms, although Cardano at the middle of the century had only men-
tioned crystal. It might well have been thought that the rapidly developing Italian
glass-industry of the Renaissance supplied one of the necessary conditions for the
development of the prism as an optical instrument. But crystal prisms, cut from
the larger hexagonal stones, seem to have been in use at least until the end of
the sixteenth century: the English mathematician Thomas Harriot, who did very
significant but unpublished work on refraction, mentions a badly-ground crystal
prism lent by an acquaintance in a note of around 1610.** Perhaps the problems of
the precision-cutting, grinding and polishing of crystal were too great, although
ever since the late thirteenth century Venetian rock-crystal workers had been
making spectacle lenses, which their guild allowed glassmakers to produce from
1301.*? Venetian crystal-glass was internatjonally famous for its purity and trans-
parency by the early sixteenth century, and it is perhaps no coincidence that it is in
an account of using the prism by the Venetian Mocenigo, Archbishop of Nicosia,
published in 1581 and one of Scarmiglioni’s major sources, that, so far as I have been
able to discover, the term ‘vitrum triangulare’ first occurs.*°
As Albertus Magnus andJodocus Trutfetter had noticed, glass rods had been used
by the Romans to generate rainbow-colours, and the sixteenth-century Sienese
technologist Vannoccio Biringuccio already marvelled at the glass of Murano as,
‘most clear and transparent like the proper natural crystal...so that it seems to me
that all other metals must yield to it in beauty’.*' That Scarmiglioni refers to glass
prisms may also reflect the great development of Bohemuan glass in his day under
the specific sponsorship of Rudolph II, so that it too reached new levels ofpurity.°?
However, no glass of this period was of optical quality in the modern sense, and as
late as the end of the following century Newton and his contemporaries were
complaining that the available prisms were optically very imperfect.°} Nevertheless,
the use of glass in the long run solved the problem of size and expense, and made
these triangular glass prisms a very common commodity in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.

The spectral colours

Albertus Magnus, as we saw above, had observed that the rainbow-colours were
generated by the iris at the junctions oflight and dark; and perhaps the most impor-
tant early use for the triangular prism was in the detailed study of the coloured
fringes observed through it at the edges of a displaced image. Thomas Harriot in
1604 was able to calculate the degrees of refrangibility of the green, orange and red
rays by measuring the width of these fringes, and in the early 1640s the Catholic
virtuoso Sir Kenelm Digby was shown a whole series of experiments of this type at
the English Jesuit College in Liége by Francis Line (otherwise known as Hall), who
was later to enter into controversy with Newton.‘ The best-known experiments

130
 THE FOOL’S PARADISE

Saou. cteacouseger eee ee

375 evo Gg.

LOGS. geo}o:

oO

S pene bot fe

B
t+ 1 ife: fe . Wee

Thomas Harriot’s prism-diagram of around 1610. His note that ‘Mr Cope’s Cristall’ was concave underlines
the difficulty of cutting and grinding large quartz prisms at the time. Harriot may have a claim to being the
first scientist to measure the width of the spectral colour-bands. (54)

O31
THE FOOL’S PARADISE

of this sort are those made and publicized by Goethe about 1790, observations
which led him to refute Newton’s theory that colours are a function ofthe variable
refrangibility of rays of light.** But just as these indoor experiments prevailed, in
Goethe’s case, over his observation of the rainbow outdoors, so experiments with
the prism before Newton brought little clarity to the question of the number and
nature of the spectral colours.
The thirteenth-century German encyclopaedist Arnoldus Saxo identified four
colours, rubeo, flava, viridi ac citrino, in the spectrum projected by the iris;°° Albertus
Magnus, although he was familiar with Arnoldus’s work, opted for the Aristotelian
triad of red, green, and that confusing colour caeruleus, which sometimes meant blue
and sometimes yellow, although here it clearly means the latter.*7 Theodoric argued
for four colours in the rainbow and the hexagonal prism, specifically including the
yellow which Aristotle had regarded as a mixture of red and green, but which
Theodoric and della Porta after him insisted was a principal colour. Yet in his pris-
matic experiments he mentions only red and blue.** Cardano in the sixteenth
century saw four or five colours; Mocenigo identified three, although he also
admitted that there might be others in between; and Scarmiglioni himself also
seems to have been reluctant to identify the precise character and number of the
colours, although he claimed that they were plain enough to see.*? Harriot calcu-
lated the angles of refraction of five colours,” but della Porta’s prismatic experi-
ments revealed only three colours to him: red, yellow and blue (rubeus, flavus,
caeruleus /halurgus).°' Even Newton was to divide his visible spectrum into as many
as eleven colours and as few as five, before finally settling on the seven, which, as we
shall see in the next chapter, he was to adopt for the largely metaphorical reason
60 that he was pursuing the analogy with the notes of the diatonic scale.” It is difficult
49 to resist the conclusion that, as in the case of the rainbow at large, the perception of
the prismatic spectrum was very much in the shadow ofpreconceptions.
Whatever the perceptual difficulties in identifying the colours in a prismatic
spectrum, the origins of the triangular prism would still be of compelling interest
even if it had been no more than the toy (the popular creator of the multicoloured
‘fool’s Paradise’) which provided Descartes and Newton with their proofs of the
quantitative nature of colour. The elegant simplicity of their arguments was made
possible partly by the elegance ofthis simplest of tools.At some time during the two
centuries between Theodoric of Freiberg and Gerolamo Cardano, some perspec-
tivist must have decided to reduce the hexagon ofthe quartz crystal to a triangular
form. It may well have been that a large hexagonal crystal was first sawn in half and
polished; but this would still leave a good way to go before the adoption of the
equilateral triangle which we see in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
illustrations.”
The balance of evidence suggests that this reduction took place during the
early sixteenth century; but it is unlikely to have been achieved by Cardano him-
self, since, although he was proud of a number of his efforts to provide simpler
explanations of the structures of nature, he included no allusions to optics in his
autobiography, De Vita Propria Liber, where he listed his various and notable
achievements.”
 THE FOOL’S PARADISE

gernanaanenteamtiaingece's
peener

Nore

The diagram ofSir IsaacNewton’s crucial experiment, 1666-72. A ray oflight is divided into its
constituent colours by the first prism, and the resulting bundle of coloured rays is reconstituted into
white light by a second. (55)

Newton's experimentum crucis, developed between 1666 and 1672, in which two
prisms were arranged so that the colours of the spectrum formed by the first were $5
shown to be unmodified by the second, and were thus each the product ofa single
refraction,® depended upon the complete symmetry and reversibility of the trian-
gular prism, noticed but not interpreted by Mocenigo about 1580. Seldom can so
simple a device have been so freighted with important consequences, but seldom,
too, can it have developed so slowly as did the prism, from its theoretical grounding
in the thirteenth century to its practical realization in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, and its effective use in the seventeenth.

133
 9 - Newton and Painting

That God is Colouring Newton does shew,

And that the devil is a Black outline, all of us know.
(William Blake, To Venetian Artists’)

LAKE’S WORDS REFER TO a Newtonian inflection of the traditional notion of

God as light, for after Sir Isaac Newton, light was understood first of all as
colour.Their context, an attack on Sir Joshua Reynolds and the colouristic Venetian
style (see Chapter 11), also suggests that at the close of the eighteenth century
Newton’s Opticks had become as much a preoccupation of the painters as it had
already been so abundantly of the poets.* Long before the Romantic period it
had been regarded as essential reading for landscape artists, who were themselves
seen as something of experimenters in natural philosophy;’ but I am concerned in
this chapter not with the general background to the acceptance of Newton’s work
among painters, but briefly with two of the more precisely documented instances
of its effect. One effect is rather practical, and involves methods of colour-mixture;
the other is almost purely theoretical, representing a Newtonian phase in the search
for principles of colour-harmony. Both involve the concept of primary colours.
Newton’s theory of colours, which was first published in the 1670s in the Philo-
sophical Transactions of the Royal Society, appeared at a time when painters, especially
in Rome and Paris, were seeking some firmer theoretical basis for the study ofthis
aspect of their art. Nicholas Poussin in an early self-portrait, painted the year after the
foundation of the French Academy ofPainting and Sculpture in 1648, shows himself
57 holding a book later inscribed with the title De Lumine et Colore; this is certainly not
the most up-to-date treatment — which was that by Descartes in 1637 — but perhaps
the eclectic and conservative compilation by Matteo Zaccolini;* it nevertheless
proclaims an interest which was to play a prominent role in the discussions of the
Academy after it became primarily a teaching institution in 1664.) It was an interest
which united the Poussinistes and their rivals the Rubenistes within that institu-
tion, and it was the chief spokesman of the Rubenistes, Roger de Piles, who in his
Dialogue sur le Coloris of 1672 best outlined the problem facing the painter:
During the all but three hundred years since the revival of painting we can
hardly reckon half-a-dozen painters who have used colour well: and yet one
could list at least thirty who have been outstanding draughtsmen. The reason
for this is that drawing has rules based on proportion, on anatomy, and on a
continual experience of the same data [de la mesme chose: i.e. the human

134
 NEWTON AND PAINTING

SENZA DENOL OGNI PATICA EVANA

Left: the precedence of drawing over the less-

easily-schematized painting in a seventeenth-
century Academy (note the neglected palette
and brushes). Engraving after Carlo Maratta.(56)

Above: Nicholas Poussin’s self-portrait as

reproduced in a seventeenth-century engraving,
depicting the French Academician holding a
TANTO CHE BASTI treatise on light and colour. (57)

figure]: whereas colouring has yet hardly any well-known rules, and since the
studies made have differed according to the different subjects they treated, no
very precise body ofrules has yet been established.°
A French didactic print of 1677/83, after a design by the influential Roman teacher 56
Carlo Maratta, sums up this situation: students busy themselves with the study of
drawing, perspective, anatomy, and above all, ancient sculpture, while a palette and
brushes stand idly by.’ Since the French Academy was the mother of all the many
art academies founded during the eighteenth century, and the large body of theo-
retical writing it engendered was the model for most subsequent theory, these
colouristic concerns carry a good deal of weight.

Doctrines of mixture

It may at first sight seem surprising that Newton’s theory had any part to play in
these developments, for it was chiefly concerned with the causes of colours, and
only marginally with those subjective effects which were the central concern of
painters. This is especially so in the case of the notion of primary colours, which

135
NEWTON AND PAINTING

had been clarified over the previous half-century or so through the experience of
mixing paints. Robert Boyle, in a treatise of 1664 which stimulated Newton to
make some ofhis earliest colour-experiments, claimed that

much of the Mechanical use of Colours among Painters and Dyers, doth
depend upon the Knowledge of what Colours may be produc’d by the Mixtures
of Pigments so and so Colour’d. And.. .’tis of advantage to the contemplative
Naturalist, to know how many and which Colours are Primitive. ..and Simple,
because it both eases his labour by confining his most solicitous Enquiry to a
small Number of Colours upon which the rest depend, and assists him to
judge ofthe nature of particular compounded Colours, by showing him from
the Mixture what more Simple ones, and of what Proportions of them to one
another, the particular Colour to be consider’d does result.®

Boyle had already stated that these few ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ colours ofthe painter
were black, white, red, yellow and blue.
But Newton had thrown this neat symmetrical scheme of simple colours into
confusion in his first paper of 1672 by showing that there were as many ‘simple’ (or
‘primary’, ‘primitive’ ,“‘uncompounded ’,‘original’, or ‘homogeneal’) colours as there
were refrangible rays of light,’ and that these same colours (for example green, and
even yellow) might occur in both a simple and a compounded form. Newton's
leading opponent on this occasion, Robert Hooke, who had himself developed a
radically reductive theory of only two primary colours, understandably sought to
apply Ockham’s Razor;'° and during the eighteenth century Newton’s number of
primaries (which was generally and erroneously thought to be seven) continued to
present something of an obstacle to students with painterly connections. And yet
the circular diagram of colour-mixtures which Newton introduced in the Opticks
of 1704 gave promise that a white might indeed be compounded from two or three
of the colours lying opposite each other, which could thus be regarded as primary
by themselves.'' Newton claimed in the text to this figure that he was never able to
mix more than a ‘faint anonymous Colour’ by means of the proportions indicated;
but in his experiments with the mixture of coloured powders (I, ii, prop. v, theor. iv,
exper.15), he had succeeded in making a‘mouse-colour’ (his surrogate for white in

Sir Isaac Newton’s colour-circle, from the Opticks

of 1704. It was devised for mathematical calculation of
the constituents of mixtures, and its asymmetry reflected
the proportions which Newton ascribed to the spectral
colours. (58)
 NEWTON AND PAINTING

SS =
caesar COTTA ~
a

————S
——=——
—<——<——

Mi
He
.
fi ‘
kHi

‘i\\ \\Y

\\S
Cc

Colour-circle from Moses Harris, The Natural System of Colours, c. 1776. Harris’s is probably the first
completely symmetrical circle of primary and secondary colours, and it also suggests the progressive
darkening of each hue to black at the centre. (59)

pigment-mixtures) with only two: one part red lead and five parts copper-green,
which he concluded, to save his theory, must themselves be compounds of other
colours.
This circular diagram became the model for many colour-systems in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth century, from the supplement to the Tiaité de la Peinture en
Mignature, attributed to Claude Boutet, in The Hague edition of 1708, where the
seven-colour division (with two reds) seems clearly to reflect the Newtonian
arrangement of four years earlier, to the first completely symmetrical and comple-
mentary colour-system of Moses Harris, The Natural System of Colours, published
about 1776. Newton’s scheme provided, too, the starting-point for the first attempt
to apply the Newtonian system to the practical problems of colour-mixture, pub-
lished by the Cambridge mathematician Brook Taylor in the second edition of

se
NEWTON AND PAINTING

his treatise New Principles of Linear Perspective in 1719. Taylor amplified Newton's
conception of mixture to emphasize the co-ordinate functions of hue, value and
saturation in each colour; and he observed that white ‘breaks’ (1.e. desaturates)
colours far more than black, hence the prime importance of the lightest pigments,
for ‘it is easier to make clean dark tints with light Colours and Black, than to make
the bright light ones with dark Colours and White’. Taylor also noted that because of
the impure nature of pigments, mixtures could not always be accurately predicted:
and although he seems to have been an amateur painter himself, he concluded,
‘these Properties ofparticular Materials I leave to be consider’d by the Practitioners
in this Art’.'*

In search of harmony — printing the primaries

The establishment of an irreducible number of primary colours and their embodi-
ment in available colorants became of practical significance in a new development
in colour-engraving, introduced about 1715 by the German artist J.C. Le Blon.The
earliest reference to Le Blon’s process, which employed the technique ofmezzotint,
suggests that he was chiefly interested in manipulating hues and values according to
Newtonian principles in order to achieve harmony." This account refers to his
period in Holland about 1715, but the emphasis is renewed in his treatise, Coloritto:
or the harmony of Colouring in Painting, published in London in 1725" after the failure
of his large-scale English engraving enterprise, The Picture Office. Coloritto also
makes it clear that Le Blon’s printing-methods were themselves a matter of New-
tonian principle:
Painting can represent all visible Objects with three Colours, Yellow, Red
and Blue: for all other Colours can be compos’d of these Three, which I call
Primitive... And a Mixture of those Three Original Colours makes a Black,
and all other colours whatsoever; as I have demonstrated by my Invention of
Printing pictures and figures with their natural Colours.
I am only speaking of Material colours, or those used by Painters: for a
Mixture of all the primitive Impalpable Colours, that cannot be felt, will not
produce Black, but the very contrary, White, as the great Sir ISAAC NEWTON
has demonstrated in his Opticks.'®
Le Blon thus removed black and white from the category of primary colours as,
indeed, had Boutet, and even Alberti before him,'® and invoked the authority of
Newton, for whom black and white had also been a compound ofthe same genus
of colour, just as red, for example, might be either light or dark. By about 1718
Le Blon had begun to supply the ‘Curious’ with colour-separations of his prints:
the three constituent colours, plus an example of a mixture of two of them, to
demonstrate the process'” — one such set, after a self-portrait by Van Dyck, is now
at Yale. This particular example seems, however, to show the use of a fourth, black
plate, and there is ample evidence, including a number of references in Coloritto
itself, that at least as early as his period in England Le Blon was prepared to adopt

138
 NEWTON AND PAINTING

this expedient in order to make the process faster, and hence cheaper.
The question
of three or four plates became a matter of controversy after his death in 1741,
when a former pupil, Jacques Gautier d’Agoty, was anxious to protect his own
patent for this four-colour process, and disputed the claims of Le Blon’s workshop
that the master had ever used more than three. The debate was long and tedious, but
It is of some interest to us because Gautier d’Agoty sought to bolster his method
with a vigorously argued anti-Newtonian theory of colour, which was essentially a
revival of the traditional Aristotelian view that all hues are generated by the interac-
tion of black and white, or light and darkness.'8
The apologists for Le Blon in this exchange argued that their master never spoke
of his fourth plate precisely because he used it in spite of himself, and felt that it
would dishonour the system.'? If we cannot establish the formative effect of theory
on the practice of these print-makers, it was certainly in the forefront of their public
relations. Le Blon’s appeal to Newton was not itself essential to his three-colour
system, for that system had already been proposed by Boutet in his treatise of 1708,
where Le Blon, as a miniature-painter himself, may well have found it. Perhaps
what had really attracted him to Newton’s theory of colours was the promise it pre-
-sented of a quantifiable theory of colour-harmony. The Venetian writer Antonio
Conti, to whom we owe the first record of Le Blon’s ideas, reported that he was
indeed preoccupied with harnionic proportions:
...the Newtonian theory of colours has given many [painters] the opportu-
nity of determining their compositions by the mechanical rule of the centres
of gravity [a concept deriving from Newton’s circular mixture-diagram].That 58
German painter who prints pictures [Le Blon] derived his secret from this
source...I met [him] at The Hague, and he assured me that following Newton’s
principles of the immutability and unequal refrangibility and reflexibility of
the rays of light, he had established the degrees of strength and weakness
which colours required to be harmonized...*°

The principles ofharmony: colour and music

Newton’s great achievement in optics was of course to have quantified the compo-
nents of white light, and his mixture-diagram was based on this quantification. It
was also arranged according to the proportion of the colours in the spectrum of
white light, which for Newton was a musical proportion; and it was this analogy 60
which gave a new impetus to the ancient attempt to assimilate the aesthetics of
sight to those of hearing, and to give the new science of colour the benefit of
the many centuries of investigation into the principles of musical harmony. In
the Opticks the analogy between aural and visual harmonies, based on that between
the vibratory characteristics of light and sound, 1s relegated in a very summary form
to Query 14; but Newton had given a fuller exposition in a letter to the Royal
Society of 1675 which remained unpublished until the middle of the following
century:

039
NEWTON AND PAINTING

645.) ROYAL °$ O CTEMYr 0 FL ONDO Ne | 283

7 ic

Y thecentres of thofe femicircles, X Z the length of a mufical ftring double to

X Y, and divided between X and Y, fo as to found the tones expreffed at the

part,
fide (that is X H the half, X G and GI the third part, Y K the fifth
Y M the eighth part, and G E the ninth part of X Y) and the intervals between
thefe divifions exprefs the fpaces which the colours written there took up, every
colour being mott brifkly {pecific in the middle of thole f{paces,
Sir Isaac Newton’s correlation of the intervals of the spectrum with the musical scale, first devised in
the 1670s though not published until the following century. (60)

...as the harmony and discord of sounds proceeded from the proportions of
the aereal vibrations, so may the harmony of some colours, as of golden and
blue, and the discord of others, as of red and blue, proceed from the propor-
tions of the aethereal. And possibly colour may be distinguished into its
principal degrees, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and deep violet, on
the same ground that sound within an eighth is graduated into tones.
For,some years past, the prismatic colours being in a well darkened room cast
perpendicularly upon a paper two and twenty foot distant from the prism, I
desired a friend to draw with a pencil lines across the image, or pillar ofcolours,
where every one of the seven aforenamed colours was most full and brisk, and
also where he judged the truest confines of them to be, whilst I held the paper
so, that the said image might fall within a certain compass marked on it. And
this I did, partly because my own eyes are not very critical in distinguishing
colours, partly because another, to whom I had not communicated my thoughts
about this matter, could have nothing but his eyes to determine his fancy in
making those marks. This observation we repeated divers times, both in the
same and divers ways, to see how the marks on several papers would agree; and
comparing the observations, though the just confines of the colours are hard to
be assigned, because they pass into one another by insensible gradation; yet the
differences of the observations were but little, especially towards the red end..."
It seems clear that, in spite of Newton’s efforts to make the experiment ‘objective’,
the isolation of seven prismatic colours was itself the result of the musical analogy, in
which he had been interested for some years.** The conception of the especially
harmonious character of acombination of gold and blue which (shifted to indigo
in the Opticks, as purple was renamed violet), and the discord of red and blue, have
no justification other than their relative places in Newton’s scale.

140
 NEWTON AND PAINTING

The general conception of numerical harmonies in colours had an Aristotelian

origin, but Aristotle (De Sensu, 439b) had confined it to the light and dark compo-
nents of single hues rather than an assortment of hues; and the closest precedent for
Newton’s view is in a remarkable study of the rainbow published by Marin Cureau
de la Chambre in 1650. Cureau de la Chambre, however, did not use a prismatic
spectrum, but an Aristotelian scale between black and white, yet he agreed with
Newton that blue was dissonant with red and consonant with yellow.”
It was Newton’s suggestion in Query 14 of the Opticks, however tentatively
expressed, which provided the chief stimulus to the study of colour in the first half
of the eighteenth century, both for Le Blon and for another unsuccessful projector
who sought to materialize the theory of correspondences, the French Jesuit Louis
Bertrand Castel, the inventor of the ocular harpsichord, which became a cause célébre
throughout Europe in the latter part of the century.
In the first brief outline of his idea in 1725, Castel traced its inception to some
hints by the mid-seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher, but more
immediately to Newton’s Opticks, ‘that excellent book’, which had ‘verified’ the
link between sound and light. He secured professional help to design an instrument
_embodying the analogy by means of a keyboard controlling coloured-glass filters
and mirrors; but the prototype, which was ready by 1730, appears to have been
rather simpler. Castel began the building of a full-scale version in 1734, but the
account which he published the following year shows that he had by now moved
away from any Newtonian scheme. He had come under the influence of the com-
poser and theorist of harmony, Jean-Philippe Rameau, who had encouraged his
project from the first, and he had adopted a scale based on the three primary
colours, red; yellow and blue, of which blue was analogous to a musical ground-bass
(basse fondamentale). Castel thought blue to be equally close to white and black, the
traditional origins of all colours, and it is indeed a colour which retains its true
identity over a remarkable range of tonal values. Blue he gave the note-value of
C, yellow of E, and red, ‘the dominant colour ofnature’, of G.
Rameau had published his first treatise on harmony in 1722, and also regarded
the base as fundamental; he, too, had developed a triadic theory of harmony in
which the consonances of the fifth and the two thirds were primary, and gave rise to
the three secondary consonances, the fourth and the two sixths.*4
It may well be that Castel adopted his scale of three colours from Le Blon, whose
printing-process he had witnessed in 1732, for, as he noted in a review of Coloritto a
few years later, that process also treated blue as the fundamental colour, with which
the sequence of impressions began.** But notwithstanding Le Blon’s Newtonian
pretensions, by the time of his most important publication, L’Optique des Couleurs
of 1740, Castel had become the most extravagant of anti-Newtonians, and had
rejected all prismatic studies in favour of the exclusive investigation of colouring-
materials. The ocular harpsichord, which was now based on a twelve-colour circle
and a chromatic scale of twelve notes over twelve octaves, was apparently com-
pleted in the 1750s, and may have been demonstrated in London and Paris.” In any
case it was the ancestor of the many instruments which have sought to present
colour in motion, with or without a musical analogy, until our own times.”

I41
NEWTON AND PAINTING

Harmony and complementarity

A rather more durable theory of the harmony of colours, current among painters,
was based on the idea of complementary colours, and this too derives from
Newton. In his experiments on the colours ofthin plates Newton had long recog-
nized that certain colours were ‘opposite’ or ‘contrary’,** and the diagram in his
61 classic exposition of what came to be known as ‘Newton’s Rings’ in the Opticks
became the starting-point for the study of complementarity in the latter half of the
century.”? The experiment with the mixing of red and green powders (pp. 136-7)
could also be interpreted in terms of the complementarity of these colours. By
about 1800, both scientists and painters?° had come to believe that the simplest form
of colour-harmony was in the juxtaposition of complementaries. This view
became canonized for the nineteenth century in Chevreul’s On the Law of Simulta-
neous Contrast of Colours (1839),and through him, became a decisive stimulus to the
developing painterly methods of Seurat, for whom, too, harmony was implicit in
contrast (see Chapter 16).3' It is appropriate that what is perhaps the only series of
paintings to be based directly on Newtonian ideas about colour, Frantisek Kupka’s
47 Discs ofNewton of 1912, should look back to these influential experiments.**
I have tried to show that during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
the scientific and painterly students of colour, under the dominant influence of
Newton, shared several common interests, and were each prepared to draw on the
experience of the other. These interests were not yet considered to be antithetical,

Sir Isaac Newton, Colours of Thin Plates (Newton’s Rings), from the Opticks, 1704. “Newton’s Rings’ are
the concentric circles of colour spreading out from the point of maximum pressure when two thin
transparent plates (or here, a convex lense and a plane glass surface) are pressed together. They gave
the first clear demonstration of complementarity in colours — although this was not something that
interested Newton himself. Black appears at the centre by reflected light, white by transmitted light,
red opposite blue or green, violet opposite yellow, and so on. (61)

142
 NEWTON AND PAINTING

Frantisek Kupka’s Newton’s Wheel, c. 1910. Kupka

evidently depends more on Newton’s colour-circle
(58) than on “Newton’s Rings’ (below): the white
centre is surrounded by progressively saturated
circles of ten named hues, including ‘indigo’, a clear
indication of Kupka’s interest in Newton’s theory
of colours. (62)

although by the middle of the eighteenth century some writers, like Castel, and
Gautier d’Agoty who owed a good deal to him, sought to drive a wedge between
the quantitative study ofthe colours of light and the qualitative study of colorants.
Both controversialists were much used by Goethe.*? It was not until the close of the
century that Wiinsch in Germany and Young in England began to bring clarity to
the notions of additive and subtractive mixtures, and not for another half-century
again that these ideas became widely accepted.As late as Mondrian in the 1920s the
whole universe of colour could be symbolized in terms ofthe subtractive primaries,
red, yellow and blue.
The fascinating question of the harmony ofcolours also led Newton to propose
some far-reaching, but ultimately unsuccessful hypotheses about the relationship of
colours to musical sounds; but it was a notion of complementarity, latent 1f undeve-
loped in his work, that came to have the greatest resonance in the history of painting.

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143
 10 - Blake’s Newton

Adapting Michelangelo
MONG THE EARLIEST DOCUMENTS OF William Blake’s activity as a graphic artist
is a series of copies in pen and wash from Adamo Ghisi’s engravings after
Michelangelo, now in the British Museum.' These copies already show a character-
istic freedom in handling their source: just as the engraving Joseph of Aramathea
(1773) was adapted by Blake from the Centurion in Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of
St Peter in the Cappella Paolina, so Blake’s group of Matthan from the Sistine
lunettes (LB6r) transposes the titular great-grandfather of Jesus into a young
mother, and Aminadab (LB7v ) has become, in a pencil caption possibly contempo-
rary with the copy, The Reposing Tiaveller.* But twenty years later Blake seems to have
become far more concerned with Michelangelo’s own iconography of the Sistine
63 ceiling, and in adapting the figure of Abias (LB6v), long recognized as the prototype
64 for the posture of Newton in the colour-print of 1795,' he extended visually the
connotations of this symbol of oppressive rationalism by his borrowing.
Blake had been in touch with the painter Henry Fuseli since the late 1780s, and it
was from Fuseli that he may have understood the programme of Michelangelo’s
great cycle.“The subject’, as Fuseli put it in a later lecture,‘is theocracy, or the empire
of religion...the progress, and the final dispensation of Providence...the relation
of the race to its Founder.* From Fuseli, too, Blake may have learned the role of
Abias (= Abijah) in the genealogy of Christ, a role of absolute submission to the
Divine Authority. In Il Chronicles 13 Abias upholds Judaic orthodoxy against the
rebellion of Jeroboam, which he put down with great slaughter.» He would thus
serve in Blake’s eyes as a fitting model for Newton, who was also associated in his
imagination with the tyrannical figure of the Ancient ofDays.
Fuseli was certainly familiar with the details of the Sistine lunettes in the
66 sixteenth-century engravings of Giorgio Ghisi, which had served as models for his
65 Shakespearean fantasies;° and Ghisi’s arrangement may also have affected Blake, for
it brought the Ancestors into direct visual relationship with the Prophets and Sibyls
between them. Abias appears here as one of the supporters of the Persian Sibyl,
whose shadowed and obviously short-sighted features are buried in a book.? The
mystical darkness she engenders has cast both her flanking Ancestors into postures
of sleep, one of which postures Blake has adapted to his Newton, who sits similarly
shrouded in darkness. While it seems improbable that he is seated on the sea-
bed (i.e. beneath the waters of materialism) as has been suggested,’ the encircling
darkness may be related to the gloomy bottom of the Cave of the Neo-Platonic

144
 BLAKE’S NEWTON

William Blake after

Michelangelo: Abias, the
Old Testament ancestor
of Christ, in the lunettes
of the Sistine Chapel,
17708. (63)

William Blake, Newton,

c. 1795, the figure based
on Michelangelo’s Abias.
Blake’s materialist is
shown using a pair of
compasses (dividers). (64)
BLAKE S NEWTON

Henry Fuseli, Twelfth Night, 1777, a design for a proposed Giorgio Ghisi, The Persian Sibyl, after Michelangelo.
chapel to Shakespeare based on Michelangelo’s Sistine Ghisi’s illustration-format separated the left and right
Chapel lunettes, known to Fuseli via Giorgio Ghisi’s figures of each lunette, so allowing Blake to associate the
engravings (66). It was probably Fuseli who instructed sleeping Abias-figure, left, with the defective vision of
Blake on Michelangelo’s programme. (65) the Sibyl, centre. (66)

material world, which had recently been expounded by the leading English Platonist
of the period, Thomas Taylor, in his translation of The Hymns of Orpheus;? and perhaps
Blake, in his conception of Newton’s lichen-covered seat, was thinking, too, of the
‘oozy rock, inwrapped with the weeds of death’, which in his own prophetic book
Vala (1795-1804) supported the Eternal Man, who ‘sleeps in the earth’."°
Newton in Blake’s print is wide-eyed and active, but his posture and his setting
are, on our showing, those of somnolence: he seems the visual embodiment of
Blake’s prayer in the verse-letter to his patron Thomas Butts of 1802 (p.826):
... May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’ sleep.

Blake’s interest in optics

In a later passage in Vala (Keynes ed., p.350), the Eternal Man invoked Urizen as
Prince ofLight:

146
 BLAKE S NEWTON

where art thou? I behold thee not as once

In those Eternal fields, in clouds of morning stepping forth
With harps & songs when bright Ahania sang before thy face
And all thy sons & daughters gather’d round my ample table.
See you not all this wracking furious confusion?
Come forth from slumbers of thy cold abstraction. . .
The tone and the imagery are very close to Goethe’s polemic in his poems against
the abstraction of Newton’s optics; and near this passage, on p. 120 of his own man-
uscript of Vala, Blake drew what seems to be sketch of the Eternal Man, seated
beneath a pair of compasses.'' If Blake’s Newton is presented in darkness — in the
‘dark chamber’ which formed the setting for his optical experiments — it is perhaps
in Newtonian optics that we shall find amplification of Blake’s motif.
Although an association has been recognized between the compasses of Newton 64
and the Ancient of Days, and Motte’s frontispiece to his English translation of
Newton's Principia,’* there seems to be no relation between the diagram Newton is
measuring in Blake’s print and any published in that book." The relationship of the
chord of the circle to the triangle is closer to Fig. 2 of Newton’s Opticks (I, i), which 67
illustrates the passage of a ray of light through a prism.'* Blake seems to have taken
up the idea of a ray of light formed by the prism into a rainbow by showing the arc
of the bow within the prism itself, and thus making the diagram far more legible
than Newton’s construction would have been on this scale. This interpretation of
the diagram is reinforced by the introduction of the white cloth over the scientist’s 64
shoulder'’ which may symbolize the ray of white light from which Newton derived
his prismatic colours, for later, in another prophetic book, Jerusalem (111, 63-4), Blake
alluded to the weaving in a cavern of what appears to be a rainbow. If in this print
Blake made a formal association between Newton and God, as Ancient of Days, he
may have taken a cue from a recent commentary on Newton’s optics by Joseph
Priestley in his History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light and
Colours (1772). Priestley, in claiming that the Opticks were Newton's greatest
mathematical achievement, referred to the opinion of Plato that ‘to pry into the
mysteries of light, was to encroach upon the prerogatives of divinity’."°

dp Lug 2.
Cc

The probable source of

the figure which Newton
draws in Blake’s print (64):
Sir Isaac Newton’s
diagram of refraction
through a prism, Opticks,
1704, Fig. 2. (67)

147
BLAKE S NEWTON

In his 1802 letter to Butts (p.860) Blake had already referred to the spiritual idea
of double vision:

Double the vision my Eyes do see

And a double vision is always with me.

Here the idea is that the perception of the material world must be complemented
by the visionary’s perception ofa second world. On a purely material level, Priestley
was also occupied by the contrast between single and binocular vision, which a
number of eighteenth-century ophthamologists had brought on to the optical
agenda. He quoted the Cambridge philosopher Robert Smith’s view that “Objects
seen with both eyes appear more vivid, and stronger, than they do to a single eye’;
and he gave an anatomical explanation of why this should be so which showed that
Newton’s account ofthe matter had now been superseded:
It was the opinion of Sir Isaac Newton and others, that objects appear single
because the two optic nerves unite before they reach the brain. But Dr
[William] Porterfield shows, from the observations of several anatomists, that
the optic nerves do not mix, or confound their substance, being only united
by a close cohesion; and objects have appeared single where the optic nerves
were found to be disjoined... Originally, every object making two pictures,
one in each eye, is imagined to be double; but by degrees, we find that when
two corresponding parts of the retina are impressed, the object is but one; but
if those corresponding parts be changed, by the distortion of one of the eyes,
the object must again appear double as at the first... '7
The implication of the priority of double vision over single would have appealed
especially to Blake; and in a later account of the experiments of Dr Smith, Priestley
64 showed that, as in the case of Blake’s Newton, it was with the aid ofa pair of com-
passes that the transition from double to single vision might be demonstrated."
Priestley’s History and Present State offered Blake, in its account of‘fallacies in
vision’, many testimonies to the imperfection of the corporeal eye which he did
not hesitate to adopt. A draft for The Everlasting Gospel, a poem which linked
Priestley and Newton as doubters and experimenters, concluded with a passage
closely related to part ofPriestley’s explanation ofthe apparent size of the horizon-
tal moon:
This Life’s dim windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro’ the E ye
That was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the Soul slept in the beams of Light."
The well-known passage at the close of the Vision of the Last Judgement:‘ “What”,
it will be Questioned, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire
somewhat like a Guinea’ relates to the use of a wafer to simulate the moon in
an experiment in the same chapter of Priestley.*° It was not simply the spiritual

148
 BLAKE'S NEWTON

Newton and the Prism, an engraving after George Romney. Newton is shown demonstrating the
formation ofthe spectrum to his daughters, with blue and violet at the top of the column and the long-
wave-length red at the bottom. From 1803-4, when he will have seen the original painting, Blake
tended to show the spectral colours in this order even in the rainbow, where they are reversed. (68)

writings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also developments in

the scientific study of perception which encouraged Blake to doubt the evidence of
the senses.
Given the doubts published by Priestley on the Newtonian number and order of
colours in the rainbow,” and the traditional tri-colour bow passed on to Blake in
the writings of Boehme,” it is perhaps surprising that Blake’s solution to the
problem of representing the rainbows demanded by his subject-matter is usually in 48
Newtonian terms. As recently as 1793, Blake’s friend James Barry had publicly
attacked the Newtonian seven-colour conception in favour of three colours, which
he supported, significantly for Blake, with quotations from Milton:
our philosophers have pretended to discover in the rainbow, just seven primi-
tive colours in that phenomenon. But if they mean by primitive colours, colours
simple and uncompounded of any others, why seven, when there are but
three? If they mean only to enumerate the differences, without regarding the
actual fact of the procreation of the compounds from the primitives, why more

149
BLAKE'S NEWTON

than six? or, why not double that number, or even more, if all the intermedi-
aries are attended to? It may be worth remarking that Milton has,in a few words,
described this appearance with a much more accurate and happy propriety:
and in a cloud, a bow
Conspicuous, with three listed colours gay
and in another place:
His triple-coloured bow, whereon to look ...
But lest any one should think that our poet had from defect of sight over-
looked the four other colours, we may quote the testimony ofAristotle, who
has with his usual accuracy fallen upon the same tri-partite division.”

Certainly Dante may have presented Blake with the idea of a seven-colour bow,
but Dante specified neither the colours nor their order, which in Blake’s usage are
always Newtonian.** One curious circumstance, indeed, reinforces the impression
that in the construction of his rainbows, Blake was making a specifically and self-
consciously Newtonian reference. In the known coloured bows before 1804 the
order of the colours runs, from top to bottom, as in a perfect natural bow: red,
orange, yellow, green, blue [indigo], violet.** Rainbows painted after 1804, on the
other hand, show this order of colours in reverse, and run, top to bottom, from
violet to red.*° The crucial moment seems to be the winter of 1803-4, a time when
Blake was helping William Hayley collect material for his Life of Romney. Hayley’s
68 Life published an aquatint after Romney’s Newton and the Prism, a painting which
remained in the painter’s studio with his posthumous collection until 1807.7” Blake
saw this collection in October 1803, and remarked on a companion-picture to the
Newton there, Milton and his Daughters, in a letter to Hayley (p. 878).We may assume
that he also saw the Newton on this occasion, and in it, owing to the relative posi-
tions of the light-source and the prism (which seems to be held as in Opticks, I, ii,
prop. viii, prob. iii; fig. 12), the projected spectrum runs, from top to bottom,
through violet to red. Romney has even added a band of indigo below the red,
which seems to correspond to a thin band ofviolet in Blake’s Noah.

The material bow

If Blake’s rainbow was essentially Newtonian it would be surprising to find it

embodying the traditionally optimistic connotation of the Old Testament story of
Noah’s Flood, and its climax in the Covenant between God and man. Nor does it.
Noah himself Blake pictured as shrinking ‘beneath the waters’ in The Song of Los
(1795, p.247), and from his use of it in other contexts, Blake clearly saw the rainbow
rather as an emanation of water (i.e. materialism) than of light. In Jacob Bryant’s
New System; or, An Analysis ofAncient Mythology, Blake will have read that for the
Greeks the sea-god Thaumas was the father of Iris, and that for the Egyptians
Thamus was the bow itself.** In Blake’s own mythology Tharmas personified the

150
 BLAKE'S NEWTON

element of water; and in Vala (p. 256) he presented Enion (earth) and her spectre in
these terms:
Thus they contended all the day among the Caves ofTharmas,
Tivisting in fearful forms & howling, howling, harsh shrieking,
Howling, harsh shrieking: mingling, their bodies in burning anguish.
Mingling his brightness with her tender limbs, then
Above the ocean; a bright wonder, Nature,
HalfWoman & half Spectre; all his lovely changing colours mix
With her fair crystal clearness. . .
Bryant had indeed suggested that the Egyptian Thamus signified the wonder; and
in his final vignette to A New System (vol. iii), which may have been engraved by
Blake, the Genesis story has been compressed to show the Rainbow of the Covenant 69
rising directly out of the Flood. Similarly, in a monochrome wash-drawing in the
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal (Butlin no. 690), variously entitled The Rainbow over
the Flood and God moving on the Face of the Waters, but which might perhaps more
appropriately be called Thaumas and Iris, Blake has shown again this close relation-
ship of bow and sea.
Both in illustrating other poets’ verses and in illuminating his own, Blake used
the rainbow as an emblem of materialism. In a watercolour for Night Eight of
Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the image precisely interpreted a passage (II, 138- 48
42) on the transience of the sublunary world:
What is this sublunary world?A vapour;
A vapour all it holds; itselfavapour;
From the damp bed of chaos, by Thy beam
Exhaled, ordain’d to swim its destined hour
In ambient air, then melt, and disappear.
In Jerusalem (ii, 48, p. 493) Blake described the creation of a bow by the emanation
of the Friends of Albion:
With awful hands she took
A Moment of Time, drawing it out with many tears and afflictions
And many sorrows, oblique across the Atlantic Vale,
Which is the Vale ofRephaim dreadful from East to West
Where the Human Harvest waves abundant in the beams of Eden.
Into a Rainbow ofJewels and gold, a mild Reflection from
Albion’s dread Tomb...
The rainbow is a reflection of death, too, in the watercolours of Mary and Joseph on
Vala, or Nature,’Mother of
their biers. Blake saw Mary, like Beatrice, as a daughter of
the Body ofDeath’ (p. 152), and Joseph, as her spouse, clearly belongs to the same
cycle of generation. It is he who, in a drawing in Walsall Museum and Art Gallery,
appears to have given the young Christ a pair of compasses in the carpenter's shop.”
It is, indeed, the compasses — which Blake may well have thought of as dividers —
that Christ holds in common with the Newton of Blake’s print; and the man Jesus

ISI
BLAKE SNEWTON

Vignette of The End of the Deluge, 1774, probably a design by Blake for Bryant. The Rainbow of the
Covenant is shown rising directly out of the waters. (69)

recurs often in his prophecies as a symbol of division, and hence, according to

Blake’s doctrine of generation, of the material world.*° Newton’s gesture and his
instrument have long been related to those in the frontispiece to Europe which
shows the Ancient of Days holding a pair of compasses in the Heavens,*' creating
the Universe, an activity which, as Genesis has it, was conducted in a series of divi-
sions. Blake was not only aware of the multiplicity of the Newtonian corpuscles of
light, but also that the scientist’s chief contribution to the understanding of colours
had been to derive them from white light by a process of division through the
prism. The divided light of the rainbow was thus for him a perfect image of the
divided and fallen material world; and in portraying Newton in the act of creating
this division — plotting perhaps the arc of the rainbow in the prism — Blake invented
one of the richest images of materialism in his art.*?

152
 It - Magilphs and Mysteries

...such people as ours who are floating about after Magilphs and mysteries
and are very little likely to satisfy themselves with that saying of Annibal’,
‘Buon disegno e colorito di fango [good drawing and muddy colouring].
(James Barry RA, 1769')

AN (ie WILLIAM SANDBY PUBLISHED the first history of the Royal Academy
in 1862 he made a special plea for instruction in the chemistry of colours,
citing the physical decay of many pictures by Reynolds, Turner and Etty, and the late
works of Wilkie.* The professorship of Chemistry at the Academy was not estab-
lished until 1871, but already, by mid-century, the work of testing-bodies such as the
Society ofArts, and of individual colourmen like George Field, had made available
to artists proven methods and materials which have lasted extremely well, as for
instance in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites.'
Earlier students and academicians were not so fortunate. None of the later
eighteenth-century academies seems to have concerned itself with the teaching of
technique, which was left to private masters,* and in England these masters were
often unable or unwilling to provide instruction.’ The technical manuals com-
plained of secretiveness,° and recipes were spread by rumour and hint, rather than
by any systematic teaching.” This atmosphere of uncertainty and speculation was
naturally fertile in quack formulae, the grossest of which, the ‘Venetian Secret’
which was brought to general notice at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1797,
retained its echo of derision well into the following century.

The lure of Venetian colour

A preoccupation with sixteenth-century Venetian methods of painting was, perhaps
rather surprisingly, as common among British history-painters as it was among por-
traitists, from Reynolds to Haydon," and the tone was generally one of fascinated
bafflement. When, therefore, in the 1790s, a copy of an apparently authentic early
Venetian manual was produced, the enthusiasm of the President and other Royal
Academicians is less surprising than their continued interest once the recipes had
been tried. Ann Jemima Provis, who seems to have brought this document to the
notice of the President, Benjamin West, in December 1795,” claimed that the origi-
nal manuscript had been given to her grandfather in Italy by a Signor Barri, but had
been destroyed in a fire some time after the copy had been made."° Little is known
MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

about Miss Provis'' except that she was a miniaturist who had been at some time in
the care ofthe alienist and patron Dr Thomas Monro."*
Her secret, of which the diarist Farington’s copy is preserved in the library ofthe
Royal Academy, was by no means exclusively Venetian. It offered, indeed, a ‘System
of Painting according to the Several Great Italian Schools’, and among the recipes
for painting draperies is a ‘Raphael Green’, mixed from indigo, yellow ochre and
orpiment, with powdered glass as a dryer."’ Farington’s Diary also tells us that Miss
Provis was prepared to teach Roman practice,"* and the manuscript even has some
notes on the procedures of the Dutch painters Ruisdael and Wynants.'* Her advice
on method was also generously vague:
Be particular to remember that all the before-mentioned Carnations may
either be finished at one painting so as to deceive the eye as if they were
Glazed, or heightened lastly by various Glazings of Transparent Carnations,
Shades &c. mixed only in Linseed Oil very sparingly."®
Nearly half, however, of the Academy manuscript is in Farington’s hand, which
suggests that much was communicated by word of mouth, and there may have been
more detail which has not survived. Stephen Rigaud, who records in a memoir the
copy sold by Miss Provis to his father, the Royal Academician John Francis Rigaud,
recalled that she
committed very little of [the secret] to writing, but explained it principally by
exhibiting [to a Royal Academy committee] several little pictures painted in
that manner, from the first sketch to the finished work; as also by herself paint-
ing in their presence some specimens of the different processes through which
the picture had to pass in order to its completion, according to the Venetian system.
This sounds remarkably like the then-current method of teaching watercolour
painting to amateurs in a series of graded lessons.'7
The three key elements of the Secret seem to have been the use of pure linseed
oil, dark absorbent grounds,"* and the “Titian Shade’, made up of equal quantities of
lake, indigo, and Hungarian (Prussian) or Antwerp blue, plus rather more ivory
black. This was the universal shadow-colour for flesh, drapery and clouds,'® and it
has been pointed out that the blues in this recipe were first developed in the eigh-
teenth, not the sixteenth century.’°
Examples of Miss Provis’s paintings according to this system had been known
7O for some years, and she had apparently worked on West’s Venus Comforting Cupid
(Cupid stung by a Bee).*' But it was not until January 1797, when it seemed that the
President might buy the monopoly of the secret, that interest began to spread
widely in the Academy.** West asserted that ‘A new Epocha in the Art... would be
formed by the discovery’; and Alderman Boydell had already dismissed a number of
painters from his Shakespeare Gallery project, and refused to engage others until
sp the process had been tested more fully.” In Gillray’s satire Titianus Redivivus Boydell
is seen slinking off with West and clutching a volume of Shakespeare, with the com-
plaint that the Secret might spawn ‘another Gallery’. Even before they had been
convinced of the improvement in the President's ‘Venetian’ pictures, Farington and

154
 MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

This typically
‘Venetian’ mytho-
logical scene, Venus
Comforting Cupid,
c. 1796-1802, was
apparently started by
Benjamin West, the
President of the
Royal Academy, in
collaboration with
the miniature-painter
Ann Jemima Provis,
the chief author of
the “Venetian Secret’.
(70)

Robert Smirke and half-a-dozen other Academicians suggested that the Provises
should be offered an annuity; but West proposed private subscriptions and the
establishment of Ann’s father, Thomas, as an artists’ colourman.** According to
Farington (25 January) Thomas Provis would have been satisfied originally with
fifty guineas for the process, but when the copyright agreement was drawn up
with Farington’s help,*> six hundred guineas was the sum which the two partners
were to be allowed to collect, before subscribers were free to divulge the Secret, for
which they had paid ten guineas apiece. Until then, it was reported, the fine for a
breach ofsecrecy would be £2,000, and the buyers undertook never to divulge it to
any foreigner, ‘thereby to preserve the advantage to their own country’.”® J. F
Rigaud proposed that Academy students competing for medals should not use the
Secret, as this would discriminate against the poorest.*”
Almost as soon as rumours of the Secret reached the outside world they met
with ridicule as well as with rivalry and support. By March 1797 the watercolourist
Paul Sandby RA had composed what he later described as a‘doodle-do song’ on the
affair; and he declared that he and the portraitist Sir William Beechey had quickly
discovered the process for themselves ‘without subscribing a shilling’.**
Reynolds’s former colourman, Sebastian Grandi, later described by Field as ‘a
most ignorant Italian quack in Colours’, was found successfully passing off a picture

155
MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

James Gillray, Titianus

Redivivus; or The Seven
Wise-Men consulting the new
Venetian Oracle, 1797, the
most important visual
document of the Venetian
Secret scandal. (71)

painted by Henry Tresham RA to the Provis formula as a product of his own ‘Venet-
ian’ system.” At the Society of Arts, another and more modest ‘Venetian’ expert,
Timothy Sheldrake, gave a tentative recognition to the Provis method, which he
imagined was similar to his own.’°
Edmond Malone, in the first edition of his Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1797),
welcomed the advantages of the Secret, which his subject had unhappily not lived
to see; and, although he alluded to the Ireland Shakespeare forgeries of afew years
earlier, he declared confidently that the authenticity of the process could easily be
established by experiment.’' Malone predicted with some confidence the appear-
ance of several ‘Venetian’ pictures at the coming Royal Academy Exhibition; but
those that were exhibited — by West, Tresham, Smirke, Thomas Stothard and
 MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

Richard Westall — generally met with a poor reception. The Tive Briton approved of
Westall’s Infant Bacchus (a thoroughly ‘Venetian’ subject), but other critics found
that the effect of the ‘Titian Shade’ varied from a ‘dark and purpurine hue’ to ‘the
chalky and cold tints of fresco and that gaudy glare and flimsy nothingness of fan
painting’.*’ Even West was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the process, and
complained to Provis of his lack of success.**

The Secret exposed

In the winter of 1797 the whole affair was publicized as a major Academic scandal
by James Gillray, in his print, Titianus Redivivus; or The Seven Wise-Men consulting the
new Venetian Oracle — a Scene in ye Academic Grove.** The print is both the most vel
brilliant and the fullest document of the scandal, and Gillray shows himselfto have
been very well informed. West and Boydell creep away with another leading print-
entrepreneur, Thomas Macklin, as the villains who had hoped to make money
from the Secret, just as Farington had hinted. The Seven Wise Men are Farington

Vie

rythe
illatnis
t

Gillray’s satire may have been ig

sparked by his ongoing feud with
the print-entrepreneur Josiah arin
S ,
Boydell (centre), shown creeping
away with West and the print-
publisher Thomas Macklin. Two
of the Wise Men, above, are the
landscapist Joseph Farington and
the history- and portrait-painter
John Opie. (72)

TS
MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

Sa

: eedeunt Titiamica F fA. Tan =n

Miss Provis demonstrating her technique ofportraiture on a dark ground. The ass Pegasus’s wings
display the names of the newspapers who supported the Secret. (73)

himself, John Opie, Stothard, John Hoppner, Smirke, Rigaud and Westall, each
neatly characterized on their canvases or in their speech-bubbles by some telling
weakness, such as Farington’s ‘Filchings from Wilson’, Opie’s thick impasto and
Stothard’s obsession with white grounds. Among the swarm of increasingly ape-
like painters clamouring for the Secret are James Northcote, Tresham, Thomas
Lawrence and Ozias Humphry, most of whom are well known for their technical
74 curiosity. Two of the pufti of puffing patronage above the artists represent Sir George
Beaumont, one of the first amateur painters to buy the Secret,3° and Edmond
Malone; and the painters whose work is suffering defilement to the left include
Sandby and Beechey, whose scepticism about the Secret we have seen, Gillray’s
friend and collaborator Phillip Jacques de Loutherbourg, one of the soundest
technicians of the period, Henry Fuseli who was a lifelong opponent of the Venet-
ian School, and the rising Academy star Turner, who was to be praised in a review
 MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

Above: the puffing patron age oO fthe criti cs, in cludin o

5 Reynold S
>
s bio grapher Malone and th e amateur
painter Sir George Beaumont. (74 )
f
Below: Sir Joshua Reynold s rises from the ¢grave, Ww |aile nearby, an ape-like painter defiles the works o
the sceptics, among them Fu seli and Tu rer. (75 )

a)
MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

of the Exhibition of 1798 for keeping aloof from ‘these ridiculous superficial
expedients’. *7
The effect of Gillray’s satire, or the disillusionment of which it was a symptom,
was soon clear. Malone’s second edition of Reynolds’s Works (1798) carried an
embarrassed recantation of his earlier enthusiasm, which concluded that, ‘however
ancient...these documents may be, they hitherto appear to be of little value’.*
The editor himself was attacked, and Reynolds defended as a naturally ‘Venetian’
colourist, in the bitterest criticism to arise from the affair, James Barry’s Letter to the
Dilettanti Society, which included the splenetic protest that
such a concurrence of ridiculous circumstances, ofsomany, such gross absur-
dities, and such busy industrious folly, in contriving for the publicity, and
exposure of aquacking disgraceful imposture is, I believe, unparalleled in the
history ofthe art.
As the epigraph to this chapter shows, Barry had long been an opponent oftechni-
cal nostrums, but the tone of his vituperation on this occasion may well have
contributed a good deal to his expulsion from the Academy in the following year.
A critic noted that there were no ‘Venetian’ pictures to be seen at the Exhibition
of 1798.39

The aftermath
But the matter was not entirely closed: critics of the Academy continued to use it as
ammunition, and the acute anxieties about technique, together with a belief in the
essentially painterly qualities of British painting, did not go away. In 1802 John
Singleton Copley claimed to have found the ‘vehicle’ which was the key to the
Secret, and, about the same time, the new exhibiting society, The British School,
which introduced George Field into the world of art, showed ‘a specimen of the
Venetian process of Painting’ by the Irish artist Solomon Williams, who was touting
his own ‘Venetian’ vehicle among the Royal Academicians, including, notably,
Farington.*° In 1806 it is curious to see the duped of 1797 — Farington, West, Opie
— joining with the sceptical — Loutherbourg, Richard Cosway, Beechey — in endors-
ing Sebastian Grandi’s absorbent grounds, ‘in the old Venetian stile’, before the
Society of Arts, which awarded him a silver medal and a bounty of twenty pounds.*!
Miss Provis was lost to view, together with her process; but the continued attrac-
tion ofVenetian secrets for lady amateurs is shown by the Account of aNew Process
in Painting by means of Glazed Crayons; with Remarks on its General Correspondence
with the Peculiarities of the Venetian School, which was published anonymously at
Brighton in 1815. The author was the daughter of William Cleaver, Bishop of
Bangor and later of St Asaph, and she claimed to have discovered her process by
accident in 1807.** The quality of this strange pamphlet on ‘dry colouring’ may
perhaps be judged from its assertion that ‘oil colour is...incompatible with the
essential characteristics of flesh, suppleness and transparency...’,? and from the
introduction of only a single Venetian painting (Bassano) among the twelve visual

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 MAGILPHS AND MYSTERIES

examples to which the pamphlet was to serve as text. The specimen thought to be
closest to Venetian effects was after an etching by the Bolognese painter Guercino.4
Miss Cleaver’s work, which was re-issued in an expanded London edition in
1821, would hardly merit attention in this context had she not made repeated
applications for support to the British Institution, and been taken up by Sir George
Beaumont, who approached Constable to make trials of her process in 1824.
Constable’s deep sympathy for Titian, and probably his closeness to George Field,
which developed at this time, inclined him to be suspicious of all formulae; and
although he heard that Miss Cleaver ‘had been boring at [it] these twenty years’,
he concluded that he did not much like it. Cleaver hoped the Institution would
send several artists to test her process at her home in Brighton ‘and offer very
high premiums for their success’, but it is not known whether anything further
was done.*
Miss Cleaver claimed that she had never had the opportunity of consulting orig-
inal Venetian manuals;*° but soon, with the publication of the historical researches
into technique by Charles Lock Eastlake and Mary Merrifield, there could be very
little possibility of further impostures of the “Venetian Secret’ type. Both historians
and chemists were making artists and their public more aware of the limitations and
legitimate uses of materials; possibly they were also changing an attitude of mind
which looked for art in easy recipes. ‘Itwill soon be discovered, wrote a critic of the
eighteenth-century Venetian scandal, ‘that the colour-shops of ancient as well as of
modern times have not dealt in the ingredients of genius.’*”

161
 12 - Turner as a Colourist

4 S FOR TURNER, AT FIRST HE STUNS YOu. You find yourself facing a confusion of
WANS a and burnt siena, of blue and white, rubbed on with a rag, sometimes
round and round, sometimes in lines, or in zig-zags in several directions. You might
say that it was done with a rubber-stamp brushed over with breadcrumbs, or with
a pile of soft paints diluted with water and spread on to a sheet of paper, which is
folded and then scraped violently with a stiff brush. This gives rise to an astonishing
play of mixtures, especially if you scatter a few flecks of white gouache on it before
folding the paper.
‘That is what you see from close to, and from a distance...everything balances
itself out. Before your incredulous eyes a marvellous landscape rises, a fairy place, a
radiant river flowing beneath a sun’s prismatic rays. A pale sky vanished into the
distance, engulfed in a horizon of mother-of-pearl, reflecting and moving 1n water
that is iridescent like a film of soap, and the spectrum of soap-bubbles. What land,
what Eldorado, what Eden flames with this wild brilliance, these floods of light
refracted by milky clouds, flecked with fiery red and slashed with violet, like the
precious depths of opal? And yet these are real places; they are autumn landscapes
with russet trees, running water, forests shedding their foliage; but they are also
landscapes that have been vapourized, where dawn fills the whole sky; they are
jubilant skies and rivers of a nature sublimated, husked, and rendered completely
fluid by a great poet’ (J. K. Huysmans, “Turner et Goya’, Certains, 1889").
Huysmans’ vivid characterization of Turner as a colourist places the painter
firmly in the Elysium of Symbolist heroes; and it is no surprise that Gustave
Moreau and Edmond de Goncourt found him to be something of a ‘jeweler’ when
they went to look at his work in the Groult collection in 1891, and may have seen
80 there the Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Distance — possibly also the work,
exhibited at the quai Malaquais, which had aroused such an enthusiastic response in
Huysmans. Goncourt wrote of one TurnerVenetian scene there — alas, likely to have
been a fake — that it was ‘liquid gold, and within it an infusion ofpurple. ..it has the
air of a painting done by a Rembrandt born in India’.
But for the Impressionists in these years it was a very different story. In a conver-
sation with the dealer René Gimpel in 1918, Claude Monet explained that ‘Dans le
temps j’ai beaucoup aimé Tirner, aujourd’huijel’aime beaucoup moins.— Pourquoi? — Il n’a
pas assez dessine la couleur et il en a trop mis [Over the years I have liked Turner a great
deal, but now I like him far less. He has given too little attention to the arrangement
of colour, and he has used too much of it].””

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 TURNER AS A COLOURIST

Local colour
Of course Monet was right. If we place one of his Rouen Cathedral paintings beside 83
Turner’s small gouache of the same subject,} or one of his or Renoir’s Venetian 82
subjects beside one of Turner’s, we see that even the late Impressionist approach to
colour is very different from that of the late Turner. In Monet and Renoir colour is
a function of the light which floods into the picture, animating the complex sur-
faces of objects, but also bringing them into unison by the homogeneity which it
confers on the whole. However strange or ‘recherché’, the colours in Impressionist
paintings are always echoed in every part of the canvas; like the unified brushstroke,
light and colour weld the surface into a unity. Turner handled his colour in quite a
different way. Just as his brushstroke varies from object to object and from area to
area on canvas or paper, now broad and fluid, now crisp and impastoed, now swift
and calligraphic, so Turner’s colour is used, for the most part, to discriminate
between objects, not to unify them. The strong red and green costumes of the
figures in the foreground of his Rouen Cathedral —a colour-combination so charac-
teristic of his work in the early 1830s —are used as maximal contrasts of local colour,
ot, as they might be in Monet, as complementary colours of light: they give us
neither the appearance nor the conception offigures in full sunlight.
During the second half of his career Turner was always searching for ways of
introducing local colour into the various areas of his works. A Venetian subject,
painted for the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, was the subject of a conversation at
some reception, where a discussion ensued among a number of spectators about the
identity of a large orange object floating in the water, which some considered
might be a gorgeous turban. Then Turner came up, and ‘after two or three twitches
of his lips, and as many little half h-ms, he replied, ““Orange-orange.”
Turner's liking for fruit and vegetables in his pictures, which Ruskin attributed to
tastes developed during his boyhood near Covent Garden market, served in the
event a much more purely formal purpose. They were the landscape-painter’s sur-
rogates for the coloured draperies of the history-painter or the bric-a-brac of the
still-life artist, to be manipulated at will, according to the exigencies of a pictorial
idea. But they must not be wholly arbitrary: Turner’s resistance to abstraction is
nowhere more evident than in his urge to give these patches of brilliant local
colour a recognizable — and more or less reasonable — physical form. The need for
reason is emphasized in a story circulating in the 1850s at Petworth House in
Sussex, the home of Turner’s most important later patron, Lord Egremont, about
Brighton from the Sea, one of the painter’s florid footnotes to the family portraits by
Van Dyck. As one visitor wrote: [Turner] introduced in the foreground of it a
broken basket with some floating turnips, carrots, etc., and, as the old butler told
me..., was savage when, at Lord Egremont’s suggestion as to their specific gravity,
he asked for a tub of water and some of the identical vegetables, and found the latter
all sank. They were evidently too useful in his picture to be removed.’
They were indeed extremely useful, and as late as 1847, when Turner had taken
to repainting some of his early canvases, he introduced into Tapping the Furnace (a
work originally produced nearly half a century earlier) a strikingly characteristic

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TURNER AS A COLOURIST

device to accentuate the flames of the furnace. “Turner, not satisfied with the daz-
zling effect obtained by surrounding the blazing fire with broad masses of shadow
on the walls and roof of the foundry? recalled a contemporary, ‘had determined
to make the glow and glare still more effective by opposition of colour. He could
conceive of nothing that would naturally be seen in the place to answer the desired
purpose; and so he introduced, in the immediate front of his picture, stretching
from side to side, a row ofcut cabbages ofthe greenest possible hue. These cabbages
were a great puzzle to many visitors to the exhibition.®
The public certainly saw the work primarily as a matter of colour: as the critic of
the Atheneum put it, it was ‘full of fine passages of chromatic arrangement; it has so
little foundation in fact that the sense is merely bewildered at the unsparing hand
with which the painter has spread forth the glories of his palette’. Turner's inten-
tions were essentially colouristic, but he was not prepared to allow colour to stand
by itself. By an irony of history, the cabbages in Tapping the Furnace are still some-
thing of apuzzle, and their presence has barely been noticed by modern commen-
tators on the picture, for the hasty methods used by Turner to improvise his
repainting in time for the Exhibition have meant that they have now darkened and
cracked to the point of being virtually invisible.
Thus, ifTurner’s later treatment of colour was not abstract, seen from the point of
view of ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’ it could none the less be thoroughly wilful, and
Monet’s strictures in 1918 are entirely in order. Yet it had not always been so, and if
Monet saw Turner’s early work, like the Cilgerran Castle (Leicester) which passed
through the Paris saleroom in 1874, at a time when the English painter was still
something of a hero to the Impressionists, he will surely have recognized a kindred
spirit.? For between about 1800 and 1812 Turner’ art saw a naturalistic phase which
is precisely parallel to the ‘high’ period of Impressionism in the 1870s. He developed
an interest in more informal pastoral subjects, and he took to the practice of working
directly from nature in the open air, both on small oil-sketches and on the earlier
stages of canvases destined for the Exhibition. This was the time when he believed,
as he told a travelling-companion in 1813, that ‘we can paint only what we see’.*

Primaries — the ‘colour-beginning’

But it was only a phase, and already by 1820 Turner had begun to organize his work
colouristically on the basis of the ‘colour-beginning’,® a method which began with
watercolours, but which by the early 1830s had also become his standard procedure
in oil. It is a procedure closely associated with Turner’s work in series, of which the
French Rivers is one of the finest, and certainly one of the most sustained examples,
where the painter worked simultaneously on many separate images, taking each of
them to completion through a series of stages; and this serial process was also
applied increasingly to oils in the 1830s.
The ‘colour-beginning’ divided canvas or paper into large areas of distinct colour,
sometimes pure and sometimes surprisingly bright, and these areas had little direct
connection with the nature of the objects which were to be represented. The

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 TURNER AS A COLOURIST

colours which came to be chosen were for the most part the three subtractive
primary colours, yellow, red and blue, which Turner felt were an epitome of the
whole of visible creation.Ashe wrote in a lecture of 1818, yellow represented the
medium (i.e. light), red the material objects, and blue, distance (1.e. air) in landscape,
and in terms of natural time, morning, evening, and dawn."° In common with many
artists of his generation Turner was fascinated by the idea of discovering an irre-
ducible number of elements in nature and art: his interest in primary colours is
matched by a belief in the underlying geometrical simplicity of forms.

Light and colour

That tradition in the understanding of colour in France which runs from Chevreul
(Chapter 15) to the Neo-Impressionists was essentially perceptual;itconcerned itself
chiefly with optical functions. Complementary colours acquired a special status
because they are ‘objectively’ the colours of light and of the shadows cast by objects
placed in that light, and because they are ‘subjectively’ the colours of after-images, 13
of those pairs of colours which seem to be demanded by the natural functioning of
the eye. Nothing is more indicative of Turner’s lack of concern with this aspect of
colour in nature and in perception than his adaptation of one of the earliest colour- 59
circles to arrange the ‘prismatic’ colours in a complementary sequence: the circle 81
devised by the entomologist Moses Harris about 1776.Turner used this circle as the
basis for one ofhis lecture diagrams in 1827, but he denied precisely these comple-
mentary functions of colour in favour of those traditional functions of value: light
and dark, day and night."' Turner’s abiding interest in the symbolic attributes of
colour is clear from the series of small paintings, conceived in pairs, which he
produced in the early 1840s, and of which the best known is Shade and Darkness: 76-7
the Evening of the Deluge, and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory): the Morning after
the Deluge — Moses writing the Book of Genesis.'* In these two paintings, with their
convoluted iconography, Turner was concerned first of all with the capacity of
colour to convey an idea, rather than with the sensations of darkness and light.
Turner’s insistence on the essentially symbolic value of colour in nature is bound
up with his belief that colour and light are substances, a view which was presented
to him in a number of literary sources from the Renaissance and the late eighteenth
century. It must have been a particularly attractive notion to a painter whose han-
dling of his materials, whether in watercolour or in oil, showed such a delight in
their substantiality. Light in his paintings, and particularly the disc of the sun in, for
example, The Festival of the Vintage at Macon and Calais Sands," is rendered by a thick
impasto of white or vermilion, ‘standing out’, as one commentator on the Regulus
of 1837 put it,‘like the boss ofa shield’.'t One of Turner’s sources, Edward Hussey
Delaval, also suggested that the production of colours in animals, plants and
minerals was analogous to the procedure of the watercolourist (extended to oils in
Turner’s latest practice), which functioned ‘by the transmission of light from a white
ground through a transparent coloured mediumy’.'* The idea that all the colours of
the visible world could be subsumed under the three primaries, red, yellow and

165
TURNER AS A COLOURIST

J. M. W. Turner, Shade and Darkness: the Evening ofthe Deluge (above), and Light and Colour (Goethe’s
Theory): the Morning after the Deluge — Moses writing the Book of Genesis (right), both of 1843. Turner
contrasts the dark prelude to the biblical Deluge and its brilliant aftermath, when the sun brought
prismatic bubbles to the surface of the Flood. The Goethe reference is probably to the poet’s table of
polarities — blue and yellow, dark and light, and so on —in The Theory of Colours, of which Turner
annotated his own copy at this time. But Turner felt that even Goethe had not sufficiently stressed the
constructive role of darkness in the generation of colour. (76, 77)

166
 TURNER AS A COLOURIST

blue, was also of course derived from the painterly experience of mixing material
pigments, rather than from an analysis of the prismatic spectrum, and all these
notions allowed Turner to resist the conclusion that colour, even as it is perceived, is
simply a function ofthe action oflight on surfaces.

The relativity of colour

But this is to concern ourselves only with the ‘objective’ status of colour; and
Turner’s colourism is also a result of those aspects of colour which occupied the
researches of Chevreul and of the Impressionists, namely colour as a relative value,
TURNER AS A COLOURIST

and the notion that contrasts and juxtapositions may work miracles with percep-
tion. ‘Stay there’, Turner is reputed to have muttered to a patch of yellow pigment
on his canvas, ‘until I make you white.’'® And he was prepared to turn the accidents
of perception into a painterly method during those “Varnishing Days’ at the Royal
Academy and British Institution exhibitions. A younger contemporary recalled
how, when Turner arrived to hang his work at the Royal Academy exhibition in
1846,‘some ofhis work was, as usual, only rubbed in, and it was common practice of
his, when he saw how his pictures were placed, to paint first a little on one, then on
another, and so on till all were finished to his satisfaction’.'”
This procedure was very much a method ofself-defence, as the critic of L’Artiste
had noted, with pardonable exaggeration, as early as 1836:
There is no doubt that the chief reason for the great change which has crept
into his style derives from the rivalries occasioned by the annual exhibition of
paintings at Somerset House, where the paintings are so crowded together,
that the artist most ambitious for reputation tries to attract attention by the use
of bright colour and the most dazzling effects of light. When a man of genius
like Turner makes this effort, the result is overwhelming for artists with less
imagination."*
And not for these nameless artists of lesser imagination alone, for in 1832 John
Constable himself was to find the red robes of the dignitaries in his picture of the
Opening of Waterloo Bridge (London, National Gallery) cast into obscurity by the
wafer of red sealing-wax which Turner applied to the water of his cool green sea-
piece next to it, Helvoetsluys, and later painted into the form ofa buoy.‘He has been
here’, said Constable when he saw it, ‘and fired a gun.”
As he grew older, Turner paid more and more attention to these subjective effects
of colour;in 1845 a group ofvisitors to the private gallery he had designed and built
to provide the best lighting and coloured background for his paintings was told to
wait for some time in a totally darkened anteroom before they were allowed to see
the pictures themselves, since ‘the bright light outside would have spoilt their eyes
for properly appreciating the pictures, and that to see them to advantage an interval
of darkness was necessary’ .*°
We return here to where we started, to the world of late Monet, for it was
Monet who proclaimed, just before he died, that he would have liked to have been
born blind and to have had his sight suddenly restored, so that he could see the
world afresh as nothing but an arrangement of coloured patches, without reference
to any knowledge of objects. It is fitting that Monet should here have been
echoing a notion he had found in that most admired of Ruskin’s works in late
nineteenth-century France, The Elements of Drawing, translated as it was by the
Neo-Impressionists Henri-Edmond Cross and Paul Signac,?' and that Ruskin
himself should have come to recognize these principles of colour-relativity above
all from his experience oflate Turner.

168
 13 - °Iwo Different Worlds’ —
Runge, Goethe and the Sphere
of Colour

LI THE HISTORY OF COLOUR-IDEAS 1810 was something of an annus mirabilis, for in

that year two books appeared almost simultaneously in Germany which, after
Newton’s Opticks, have some claim to being the most important early modern
classics of colour. Unlike the Opticks, however, they were neither of them the work
ofaprofessional scientist, let alone a significant one. The first was the poet Goethe’s 78
Die Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) and the second was Die Farben-Kugel (Colour-
Sphere) by the Hamburg painter Philipp Otto Runge.
Goethe’s Farbenlehre is still the most comprehensive study of colour from every
point of view, including the historical, and although its ‘Historical Part’, like its
detailed polemical critique of Newton’s theory of colours, has not often been
reprinted, the “Didactic Part’, laying out Goethe’s own theory, has been much re-
edited and translated, and is still in print in several languages, including English.
Goethe’s theory of the origin of colours in the polar interaction oflight and dark-
ness, and the exemplification of this action in many familiar experiences of colour,
have become in recent years of increasing interest to historians of science, and
Goethe’s work is now routinely included in scientific, as well as philosophical dis-
cussions of colour.’
Runge’s Farben-Kugel, a far slimmer text, is essentially an exposition of his three-
dimensional arrangement of colour-space, co-ordinating the six primary and sec- "2
ondary hues with the value-scale of light and dark. It included an introduction on
the place of colour in nature, not by Runge himself, and a brief appendix on the use
of the sphere to derive principles of colour-harmony by complementary contrasts.
The colour-sphere is the ancestor of most modern systems ofsurface-colour, and it
has often been cited in the literature of colour-measurement, although its ideal
symmetry has not proved adequate to modern conceptions of colour-spacing. The
text of the Farben-Kugel is concise and factual; only the appendix introduces a note
of personal interpretation, although this interpretation was hardly unique to
Runge. The Romantic character of the painter’s enterprise emerges only from the
thoroughly speculative introduction by the Danish nature-philosopher Henrik
Steffens which has not always been reprinted in modern editions.*

Goethe and Runge

However disparate these two contemporary treatises may seem, they have usually
been considered together because Goethe and Runge were, in fact, closely involved

169
TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

J. W. von Goethe, frontispiece to Die Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), 1810. Nos 3 and 7 show the
basic colours of light (or flame) as yellow and blue, while circles 1 and 2 have at the top Goethe’s
most important colour: Purpur (red), produced by the ‘augmentation’ of polar yellow (light) and blue
(darkness). The landscape below contains no blue — a precocious investigation of colour-blindness. (78)

in each other’s developing interest in colour over a period of nearly ten years; and
theirs is an exceptionally well-documented relationship which promises many
insights into the interaction of practice and theory in the visual arts. And yet the
completeness and intelligibility of this record is more apparent than real,and I hope
in this chapter to suggest that we are still faced with as many questions as answers,
to point out what these questions are, and to go some way towards answering some
of them.

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 TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

BP SRN Z = Aft fe
Sartentugel,
“ Sovsioll? MOS BOI ENE Distes fa KY é jp
Eisen haan Sele.

Chit he : CY, hoch ntl

a ards % Tit» loyualer : Miiuh G te toylenpOYe f,

i
w
B

Philipp Otto Runge, Farben-Kugel (Colour-Sphere), 1810. Runge’s three-dimensional model of

colour-space co-ordinates hues with values (light and dark). A set of three primaries — red, yellow
and blue — is arranged in a complementary scheme around the equator, with black and white at the
respective poles. (79)

To the central, ‘Didactic Part’ of his Farbenlehre Goethe appended a letter which
he had received from Runge in 1806:a letter, as the poet wrote in a prefatory note,
which showed ‘that artists have already opened up the path which we see as the
correct one...’,so that:

without being informed of my efforts, through his own inclinations, his own
practice and his own thought, [Runge] has found himself on the same path.

I7I
TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

A careful comparison of this letter and my sketch will reveal that in several
places they agree precisely, and that others may be interpreted and illuminated
by my work, so that the writer has anticipated me in several points by his lively
conviction and true feeling.’

A ‘careful comparison’ of the two texts will, however, show us that there are
remarkably few points of comparability between them: Runge, for example, is not
at all concerned with the origin ofcolours in the interplay oflight and dark, which
is the keystone of Goethe’s theory; and Goethe, for his part, shows no special inter-
est in the distinction between transparent and opaque colours, which is Runge’s
chief preoccupation in this letter. But by the time the Farbenlehre appeared in print
Goethe had received a further sample of Runge’s colour-ideas in the form of the
Farben-Kugel, which the poet read in manuscript during 1809 and in its printed
version early the following year. This text he also welcomed as being close to his
own views,* although again, with the exception of the appendix on harmony
(which recommended complementary contrasts), it had little to do with the
leading arguments in Goethe’s book, and was indeed even further in general terms
from Goethe’s approach and tone than the 1806 letter had been. In particular,
Runge had now abandoned that arrangement of the colour-circle with red at the
top, which had a crucial significance for Goethe, but none for Runge, who tried
many orientations quite indifferently during the preparation of his treatise.
Goethe’s concept of Steigerung (augmentation) by means of the semi-opaque
medium, by which the two basic colours, yellow representing light and blue repre-
senting darkness, are acted upon to produce the highest, noblest colour, red
78 (Purpur), was the driving force behind the poet’s attack on the Newtonian doctrine
that all colours inhere in white light alone, without the intervention of darkness.
But Runge came late to Newton — as late as September 1806 he was asking Goethe
where he could find a good account of Newton’s theory® — and opposition to
Newton was never a central issue with him, since he avoided any engagement with
the crucial matter of the origin of colours (Farben-Kugel, §4). The Farben-Kugel
was at once recognized as in no way an anti-Newtonian treatise,” and Runge, like
Blake, continued, for example, to use the Newtonian seven-colour schema of the
rainbow-colours.*
When in the summer of 1810, and shortly before his death, Runge came to read
Goethe's Farbenlehre itself, he found

that there is much that I have not understood or see differently, and since
several errors have slipped into [my] book, [Goethe] will have something to
forgive: my goal is really a different one...°
And the only recorded note which the painter made in the course ofhis reading of
the poet’s text was to counter one of Goethe’s arguments about subjective, physio-
logical colour-phenomena by an appeal to the effects of objective transparency. '°
At no stage in the interchanges between Goethe and Runge between 1806 and
1810 do we have a sense of the unity of minds.
Why then did Goethe claim so vigorously that there was a close similarity between

172
 TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

his and Runge’s views on colour? Certainly we know from their correspondence
that he was aware of a far greater range of Runge’s thoughts and experiments than
was ever published in either of their books; but that is hardly the point, and there
was, in any case, little in these further thoughts and experiments which came close
to Goethe’s central concerns. Some indication of what was in Goethe’s mind
emerges from a letter to the composer and musical-theorist Zelter in August 1806,
and from a remark made both to Runge and to Steffens in 1809:
It would be very congenial to me if, on the completion of my work, I can
appeal to sympathisers among my contemporaries, since so far I have been
able to find support only among the dead."
Goethe was above all anxious to find support among the living, for he had already
enrolled the dead in the ‘Historical Part’ of the Farbenlehre, and if there was nothing
in Runge’s work that was specifically anti- Newtonian, nor was there anything there
which clashed directly with his own views.

Steffens, Schiffermiiller and the Farben-Kugel

In the letter to Zelter as well as in the published note on Runge’s letter of 1806,
Goethe claimed that Runge had known nothing of his (Goethe’s) colour-studies
before that date, and if this is so, then the mysterious conversation between them
which took place at Weimar in 1803 can hardly, as has sometimes been assumed,
have touched on that subject.'* But in April 1808 Runge referred approvingly to an
idea in Goethe's Beitrage zur Optik (Contributions to Optics), which had been pub-
lished fifteen years earlier.’ During the winter of 1807-8 Runge had renewed his
acquaintance with Steffens, who had long been familiar with Goethe’s early optical
work and was to cite it repeatedly in his own contribution to the Farben-Kugel in
1809.'* Runge’s brother Daniel recalled that it had been discussions with Steffens
which had first led the painter to formulate the idea of the Kugel itself." The Kugel
is first mentioned in a letter to Goethe of November 1807, and is described as
‘ready’ (presumably referring to the three-dimensional model, rather than to the
book) by April of the following year, in a letter which also acknowledged Runge’s
indebtedness to Steffens at this time." Clearly Steffens was a figure of the greatest
importance for the direction taken by Runge’s study of colour.
Steffens’s essay,‘On the meaning of colours in nature’, unlike Runge’s own part of
the Farben-Kugel, has attracted very little attention.'” Certainly it came very much as
an afterthought, and does not seem to have been written in direct consultation with
the painter, who read it with some curiosity and even surprise when his book was
published in 1810."* It does nevertheless throw light on a number of problems con-
nected with Runge’s own work. In a list of earlier authorities on colour, introduced
to point up the originality of Runge’s contribution to the subject, Steffens men-
tioned not only the Goethe of the Contributions to Optics, but also the Viennese
entomologist Ignaz Schiffermiiller, whose Versuch eines Farbensystems (Essay on a
System of Colours) had appeared in 1771 (see pp. 24-5)."°

173
TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

6 Schiffermiiller presented his colour-circle in a thoroughly Rococo format — he

himself admitted that the diagram had an element of pure decoration — and this is
perhaps one reason for his rather poor press among some modern students of
colour.’ But the book is nevertheless of the greatest interest as perhaps the earliest
attempt to base a theory of harmony on the arrangement of colours in a circle. Like
Runge, Schiffermiiller found that colours close to each other on the twelve-part
circle are discordant; unlike him, he agreed with those critics of complementary
juxtapositions who called them ‘poisonous and merely box-painting’ (giftig und eine
Schachtelmalerei), although he added that they might be manipulated into harmony
by modifying the values of light and dark in each hue.*' Also like Runge in the
Farben-Kugel, Schiffermiiller, following Louis-Bertrand Castel, placed blue at the
apex of his schema as the most important colour, by virtue of its keeping its identity
as blue throughout the whole range of values from light to dark.”
The Essay was noticed briefly in the 1792 edition of J.G. Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie
der Schénen Kiinste (General Theory of the Fine Arts), with which Runge appears to
have been long familiar,” but that the painter turned to it at this particular moment
in 1807 is suggested by his new interest in testing pigment- and light-mixtures on a
spinning disc; for this experimental method, and the marked differences between
pigment-mixtures on a disc and those mechanically achieved on the palette, had
also been discussed in some detail by Schiffermiiller.** It remains, however, that
Runge’s far more comprehensive treatment of harmony in the appendix to the
Farben-Kugel is closest to Goethe’s formulations of 1798, and the likeness cannot be
simply coincidental.*°

The suppression of symbolism

Steffens in his essay also suggested that the Farben-Kugel was far from representing
the whole of Runge’s views on colour:‘do not imagine that he has given all that he
was capable of giving’.*® The treatise is indeed a surprisingly dry and old-fashioned
affair, especially if we recall that a three-dimensional model of a colour-system had
59 been implicit, if not quite explicit, in Moses Harris’s The Natural System of Colours
which had been published in the 1770s, and that the unpublished idea goes back to
the early seventeenth century.’? What had become of Runge’s intense involvement
with colour as ‘the ultimate art’, as religious expression, as universal symbol, which
had obsessed him as a painter as well as a theorist since his first encounter with the
colour-ideas ofthe poet and novelist Ludwig Tieck in 1801? In recommending the
Kugel to Goethe in 1809, Steffens stressed
the great clarity, the spontaneous simplicity and the well-organized, poetic
geometry, if I may so call it, of his vision, by which this exposition...so fortu-
nately distinguishes itself from the wild fantasists of the day.?®
And Runge himself explained to Goethe that he would be able to gain a clearer
view of his own work ‘when something has been established which we can all agree
with...and which can provide a point of reference to us all’.2” He wanted the sim-

174
 TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

plest common denominator of a systematic conception of colour which would, in

itself, be quite uncontroversial. Could both he and his collaborator Steffens have
been thinking, in the first instance, of Goethe the ‘classicist’ as their audience, and
remembering how much both of them had already suffered from the poet’s attacks
on the wilder aspects of their thought and style? The more symbolic element of
Goethe's thought, his psychological theory (see p. 187), was not to be published
until the following year. If so, we shall be surprised when we turn to Steffens’s essay
to find that he is clearly aligned with the ‘wild fantasists’, both in the content and in
the manner of his wide-ranging speculations, which were attacked precisely on
these grounds by the reviewer in the Goéttingsche gelehrte Anzeigen in 1810.3°
Steffens’s introduction to the Farben-Kugel was written independently of Runge,
but does it reflect some unrecorded discussions with the painter, and especially,
since it was composed in the winter of 1809-10, does it represent Runge’s last views
on the status of colour in nature? There is some reason to think this may indeed be
so. Steffens, for example, like Runge, linked colours with the four times of day:

Is not the dawn to be seen as the red side of the great colour-structure [|
Farben-
bild] which is every day in motion, which projects itself into the brightness of
day? And noon as the dominant yellow, and evening the violet, which loses
itself in the darkness of night?3"

These equivalents, which seem to be related to Steffens’s unusual idea that red and
blue are the most basic primaries,” do not agree with Runge’s earliest (1802) for-
mulation of the relationships between colours and the Christian Trinity and three
times of day where, in a thoroughly idiosyncratic way, blue was held to characterize
the Father (morning), red the Son (noon) and yellow the Holy Ghost (night).33 But
morning, for example, soon became red in Runge’s system, and in the 1808 Small 84
Morning the central focus in the frame is on the red lily, Amaryllis formosissima,
which thus comes to embody the dawn or Morgenroth, and, together with the aban-
donment of the name of God, Jaweh, which appeared in earlier versions of this
frame, to throw the emphasis of the Morning entirely on to red. It is clear, too, from
the way in which the Times of Day series developed, that Runge was increasingly
anxious to move away from more conventional Christian or Classical imagery and
towards something more ‘abstract’; in describing a preparatory study for the Small
Morning in April 1808 he avoided any specific mythological reference to the figures:
they are simply general embodiments of the forces of nature.™*
And yet Runge was still uncertain of the precise relationship of theory to prac-
tice. Writing to his brother Gustav in November 1808 he characterized the Farben-
Kugel as:

not a product of art, but a mathematical figure based on some philosophical

considerations...
And he concluded:

that it is necessary for me, when I am working as an artist, not to know any-
thing about it, since these are two different worlds which intersect in me...*

175
TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

But in a letter to the philosopher F W. J. von Schelling, early in 1810, in which he

expressed the hope that he might be able to extend the discoveries of the Kugel into
a more wide-ranging study of the colour-phenomena of nature, Runge was still
able to suggest that what his contemporaries needed most was for‘scientific discov-
eries in the practice of art to be related more to general scientific ideas, and to be
raised to their level’ .*° It is clear that he was deeply concerned that his early engage-
ment with colour should be intensified, but equally clear that he did not yet know
how in detail this was to be achieved. His involvement with precise and original
experiments since 1806 had made him less, rather than more sure of his fundamen-
tal ideas, and it was perhaps for this reason that he welcomed the intervention ofthe
scientist Steffens in the Farben-Kugel project, especially since Goethe had been so
uncommunicative about his own work. Runge’s thought, like his practice, was in a
continual state of evolution, and the Farben-Kugel represents only one aspect of one
or two moments in that evolution: in 1807-8 for the principal text, and 1809 for the
appendix on harmony. We are mistaken if we interpret it as the statement of a
mature and coherent doctrine.
Despite what seems on the face of it to be an ideally complete record of the rela-
tionship between Goethe and Runge in respect to colour, it would appear that
many questions cannot be answered simply by reference to this record. Runge’s art
and theory presents us with a mind in a constant state of flux, the work of a life
tragically truncated at the age of thirty-three, before it could formulate any very
compelling statements.We should perhaps try to understand Runge’s thought on
colour by appealing to the shape of that life, rather than by extrapolating backwards
from the simplified interpretation of his Romanticism which has been common in
our own century.

176
 S.
Oe pis ane es

Turner’s light and darkness

The first painting by Turner to make a major impact in

France: his late, and probably unfinished Landscape with
a River and a Bay in the Distance ofc. 1845 — perhaps the
poet Huysmans’ ‘radiant river flowing beneath a sun’s
prismatic rays’. In the France of the 1880s and 1890s this
canvas was regarded as characteristic of Turner’s style
towards the end of his life. (80)

A lecture diagram of c. 1825 (right) illustrating Turner’s

interest in darkness as well as light. It was based on the
circle devised by the entomologist Moses Harris about
1776 (59), but Turner ignores Harris’s complementary
functions of colour in favour ofvalue, with light at the
top ofthe circle and central triangle, dark below. (81) 2

177
 Colour in Turner and in Impressionism

Turner’s small gouache of Rouen Cathedral, c. 1832, uses colour chiefly to discriminate between objects,
not to unify them (above), whereas in Monet’s painting of the same subject in 1892-4 (right), colour is
a function of the light which floods into the picture, animating complex surfaces, but also bringing
them into homogeneity. Turner’s handling of the bustling street-scene shows a far greater
preoccupation with local colour. (82, 83)

178
Red and the feminine

A systematic conception of colour, as espoused by Goethe in the Theory of Colours (78), and colour as ‘the ultimate art’ — were
represented respectively in the Hamburg painter Philipp Otto Runge’s Colour-Sphere (79) and his paintings of the three Times
ofDay. Morning was seen as red in Runge’s system (left: The Small ‘Morning’, 1808). In the gendering of colour, red is here
linked to the female figure of Aurora, flanked by the red lilies in the frame. (84)

In anthropological vein, the German Romantic painter Franz Pforr believed colour to be expressive of character (above). His
Sulamith and Maria of 1811 clothes the allegorical figure of the South, brown-haired Sulamith, in white, red and green, and
the blonde northerner Maria in a bright-red dress and white apron. (85)
German Modernism and Goethe’s theory

Both Franz Marc (above: Blue Horse I, 1911) and Kandinsky were persuaded of the masculine
spirituality of blue — the Romantic colour par excellence. “We both loved blue,’ Kandinsky
mentioned a propos the name of the almanac Der Blaue Reiter — ‘Marc horses: I riders’. (86)

Perhaps under the stimulus of Goethe in 1910-11 Mare painted his dog Russi as seen through a
prism, recording the coloured fringes at the junction of light and dark (above right), and also, as
he explained, to study the contrasts between yellow, white and blue. (87)

In Yellow-Red-Blue of 1925 (right), Wassily Kandinsky, then a teacher at the Bauhaus, exemplifies
a further aspect of Goethe’s theory — the creation of red from the ‘augmentation’ (Steigerung) of
yellow (light) and blue (dark) as described in Goethe’s 7 heory of Colours. (88)
The polar interaction of light and darkness made v ble — the most striking instance of the
application of Goethe’s the ry of colour to painting. The German artist Arthur Segal’s Fisherman’s
House on Sylt I (1926) po ys the spectral edges engendered at the meeting of light and dark.
In this same series of paintings the a ist hoped to find a way of reconciling the equal demat
of colour and form. (89)
 14 - Mood Indigo — From the Blue
Flower to the Blue Rider

Price question:
1. Anna Blossom has wheels.
2. Anna Blossom is red.
3. what colour are the wheels?
Blue is the colour of thy yellow hair.
Red is the whirl of thy green wheels.
Thou simple maiden in everyday-dress,
Thou dear green animal,
I love Thine! -
(Kurt Schwitters, Anna Blossom has Wheels,1942"')

Ke SCHWITTERS’S PARADOXICAL HANDLING of colour in his best-known poem,

originally published in German in 1922, where the contraries are elided into a
syncretic conception of love, may stand as a sign of one of the most durable features
of German attitudes to colour, from the Romantics to the Modern movement - the
structuring of colour as a set of polarities.
Despite the central importance of that most concrete, as well as most compre-
hensive of colour-handbooks, Goethe’s Farbenlehre (1810), German approaches to 78
colour continued to be far more abstract and symbolic than perceptual. Where
French theorists, from Philippe de la Hire (Dissertation on Various Occurrences in Vision,
1685) to Auguste Rosenstiehl (Treatise on the Physical, Physiological and Aesthetic
Aspects of Colour, 1913),and French painters from Chardin to Matisse, wrestled with
colour-relationships as presented to and processed by human vision, Germans were
more concerned with the ideal relationships articulated by the burgeoning colour-
order systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was the schematic logic
rather than the empirical richness of Goethe’s theory that most impressed his
sympathetic contemporaries, and it was the German physicist and physiologist
Hermann von Helmholtz who persuaded the French most decisively in the second 109
half of the nineteenth century that to opt for a radical perceptual realism was to
misunderstand the nature of visual experience (see p. 221 below).’
Schwitters showed himself to be sufficiently up-to-date in his knowledge of
colour-systems to make blue the contrary of its complementary, yellow (in Goethe’s
day the complementary of blue had usually been seen as orange, the product of the
mixture of the two remaining primaries, yellow and red); but it seems clear that his
oxymoronic play with colours was simply a play with opposites: we need look no
further than the words on the page. Indeed, his idea may have a literary rather than

185
MOOD INDIGO

a scientific background, and in this chapter I want to look at the way in which some
of his Expressionist contemporaries took up and revalued the approaches to colour
first articulated so vividly in German Romanticism.To do so I shall focus on that
supremely Romantic colour, blue.

The blue flower

Blue established its central place in the Romantic imagination chiefly through the
work of the geologist, poet and novelist Friedrich von Hardenberg, who wrote
under the name of Novalis. Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800) opens
with the hero sleepless with yearning to see the blue flower of which he has heard
from a stranger. He falls asleep and dreams of setting out on a quest for the flower,
which takes him to a remote cave in a wild country, filled with bluish light reflected
from a fountain. Later, he finds himself in a meadow surrounded by dark-blue rocks
under a dark-blue sky, where he discovers the tall light-blue flower in whose centre
he sees a face. The face turns out to be that of his beloved, who when Heinrich
meets and dances with her is revealed to have light sky-blue eyes and blue veins on
her neck. One of Heinrich’s chief helpers in this quest is the shepherd-girl Cyane,
whose name derives from the Greek term for ‘blue’, and who, in the uncompleted
continuation of the novel, picks the blue flower for him. Cyane claims to be the
daughter of Mary, Mother of God.
The identification of colours and flowers was a central theme of German
Romanticism. The Hamburg painter Philipp Otto Runge used the expressive
imagery of flowers in all his Times of Day, which themselves had their own charac-
84 teristic colours (p. 175 above); and the theorist of Romanticism Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder wrote in an essay on colours edited by Runge’s friend Ludwig Tieck
(who was also close to Novalis) that:
In nature, even a single flower, a single isolated petal, can enchant us. It is no
surprise that we express our pleasure simply in its colour.The various spirits of
nature speak to us through the individual colours, just as the spirits of the
heavens speak through the various sounds of musical instruments.We can
hardly express how moved and touched we are by every colour, for the
colours themselves speak to us in a gentler accent...4
Similarly, in the essay on the meaning of colour in nature appended to Runge’s
Farben-Kugel of 1810, the Danish scientist Henrik Steffens (who like Novalis was
interested in minerals) speculated that the colour of flowers was, like their perfume,
a function of their powers of attraction - an idea he may well have drawn from that
early botanical classic, C. K. Sprengel’s The Secret of Nature revealed in the structure and
fertilization of flowers, 1793, which argued for the importance of colour in attracting
pollinating insects, and pointed, for example, to the powerful yellow-blue contrast
of the forget-me-not (Myosotis palustris) and the blue iris.’ Goethe, too, drew partic-
ular attention to blue and yellow among the flora, although he also noted that blue,
as opposed to yellow, was relatively rare.°

186
 MOOD INDIGO

Modern commentators on Heinrich von Ofterdingen have debated the identity of

the blue flower with little agreement; some have concluded that Novalis had no
specific flower in mind. One suggestion has been that since, like Ludwig Tieck,
Johann Gottfried Herder and Jean-Paul Richter, he showed some interest in the
newly available literature of India, the very exotic name ‘indigo’ (i.e. Indigblau,
‘Indian’) may have been uppermost in his mind.’ But certainly the colour seems to
have come before the flower: as Novalis wrote in a notebook,’ ‘The character of
colours: everything is blue in my book?

Gendering of blue
Novalis was probably introduced to colour-systems by his teacher and friend the
geologist A. G. Werner, who like many natural scientists in the eighteenth century
had introduced colour into his own taxonomical scheme (see p. 26 above).? Novalis
was probably also familiar with the early theory of Goethe, whom he had met in
1798.A note on coloured shadows in blue and yellow’ seems to point to the older
poet,"’ and it is likely to have been important for the scheme of polarities, blue-
yellow and red-green, which interested Novalis as it interested so many exponents
of Naturphilosophie in his day.'"? The polarity of colour was one ofits characteristics
which, as we shall see, continued to fascinate German artists and theorists well into
the twentieth century, for it could readily be understood in terms of either a physi-
ological or a psychic dynamism.
The contrasting dynamics of blue and yellow seem hardly to have concerned
Novalis, but in a dream-sequence in a novel by his contemporary Jean-Paul
Richter, which may well have given some stimulus to the introduction of the
central motif in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, the hero 1s sucked like a dewdrop into a
blue flower and lifted up into a lofty room within reach of the mysterious sister of
his own genius-figure. As in Novalis’s novel, the blue and the feminine share an
active power of attraction.’ Goethe was soon to write in his Farbenlehre (“Didactic
Part’, §781):‘As we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love
to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.’
This gendering ofblue was also felt by Runge, who in a diagram of about 1809 90
conceived of the warm, yellow-orange side of the colour-circle as male, and the
cool, blue-violet side as female. Runge may have been responding to the chemical
ideas of Steffens, who in his essay of 1810 argued for red as a sign of the contractive,
oxygenizing effect in metals, and blue of the more expansive effect of hydrogen on
them.'’ Goethe, in a similar vein, included the affinity with acid and affinity with
alkalis among the characteristics of his polar blue and yellow.'® But in a much earlier
statement about the natural meaning of the primary colours, which may be linked
to the first versions of the Times of Day, Runge had characterized blue as emblem-
atic of God the Father and red of God the Son; we saw that in the painted Morning
(small version of 1808), red is clearly linked to the female figure of Aurora as well as 84
to the small baby beneath her. Here Runge may have taken his cue from J. G.
Herder’s aesthetic treatise Kalligone, in which that precocious anthropologist

187
MOOD INDIGO

IDEALES

Liebe

The German Romantic painter Philipp Otto Runge’s

circle of Ideal and Real colours, c. 1809. The warm,
orange-red side of the circle is given to the male and
Sa 1Vaiu the cool, blue-violet side to the female. (90)

argued, unfortunately without giving details, that because of the colours’ supreme
beauty (after white), ‘several nations’ called blue and red the ‘beautiful colours’,
attributing them to man and woman: ‘firm blue to the man, soft red to the
woman’.'? Although this common belief in the polar structure of colour-space was
to be characteristic of German thought throughout our period, here as usual there
was no consensus about the meaning ofspecific colours.

An anthropology of colour
Herder’s appeal to popular ‘national’ usage proved very congenial to German artists
in the Romantic period, and especially to painters of the figure. The two young
painters Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr, who moved from Vienna to Rome in
1810 to found the Lukasbund, had already shared a belief that the colours of dress
were, and should be, represented in pictures as expressive of character. These notions
would be most appropriate for depicting women, since men’s clothing, they
thought, was largely determined by profession; and yet there was a remarkable uni-
formity in female dress. Black hair, said Pforr, went best with combinations of black
and violet, black and blue, or white and violet; brown hair with green and violet,
white and blue, yellow-green and violet, and so on; blonde hair suited quiet
colours, such as blue and grey, grey and crimson, reddish-brown with a crimson
cast, violet-grey and black. Black hair, he thought, was expressive of a proud and
cool personality or, on the other hand, of cheerfulness and happiness; brown hair of
happiness and good temper, innocent roguishness, naiveté and cheerfulness; blonde
of solitariness, modesty, good-heartedness and calm, more passive than active. Pforr
added that he did not need to spell out the meaning of red hair, ‘with an appropriate
face’, probably an allusion to the legendary red hair of Judas and the Jews."* Yet in
85 Pforr’s Sulamith and Maria of 1811, the allegorical figure of the South, the brown-
haired Sulamith, wears white, green and red, and the blonde northerner Maria
wears a bright red dress with a white apron.'? Overbeck, who dressed his later Italia
91 and Germania (1828) respectively in red, dark blue and white for the dark-haired
Italia, and salmon pink, green, pale blue and yellow (a touch in a lining) for the

188
 MOOD INDIGO

Friedrich Overbeck’s Italia and Germania, 1828, an allegory ofthe friendship of southern and northern
Europe in which contrasts of hair-colour match contrasts of dress. (91)

blonde Germania, had argued to his father in 1808 precisely that blonde hair with
grey and crimson was expressive of ‘feminine gentleness and amiability, or rather,
true femininity’.*° The move to Rome may well have worked a powerful change in
the Nazarene’s colour-perceptions. As that veteran grand tourist Goethe wrote in
these years, when he was in touch with if not entirely sympathetically disposed
towards their art: ‘the inhabitants of the south of Europe make use of very brilliant
colours for their dresses. The circumstances oftheir procuring silk stuffs at a cheap
rate is favourable to this propensity. The women, especially, with their bright-
coloured bodices and ribbons, are always in harmony with the scenery, since they
cannot possibly surpass the splendour ofthe sky and landscape.’*!
Perhaps, too, for Pforr and Overbeck this iconography of colour had to yield in
practice to more private aesthetic considerations: Pforr’s detailed account of his
Sulamith and Maria mentioned Maria’s red dress, ‘just as we have so often spoken
about it’, and even then not all his details of the colouring were followed exactly in
the painting.»

189
MOOD INDIGO

Goethe was also happy to muse, in anthropological vein, on colour-preferences

in clothing in Europe and beyond, in north and south, male and female:*The female
sex in youth is attached to rose-colour and sea-green, in age to violet and dark
green. The fair-haired prefer violet, as opposed to light yellow, the brunettes blue,
as opposed to yellow-red, and all on good grounds... .’*

Goethe’s following: symbol versus substance

78 It might well have been expected that Goethe’s Farbenlehre, shaped as it was by the
poet’s experience ofart, and bearing his vast international reputation with it, would
have been taken up at once by painters as it was by philosophers such as Hegel and
Schopenhauer.” Yet this was hardly the case. The Frankfurt painter and art historian
Johann David Passavant, to whom Pforr had confided his views on colour in 1808,
studied Goethe’s treatise while he was a pupil of David’s in Paris somewhat later;
and the book seems to have been in great demand among German artists in Rome
as early as 1811.*5 But there is little sign that they were prepared to make use ofits
somewhat hermetic principles, and indeed, Wilhelm Schadow, a collaborator with
Overbeck and one of the several Nazarenes to leave Rome and take up academic
positions in Germany, was still maintaining, in an essay on the training of artists in
the late 1820s, the traditional view that colour was essentially unteachable.*° By the
middle of the century, however, teachers at the academies of Berlin and Dresden as
well as German artists in Rome were looking more closely at Goethe’s Farbenlehre,
and supporting a new wave of attempts to vindicate its arguments against Newton-
ian optics, which excluded the idea ofactive darkness.”
As we might expect, however, German painting in the nineteenth century was
not entirely immune from the perceptualism and the emphasis on the material
qualities of pigments which were so highly developed in France. If German
Romantic painting, with its particular closeness to watercolour, often presented
rather abstract painterly surfaces, so that even Schadow, the most ‘painterly’ of the
Nazarenes, could argue that it was immaterial from the point of view of colour
what support or medium, fresco, oil, wax or watercolour, was used,** Germany was
also the home ofa school ofplein-air painters which, there as elsewhere, gave a good
deal of attention to vigorous impasto and brushwork. This was a tendency which
was sometimes hostile to theory; Max Liebermann, for example, deliberately
rejected the Neo-Impressionist divided touch in the interest of his ‘simple’ browns
and greys.*?
The increasing attention to qualities of materials and surface, so familiar in French
painting, was also marked among German artists in the later nineteenth century.
The Basel Symbolist Arnold Bécklin made a profound and practical study of the
history of techniques, and it was in Munich that one of the earliest painters’ groups
to test the properties of the proliferating new synthetic materials, the German Society
for the Promotion of Rational Methods of Painting, was established in 1886.2° This
was an emphasis on the materiality of materials which was to pass, via Henry van de
Velde, to the Bauhaus, and beyond, to Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer.

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 MOOD INDIGO

Bocklin and Bezold

Bocklin was also engaged in a detailed examination of the perceptual qualities of
colour-contrast, which had been put high on the nineteenth-century painterly
agenda by M.-E. Chevreul (see Chapter 15). This was now, in the 1870s, given a far
more extensive and nuanced treatment by Wilhelm von Bezold, a Munich meteo-
rologist who frequented a circle of artists in that city and was personally known to
Bocklin. Some of Bécklin’s particular colour-interests, such as his wide-ranging
concern for simultaneous and complementary contrasts, and his close attention to
controlling the colour-effects of his paintings by working on them in their frames,
can be related to Bezold’s ideas.*! Bezold’s treatise of 1874 on colour-theory seems
to have been closely studied in Munich: his unusually extended discussion of the
spatial effect of ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours became a central interest for Bécklin’s
younger Symbolist contemporary Franz von Stiick, among whose pupils in
Munich were not only Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, but also Josef Albers, g2
whose Interaction of Color (1963) cites Bezold on colour-spread (‘the Bezold Effect’)
and also uses Bezold’s striking device of overlaid cut-out planes to demonstrate
_ vividly the contrast and relativity of colours.*?
Yet these more perceptually-oriented tendencies remained the exception in
German colour-theory for artists, who, in the tradition of Goethe’s moral and sym-
bolic values for colours, developed elaborate schemes of symbolic correspondences
during the nineteenth century and early modern period. Boécklin himself had
studied Goethe’s Farbenlehre in depth, but he devised his own set of moral associa-
tions: to him black, green and white in combination suggested seriousness, red,
yellow and blue cheerfulness, blue restfulness, and so on.*} Sttick similarly exploited
the connotations of his colours in painting: red for passion, sulphur-yellow for
danger, green for hope and blue for mystery, eternity, intellectuality and poetic
worth.*+

Experimental psychology: Fechner and Wundt

Such subjective attitudes to colour were much stimulated during the second half
of the century by the developing — and largely German — science of experimental
psychology, from G.T. Fechner’s Vorschule der Aesthetik (Primer of Aesthetics) of
1876, to the important work on colour-affects and preferences emanating chiefly
from the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt around 1900.Thus the great interest
in the dynamics of colour, which with the late-Romantic Bahr (Der dynamische
Kreis —The Dynamic Circle) had been expressed in terms of light and chemistry —
so that Bahr’s blue, for example (in contrast to Steffens’), represented oxygen — was
now directed inwards, and was nourished by experimental work with many human
subjects. Colour was now largely a concern ofpsychology.
Before the prestige of the Vienna school focused attention on psychiatry and
psycho-analysis it was experimental psychology which provided the concepts
shaping public awareness of the problems of mind.’'Thus in a periodical review of a

IQI
MOOD INDIGO

Munch exhibition in Berlin in 1906, the politician and critic Friedrich Naumann
could appeal quite naturally to the psychologist Wundt for an explanation of the
Norwegian painter’s divided touch.** It was in Wundt’s laboratory that the most
sustained experimentation on the non-associative effects of colour was carried out
in the twenty years up to the First World War. In a study of fourteen young,
professional and mainly German subjects in the early 1890s, Jonas Cohn found a
surprising love of contrasts of highly saturated colours, and he concluded that there
was a common, basic, sensual instinct for strong colour which was only later modi-
fied by culture.*° A later researcher in the same laboratory, F Stefanescu-Goanga,
reinforced Cohn’s conclusions, emphasizing ‘the individual consciousness and
above all individual experience’.*’
Stefanescu-Goanga found that blue was experienced as calming, depressing,
peaceful, quiet and serious, nostalgic (sehnsuchtig), melancholy, cool and calm, or
dreamy. Several of his subjects followed Goethe in feeling that this colour drew
them after it, and others described it as a ‘mysterious’ colour.** All this seemed to
reinforce the attitudes of recent researchers into synaesthesia and chromotherapy,
that colour was primarily a question of immediate feeling rather than of intellectual
judgment, and it was thus of the greatest importance to artists engaged in develop-
ing a non-representational art. As the critic Karl Scheffler wrote in an article which
may have introduced Kandinsky to both synaesthesia and chromotherapy (see
Chapter 21),‘never before was the sense of colour such a matter of nerves’.*”

Kandinsky and blue

Kandinsky had a particular liking for blue.“The inclination of blue towards depth’,
he wrote in On the Spiritual in Art (1911-12):
is so great that it becomes more intense the darker the tone, and has a more
characteristic inner effect. The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it
calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally,
for the supernatural... Blue is the typical heavenly colour. Blue unfolds in its
lowest depths the element of tranquility. As it deepens towards black, it assumes
overtones of a superhuman sorrow. It becomes like an infinite self-absorption
into that profound state of seriousness which has, and can have, no end.
As it
tends towards the bright [tones], to which blue is, however, less suited, it takes
on a more indifferent character and appears to the spectator remote and imper-
sonal, like the high, pale-blue sky. The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its
sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white. Represented in
musical terms, light blue resembles the flute, dark blue the ’cello, darker still
the wonderful sounds of the double bass; while in a deep, solemn form the
sound of blue can be compared to that of the deep tones ofthe organ.*°
This passage is crucial to understanding Kandinsky’s approach to colour because it
is informed by a whole range of reading which the painter had made his own. The
traditional ascription of spirituality to blue had been intensified at the beginning

192
 MOOD INDIGO

of the century by the Theosophical movement, to which Kandinsky was sympa-

thetic although he was never a member. In Thought-Forms (1901), which had been
translated into German in 1908, Annie Besant had argued that ‘The different shades
of blue all indicate religious feeling, and range through all hues from the dark
brown-blue of selfish devotion, or the pallid grey-blue of fetish-worship tinged
with fear, up to the rich deep clear colour of heartfelt adoration, and the beautiful
pale azure of that highest form which implies self-renunciation and union with the
civines: 4
Kandinsky’s musical analogies are particularly striking, since the ’cello was his
own instrument, whereas the flute, on the other hand, had been widely character-
ized as light blue in the technical literature of synaesthesia from the 1870s
onwards.** So his responses to blue were both personal and potentially universal.
Certainly we should not take as exhaustive Kandinsky’s late and rather off-hand
story of the origins of the title The Blue Rider for the almanac which he and Franz
Mare decided to edit in 1911, and which was to gather together examples of artistic
creativity widely separated in time and space. ‘We both loved blue, Marc horses; I
riders. So the name invented itself?+
Marc was indeed enthusiastic about blue horses (see his 1911 painting), but he 86
was no less convinced than Kandinsky of the masculine spirituality of blue. In a
letter of 1910 to his friend the painter August Macke he had revived the Romantic
aspiration of Runge to divide the colour-circle according to gender: ‘Blue is the
male principle, sharp and spiritual, yellow, the female principle, soft cheerful and
sensual, red, the material, and ever the colour which must be resisted and overcome
by the other two!’#
Here too, although the agenda may seem to have been a specifically Romantic
one, contemporary psychology was uncovering similar attitudes among a range of
subjects; Stefanescu-Goanga, for example, reported that among those he inter-
viewed in 1910-11,‘some characterized [yellow] as feminine and soft, in contradis-
tinction to red, which had a masculine, serious cast’.*5

Goethe in the twentieth century

What links the Blue Rider group most clearly to the Romantic tradition of colour-
theory is the belief in polarity, in contrast, which informs all their thinking, and
which often seems to be related specifically to Goethe. Kandinsky’s table of polarity 92
between blue and yellow is perhaps the most succinct illustration of this, but
Macke, too, in response to a questionnaire from the art magazine Kunst und Kunstler tot
in 1914, also argued that the supremely modern means of pictorial organization was
the strong overall effect created by individual areas of contrast in the painting; and
he cited especially the work of Robert Delaunay.*° In the early years of the century
Goethe’s Farbenlehre underwent a wide-ranging revaluation among German artists,
from the apparently academic circle around the scientist Arnold Brass in Munich to
the Expressionist E. L. Kirchner in Dresden, who was anxious to move on from
Neo-Impressionism.*7

193
MOOD INDIGO

TABLE I.

first pair (of an inner character, as

of opposites: I and I emotional effect)

Warm Cold
I = I contrast
Yellow Blue

2 movements:
1. horizontal

toward spec- away from spec-

tator (physical) tator (spiritual]}
Yellow Blue

2. eccentnc (a) and Cr) concentric

Light Dark
0 = [| contrast
White Black
2 movements:
1. The movement of resistance
Eternal resistance complete lack of
and yet possibili- White Black resistance and no
ty (birth) possibility {death}

2. Eccentric and concentric, as in the case of yellow and blue,

but in petrified form.

Wassily Kandinsky’s table of polarities from On the Spiritual in Art, 1911-12.This table was probably
developed from Goethe’s polarities of yellow and blue in the Theory of Colours, but Kandinsky gives the
opposites a particularly dynamic twist. (92)

It was probably under the stimulus of Goethe that Marc in the winter of 1910-11
87 began to look through a prism at the snowy landscape and his dog Russi, and to
attempt to match on the canvas the brilliance of the coloured fringes he saw at the
junctions oflight and dark. Goethe had described his own experience of brilliant
and delicate-coloured shadows on the snow during a journey in the Harz moun-
tains, although on that occasion he had not used a prism.** Marc told Macke ofthe
‘amazing coloured fringes’ he saw around his dog, a Siberian Shepherd, and of how
he completed the painting as a study of the contrasts between yellow, white and
blue.*?
This fascination with the prism, and enthusiasm for the powerful effects of colour-
contrast it revealed, was shared by a number ofartists and critics close to Herwarth
Walden’s Sturm Gallery in Berlin during and after the war. In 1916 S. Friedlander
(later Friedlander-Mynona) published in the gallery’s journal Der Sturm an article
in which he argued that colour-polarity was Goethe’s distinctive discovery, and in
the following year he amplified this view in a discussion of Goethe’s prismatic

194
 MOOD INDIGO

experiments (p. 132 above).°° Arthur Segal, a painter who had exhibited with Der 89
Sturm during the war, began to experiment with Goethe’s prismatic fringes in
paintings of the early 1920s in order to find a way of reconciling the equal demands
of colour and form: ‘The polar interaction of light and darkness’, he wrote, ‘is
manifested in the optical effect ofthings, thus in forms and colours_s!
Goethe's theory was an abiding presence among German modernist painters;
Kandinsky began to engage with it in a more thoroughgoing way as a teacher at the
Bauhaus in the 1920s, and in- Yellow-Red-Blue of 1925 he developed an unusually 88
sophisticated visualization of the creation of red from the augmentation (Steigerung)
of yellow and blue, as described in Goethe’s Farbenlehre.s? Extracts from a later
section of the book which also treats of this process appear among the lecture-notes
for Kandinsky’s Bauhaus courses, but he amplifies them with his own myth of the
sun (yellow) and the moon (blue), which link on the edges of night and day as red
sunrise or sunset.*’ It was perhaps in the context of this new agenda that Kandinsky
reversed the Theosophical and Blue Rider concept of the masculine spirituality of
blue, and suggested again that blue represented the feminine, for in many cultures
the moon was conceived of as female — although not, of course in Germany (der
Mond), so that Kandinsky was drawn to its Latin and feminine title,‘Luna’.*+ At the
Dessau Bauhaus, with its decisively modern and technological orientation, he was
now taking a more detached view of ‘the Theosophists’, and made much more
Wilhelm Ostwald (pp. 257-8), the best-known of German
reference to the ideas of
scientific colour-theorists, to Wundt and to the recent German school of Gestalt
psychology. But in an institution where the systems of Runge and Ostwald were
given equal attention, Kandinsky was also investing the abstract categories of
German Romantic colour with a new vitality.*

195
 15 - Chevreul between Classicism
and Romanticism

IVE YEARS BEFORE the death of the French chemist Michel-Eugéne Chevreul
le. the age of one hundred and three, the up-coming Neo-Impressionist Paul
Signac visited him in the company of another painter, Charles Angrand, with the
intention of discussing some problems about the division of light. When he heard
that they were concerned with painting, Chevreul advised them to call on his col-
league at the Institut, Monsieur Ingres, who would be able to tell them all they
needed to know.' This advice has puzzled historians of art, who, following the hints
of the critic Charles Blanc, have generally believed that Chevreul’s influential ideas
on colour were transmitted to French artists in the nineteenth century through the
agency of Ingres’s great rival, Delacroix.This is a view which has something to rec-
ommend it, but I want in this chapter to suggest that the great chemist’s suggestion
was perfectly correct — apart from the fact that Ingres had been dead for eighteen
years — and that it was among painters of a classicizing tendency, such as Ingres, that
we may find the most immediate heirs of Chevreul’s principles.We may well recall,
as Meyer Schapiro noted many years ago, that Chevreul had been appointed to the
Gobelins tapestry works in the 1820s, not simply to regulate the dyes, but also to
banish unforeseen and unwanted colour from the woollen threads and produce
pure blacks by the removal of the subjective effects of simultaneous contrast.* If
Romanticism meant colour, then the mere removal of it could align Chevreul
immediately with the rival school ofthe classicists.
In 1828 Chevreul published his first discussion of colour:‘Memoir on the influ-
ence that two colours may have on each other when they are seen simultaneously’3
in which he announced the laws ofsimultaneous and successive contrast; but it was
largely through the biennial courses of public lectures that he gave at the Gobelins
from this date until the 1850s that his ideas passed into the orbit of painters, who
began to take notice of these ‘laws’ in the 1830s, and to heighten their contrasts by
juxtaposing complementary colours.* A decade later, when Chevreul’s monumen-
tal study, On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of Colours, was finally published, not
only were his principles taken up in a number of professional journals, such as
L’Artiste, but his lectures were also advertised at the Paris ai exhibition as ‘a
course which all artists may follow with profit’.
Chevreul was increasingly consulted by painters. One was Louis Hersent, a pupil
of the Neo-Classical painter Regnault and a long-time professor at the Ecole des

196
 CHEVREUL BETWEEN ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM

Beaux-Arts; another was Louis Daguerre, who before turning to photography was
the best-known painter of that popular spectacle, the Diorama, both in France and
in England. Chevreul had been able to show Daguerre how the effects of successive
contrast would enable him to rest his eyes during prolonged work on the large-
scale Diorama, if he turned to look at sheets of paper painted with colours comple-
mentary to those on his canvas.°

Chevreul and Vernet

Chevreul’s most important contact among painters, however, was certainly Horace
Vernet, who soon became a friend.’ As a specialist in battle-painting,Vernet shared 93
with the chemist a particular interest in military uniforms; Chevreul argued that 94
strong combinations of colours would allow simultaneous contrast to counteract
the effects of fading and wear, and thus prove to be more economical than more
closely-related tones.* But, of course, the development of more effective artillery
and rifles meant that the tradition of hand-to-hand fighting was increasingly irrele-
vant, and camouflage became more important than impressive display. As Chevreul
himself recognized:
If uniforms which present contrasts of colour are advantageous in an econom-
ical point of view, if uniforms of light colours are advantageous when we wish
to impress an enemy by the number of combatants opposed to him, there are
cases where, far from deploying battalions and squadrons, with the intention

M.-E. Chevreul by his friend, the painter

Horace Vernet, around 1850. (93)

197
CHEVREUL BETWEEN ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM

of rendering extended lines visible, we seek, on the contrary, to conceal the

presence of riflemen or sharpshooters. For the latter, and also if we wish to
establish a kind of hierarchy between different corps by means of dress, we
may have recourse to a monochrome uniform of a sombre colour.
(On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast, 1839, §674)

In spite ofhis links with the French Romantic school in his youth, Vernet became
an establishment figure, member of the Institut, professor at the Ecole and the
predecessor ofIngres as director of the French Academy in Rome (1829- 34), loaded
with honours both in France and abroad, and perhaps the French painter best
known to the general public of his day. But did Vernet learn something about
colour from the theorist? Not perhaps very much.
Chevreul’s ‘laws’ were promoted largely as a key to colour-harmony ~ the first
English translation of his book was entitled The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of
Colours (1854); and in a subsequent revision Chevreul had hoped to include a
section specifically on aesthetics.’ But Vernet had the reputation of being a poor
harmonizer; as one of his bitterest critics, Théophile Silvestre, put it in 1856:

He lacks character in his drawing and at the same time unity in his composi-
tion, magic in his chiaroscuro, concentration of effect, and harmony of colour.
Particularly in recent years his work has displayed a harsh crudity, and I believe
it was according to the formula of some [paint] merchant from Saint-Germain
that he sang his last clashing scale:

PURE BLUE, PORE RED, PURE{(GREEN, PURE

YELLOW, PURE VIOLET, PURE WHITE:

The shrill harmonies of these words will perhaps give you some idea of the
arrangement ofhis hues.'°

Painting inflat tints

It was nevertheless precisely here that Vernet owed something to Chevreul, for the
chemist’s privileging of the harmony of complementaries was essentially in the
context of‘painting in flat tints’, a method developed largely in the decorative arts,
but which was increasingly integrated into many branches of French painting in
the second half of the nineteenth century (Law, §237). Chevreul distinguished
between the ‘chiaroscuro painting’ of the European tradition, and the ‘flat tints’
which he identified with applied art, and especially with Oriental styles; but
although he thought the latter method of painting more primitive, it was still
important in modern Western practice:

for in every instance where painting is an accessory and not a principal feature,
painting in flat tints is in every respect preferable to the other.
(Law, $302)

198
 CHEVREUL BETWEEN ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM

And he instanced the remote distance of represented objects which would make
the finish of ‘an elaborate picture’ disappear, so that the economy of means of
decorative painting would make it far clearer. Simultaneous contrast was to play a
major role in this style of painting, and in the harmony of contrast, as opposed to
the harmony of close tones, the complementaries provided the best combination of
colours (§237).
Chevreul’s reference to Oriental painting was very much in tune with the inter-
ests of both classicists and Romantics in France from the 1820s onwards;Vernet for
example had a room at the Villa Medici, the seat of the French Academy in Rome,
decorated for himself in the Turkish style while he was director there. Delacroix’s
Algerian Women in their Apartment of 1834, a painting used by the mid-century critic 95
Charles Blanc to illustrate Chevreul’s principles of contrast in its handling of tex-
tiles,"' was matched by Ingres’s Odalisque of 1814 (Louvre) and his Odalisque with a
Slave of 1839-40, and Delacroix remarked to George Sand particularly about the 96
‘flat’ decorative emphasis in Ingres’s painting, complaining:
he puts a bit of red on a cloak, some lilac on a cushion, some green here, some
blue there, a vivid red, a spring green, a sky-blue. He has a taste for dress and a
knowledge of costume. He has interspersed in his coiffures, in his fabrics, in his
ribbons, a lilac of exquisite freshness, coloured borders and the attractiveness
of a thousand pretty ornaments, but they do nothing at all to create colour.”
But for Ingres himself this was a matter of principle; as he wrote:
the essential qualities of colour are...in the brightness and individuality of the
colours of objects. For example, put a beautiful and brilliant white drapery
against an olive-dark body, and above all distinguish a pale blonde colour from a
cold colour, and a transient colour from the colours of figures in their local
tints. This observation was provoked by the chance sight of a brilliant and
beautiful white drapery against the thigh of my Oedipus reflected in a mirror
beside the warm and glowing colour of the flesh."
It is thus no surprise that one of the earliest discussions of Chevreul’s ideas in the
context ofart was that of the decorative painter Clerget, in the Bulletin de l’Ami des
Arts in 1844; nor that it was a pupil of Ingres also concerned with applied art, Jules-
Claude Ziegler, who six years later published the first extended, if not entirely
favourable account of Chevreul’s principles in Etudes Céramiques, perhaps the earli-
est treatment in a French book."
There is a certain irony in Charles Blanc’s determination to treat Delacroix’s
Algerian Women as if it were based on complementary contrasts, since there are very
few Chevreulian complementaries in this painting, and the painter’s theoretical
interests at this time seem to have been informed rather by a colleague, the painter
When Blanc met Delacroix, perhaps for
and colour-technologistJ. F L. Mérimée.'’
the first time, round 1850, the painter was certainly very interested in Chevreul’s
ideas and hoped to visit the chemist, but was prevented from doing so by a throat
infection. It was about this time that Delacroix must have acquired a notebook
summarizing a course of lectures given by Chevreul during the winter of 1847-8

199
CHEVREUL BETWEEN ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM

which included a discussion of ‘painting in flat tints’."® Delacroix’s increasing

involvement with large-scale mural and ceiling painting at the Palais Bourbon and
in the Palais du Luxembourg in the 1830s and 1840s, and his work from 1850 on the
ceiling of the Salle d’Apollon in the Louvre, demanded just the strong contrasting
tones for distant viewing which the chemist had explored so thoroughly.’

Shades ofgrey
Thus artists learned much from Chevreul during his own lifetime; but it seems to
have been largely for the purposes ofstructuring their paintings, rather than for the
creation of colour-harmonies, or to understand more clearly the manifestations of
colour in nature. French painters looked to Chevreul for essentially formalist reasons,
and formalism was already a major concern of academic art. It will be recalled that
at the beginning of his work on colour, Chevreul had been concerned to remove all
unforeseen colours from the Gobelins tapestries and, like a true classicist, he loved
greys, especially in female dress.'* For, as he had established in his On the Law of
Simultaneous Contrast of Colours, it was contrasts ofvalue, not ofhue, that offered the
most powerful effects of simultaneous contrast (§339). Both the brilliant lithogra-
pher Delacroix and the grisaille-painter Ingres would probably have agreed with
him on this; and among artists of the next generation, the etcher and former pupil
of Ingres, Felix Bracquemond, an associate of the Impressionists as well as an orien-
talizing designer, made a similar point in his Du Dessin et de la Couleur of 188s,
where he argued that even Chevreul had been rather casual about establishing a
comprehensive grey-scale.'? In the notes which Georges Seurat made from
Chevreul’s treatise it is clear that he was also much impressed by the idea of the
dominant role of black and white; and all Seurat’s major compositions until 1890
are based on an underlying tonal structure (see the following chapter). The notori-
ous greying, the suppression of colour, for which so many artists and critics attacked
Seurat’s paintings, may well turn out to be the most sincere of the tributes paid by
nineteenth-century painters to the work of Chevreul.?°
The bright military uniforms ofthe French battle-painter Horace Vernet (1824). Vernet’s
who
colourful painting links his interests to those of his friend, the chemist Michel-Eugéne Chevreul,
reason that
advocated the use of strong complementary colours for military wear for the very practical
they would offset the effects of fading. (94)
 Chevreul and contrast

Both Delacroix and Ingres, in their many oriental subjects,

used juxtaposed complementaries and near-complementaries
to create a sense of harmony in variety. Eugéne Delacroix’s
Algerian Women in their Apartment of 1834 (below) heightens
the tonal contrast in patterned silks by juxtaposing orange and
blue, violet and blue-green. The later nineteenth-century critic
Charles Blanc went so far as to suggest that Delacroix was a
conscious follower of Chevreul, who had elevated the idea of
contrast into a law. (95)

The harmonious interior of J. A. D. Ingres’ Odalisque with

a Slave of 1839-40 (right) strengthens red by the contrast of
pale green. (96)

iS) oO we)
 Indefinable colour

With fluid, shimmering, subtly dissolving areas of pinks, blues, greens and oranges, Georges Seurat’s
Evening, Honfleur of 1886 gives a particularly vivid sense of the shifting colours of nature — indefinable,
and hence resistant to analysis. (97)

Black is offered as a subject in this canvas (right) more radically than in any other work by Matisse.
French Window — Collioure (1914) relates closely to Manet’s The Balcony (20). The window, opening
not out on to a landscape, but in to a dark room, presents a quality of luminous blackness as the
main theme of the painting. It was first exhibited in 1966, in the United States. (98)

04
The theoretically oriented artist Louis Hayet devised ten different colour-circles incorporating
the newest conceptions of complementarity, such as Helmholtz’s pair of yellow and blue that
mix to white.One (above) he sent to Pissarro, another to the younger painter Seurat, whom he
met in 1885. The circles’ very fine divisions made them frustratingly impractical for artists.(99)

The rainbow-like gradations of M.-E. Chevreul’s 1864 colour-circle (below) suggest how hard
it was for Hayet to define the edges of his many segments in colour-space. (100)
Shaping colour

Stimulated by Delaunay’s Wind vs (p. 255-6), in 1912 August Macke adopted a similar technique
for Large, Bright Shop Window. Transpare ncy is rendered with facetted planes of colour, lustre with
dots of the complementaries. (I0T)
 Gavlemens of the I ‘ant a’gon fo ask you to give even a moments consideration

to the evidence _— before you If ‘aint worth shucks, It dont count , and even if it did , it dont proveas my

client werent there. No gentlemen , You can't convict even a white man on such evidence much lessa mgger.

A rare vizualization ofthe colours of spoken words: ‘Lawyer Spoke Stith’s address to the jury’, 1900, from The Music of
Color and the Number Seven by the American architect and designer E. J. Lind. (102)

The physiological effects of exposure

to colours attracted general attention around
HE KEMP-PROSSOR “CCLOUR - CURE~
the time of the First World War. Here a
Ward at the McCaul Hospital, Welbeck Street, W., paint-manufacturer advertises a ‘therapeutic’
for shell-shock and nerve*cases, The sense of-con colour for use in a ‘shell-shock ward’. The
finement from which such patients suffer isi done away with by painting
the ceiling Firmament Blue, walls Sunlight Yellow, woodwork Spisug medical establishment remained sceptical,
reen and floor and furniture Sunlight Primrose — the special]
colours evolved by Mr. H. and modern research into the area has been
emp-Prossor, and made
to his exact specification limited. (103)
and approval only in

“Mr, Berger” Portfolio of 54

made Fine Matone Colours
| Colours in
London in
on request to: Leadiess, Flat Oil Paint
1760 Lewis Berger & Sons, Ltd., Homerton, London, E.9.
 16 - The Technique of Seurat —
A Reappraisal

Ree STUDIES of Seurat have usually focused on his subject matter, but there
can be little doubt that the painter himself nailed his flag firmly to the mast of
technical innovatio n. as he wrote to his friend, the critic Félix Fénéon,
‘Téchnique’,
was ‘the soul and the body of the art’;' and he complained that it was a mistake to
see poetry in his work, which was simply a matter of method.’ Seurat’s working
methods have been treated in some detail, and the full-length monograph by W. I.
Homer, Seurat and the Science of Painting, which has been reprinted several times
since it was first published in 1964, has seemed to most commentators to be exhaus-
tive,’ which is one reason, perhaps, why the subject now attracts relatively little
attention. In his book Homer wrote of La Grande Jatte, the key painting in the 104
development of Neo-Impressionism:
First, [Seurat] discovered and applied physical laws governing the behaviour of
light and color in nature, rather than merely relying on his sensations; by doing
so, he was literally able to make his picture duplicate nature’s mode of opera-
tion, thus obtaining a degree of luminosity far greater than that achieved by the
Impressionists. Second, Seurat successfully integrated a carefully thought-out,
wide-range value-scheme with a color system that could accurately represent
nature’s hues and values. In other words, he united the traditional elements of
chiaroscuro, both in modeling and pictorial planning, with colors that, like
those of the Impressionists, were extremely accurate in representing the actual
hues present in the subject — local colors, the tone of the illuminating light, and
diverse reflections. Third, he harmonized the colors of La Grande Jatte accord-
ing to the principles of contrast and analogy drawn largely from the writings
of Chevreul and Rood, rather than relying on instinct or rule of thumb.+

This thesis, which is essentially the theme of Homer’s book as a whole, rests on a
number of misunderstandings of Seurat’s ideas and practice; and these have tended
to suggest that the painter’s approach to ‘scientific’ theory was unproblematic. Even
Meyer Schapiro, whose healthy scepticism about the scientific credentials of Neo-
Impressionism has been too little heeded by later commentators, was content to
argue that they simply do not matter for the aesthetic understanding of Seurat’s art:
‘Too much has been written, and often incorrectly, about the scientific nature of
the dots. The question whether they make a picture more or less luminous hardly
matters. A painting can be luminous and artistically dull, or low-keyed in color
and radiant to the mind’ Indeed it can; but if Seurat, who identified himself as
an ‘impressioniste-luministe’,° adopted the dotted technique in the expectation of

209
THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT — A REAPPRAISAL

achieving a heightened luminosity — as Fénéon suggested that he did — and if

this were an expectation that could not, for theoretical and practical reasons, be
sustained, it is surely in order to inquire further into the mechanisms of experimen-
tation that encouraged the painter to persist in this method through the major
paintings ofseveral years.
Here I shall discuss a few of the factors that suggest that Seurat was not especially
anxious to ground his practice in a thorough understanding of the colour-theory of
his day. I shall try to throw more light on his piecemeal reading of that theory, and
suggest that the aspects of the theory with which he felt most affinity were not
always those which reflected most closely the ‘scientific aesthetics’ of the 1880s.

Seurat’s reading
It is not at all surprising that Homer should have developed the thesis implicit in
the statement quoted above, for it derives essentially from the criticism of Fénéon,
which, in its turn, had received the sanction of Seurat himself.” Fénéon’s first and
most substantial analysis of the painter’s work appeared in La Vogue for June 1886:
If you consider a few square inches of uniform tone in Monsieur Seurat’s Grande
Jatte, you will find on each inch ofits surface, in a whirling host oftiny spots, all
the elements which make up the tone.Take this grass plot in the shadow: most
of the strokes render the local value of the grass; others, orange-tinted and
thinly scattered, express the scarcely felt action of the sun; bits of purple intro-
duce the complement to green; a cyanic blue, provoked by the proximity of a
plot of grass in the sunlight, accumulates its siftings towards the line of demar-
cation, and beyond that point progressively rarifies them. Only two elements
come together to produce the grass in the sun; green and orange-tinted light,
any interaction being impossible under the furious beating of the sun’s rays... *
This formulation was very similar to Seurat’s own summary characterization of his
technique in a letter to the journalist Maurice Beaubourg of 28 August 1890:
The means of expression is the optical mixture of tonal values and colors
(both local color and the color ofthe light source, be it sun, oil lamps, gas, etc.),
that is to say, the optical mixture of lights and their reactions (shadows) in
accordance with the laws ofcontrast, gradation, and irradiation.®

Yet there are several anomalies in these accounts. One is the notion of‘local’ colour
(i.e., the colour conceived as a constant attribute ofthe object) in a context so evi-
dently flooded with ‘the furious beating of the sun’s rays’, for there is, strictly speak-
ing, no colour except that inherent in the rays of light reflected back into the eyes of
the spectator. Fénéon’s remarks have been appropriately traced back to a passage in
the American physicist Ogden Rood’s Modern Chromatics, a work he cites in his
review of 1886, and which Seurat implies he had himself seen as early as 1881, the
year of the French translation.'° Rood, however, was considering a laboratory situa-
tion in which surfaces are lit simultaneously by white and coloured light; he was

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Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-6. The pointillist technique is
here applied to a major subject for the first time, although not introduced until the later stages of the
execution, in 1886. (104)

careful to explain that the ‘natural’ colour of surfaces, which, he says, artists call ‘local
colour’, is their colour in white light, and he allows his objects no inherent colour,
irrespective of their lighting.”
Seurat’s endorsement of the conventional notion of local colour is the more
surprising in that, in his letter of 1890 to Fénéon, he also listed in his early reading
Charles Blanc’s essay on Delacroix of 1864.'* Blanc had begun his account by recall-
ing a conversation among Delacroix, the painter Chenavard and himself, in the
course of which the aged master had asserted that the great colourists had always
perceived the essential relativity of colour: they had never sought to establish ‘le ton
local’, but had always worked through the manipulation of optical contrasts. It was
this very passage in Blanc which, also in the early 1880s, had especially intrigued
and puzzled van Gogh, and had led him at Neunen specifically to reject the idea of
‘local colour’ with which he had been brought up." Not so Seurat, and his practical
exemplification of the idea is well illustrated in La Grande Jatte, where, as Fénéon 104
observed, the more transient effects of light are scattered over much more broadly
and solidly established areas of ‘local’ tone and hue. But this was a procedure that he
progressively eliminated in favour of a more uniform overall structure of dots,
expressive entirely of the action of light.
THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT — A REAPPRAISAL

Another curiosity in Fénéon’s La Vogue analysis is his introduction ofthe notion

of ‘solar orange’. Rood, and I suppose every other theorist of the 1870s, had explained
sunlight as a white aggregate of all the colours of the spectrum, in which orange
played a very minor role. Some of Seurat’s earliest colour-sketches for La Grande
Jatte suggest that he, too, had felt that sunlight, as it is reflected from water or grass, 1s
essentially achromatic, for they are vigorously flecked with strokes of white paint."
As the lover of ‘striped’ lawns or the observer of a hayfield ruffled by the wind may
easily see, much of this whiteness is due to the glossy, highly reflective surface of the
individual blades of grass. Certainly Blanc, as well as his hero Delacroix, had written
of sunlight as ‘orange’ or ‘golden, in texts that were familiar to Seurat;'® and in a
passage on the modifying effects of environmental reflections, Rood himself had
almost described the rationale of the painter’s touches of orange-yellow and sky-
blue in La Grande Jatte:
The grandest illustration of these changes we find in those cases where objects
are illuminated simultaneously by the yellow rays of the sun and the blue light
ofthe clear sky: here,by this cause alone, the natural colors of objects are mod-
ified to a wonderful extent, and effects of magical beauty produced, which by
their intricacy almost defy analysis.'”
Working from nature, too, Seurat may have come to feel that the warmth of after-
noon sunlight might best be expressed chromatically as orange. In his diary for
3 December 1894, the painter’s friend and interpreter Paul Signac identified the
colour oflight at noon as ‘yellow white’ or ‘orange yellow’, and at five in the after-
noon as ‘orange’ or ‘orange and red’;'* and Fénéon had firmly placed La Grande Jatte
at four o’clock, which, from the length of the shadows, seems plausible enough for
late May or early June.'? One factor, however, and perhaps the most important,
which may have decided Seurat to interpret sunlight as orange during the course of
his work on this picture, and to confine white to the ‘local’ colour of many objects
in it, was that white stood outside the circle of hues, and its opposite or “comple-
ment’, black, was banished from the palette as a ‘non-light’ (in Fénéon’s words), so
that white could necessarily play no part in a style whose structural principle was
complementarity.
It is perhaps in his treatment of complementarity that Seurat’s attitude to con-
temporary theory shows itself to be most ambivalent. The pioneering work on
109 additive and subtractive mixture by Hermann von Helmholtz and Clerk Maxwell
in the 1850s and 1860s had modified the traditional view (repeated by Chevreul
and Blanc) that the pairs of colours complementary to each other were red-green,
orange-blue, and yellow-violet, and had given much more precise chromatic defin-
itions of these pairs. Helmholtz’s conclusions had been popularized in a number of
French manuals in the 1870s, as well as in the French translations of books by Ernst
Briicke and Rood, whose chapter on colour-mixing included very precise tables of
the results achieved by rotating discs painted with areas of named pigments. Rood’s
book is especially important because it presented these findings specifically to
painters, who were instructed how to make use of additive mixtures based on the
primaries red, blue-green and violet by means of a dotted technique (where the

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 THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT — A REAPPRAISAL

more traditional methods of mixing on the palette or by means of glazing were, of

course, subtractive, and employed a primary set of red, yellow, and blue).
These details would have been of the first importance for painters anxious, like
Seurat, to reconstitute light by the optical mixture of its components. Seurat never
claimed to have read Rood (see n. 10), but he certainly made notes from him,” and,
most important, he seems to have copied Rood’ circular contrast-diagram arranged
according to Helmholtz’s new scheme, with blue opposite orange-yellow, green
opposite red-purple, and so on.”' We do not, however, know the date of this copy, or
even whether it is certainly by Seurat, for it seems to be a tracing; and a sketch of a
colour-circle about 1887-8, recently published by Herbert, shows the painter still 106
thinking in terms of the traditional sets.*? The latter diagram seems to have been
made from memory, perhaps to demonstrate a point to another person.As Herbert
shows, Seurat’s starting point was the circle of Charles Henry, whose Introduction a 105
une esthétique scientifique (1885) is the source of other notes on this sheet; but Henry’s
eight-part circle was based on Helmholtz’s complementaries, and Seurat clearly had

Charles Henry’s colour-circle showing the rouge

movement of colours, from Cercle Chromatique, 1889.
Henry was one of the earliest French exponents of
rouge violet
experimental psychology as applied to aesthetics.
In his circle, colours moving from low to high,
e.g. blue-green to red, or from left to right, were
“dynamogenous’ and pleasing, while those moving in
the opposite direction were inhibitory or sad. Seurat me
jaune
became interested in using some of Henry’s ideas in violet
his later work. (105)
dégressif
du centre
Seurat’s colour-diagram sketched at the bottom of a vai la periphene
sheet of Parade studies, 1887-8. The changes of mind
about the positions of contrasting colours suggest a
confusion in Seurat’s mind between the systems of
Chevreul and Helmholtz. (106) bleu vert

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THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT — A REAPPRAISAL

difficulty fitting his own sexpartite Chevreulian scheme (also discussed by Henry in
this book) into this format, hence the indecision about the position of yellow.”
Robert Herbert has pointed out to me the co-existence of Chevreul’s and
Helmholtz’ pairs in the painted complementary frame of the small ensemble study
of Les Poseuses in the Berggruen Collection;** but the Chevreulian set was what
Seurat recalled in his unpublished letter to Beaubourg (cited p. 210 above), as well as
in his published statement to Jules Christophe, as late as 1890.*°
I have suggested that one ofthe great virtues of Rood’s handbook was its practi-
cality: it discussed colour-effects not simply in terms of abstract hues, but also in
terms of pigments available to artists. Homer’s important article on a (late?) palette
in the Nachlass does not go into details about the pigments on it,*° but although
Seurat’s arrangement of hues does not seem to be quite that recalled by Signac for
his own practice after 1883, it is reasonable to assume that their pigments were very
similar, and that Seurat’s were arranged, from the thumbhole, in this order:
cadmium yellow, orange(?), orange(?), vermilion, cobalt violet, artificial ultrama-
rine, cerulean or cobalt blue, viridian (emerald) green, chrome green.*’ This palette
was described by Fénéon as organized along prismatic lines, but it is not strictly the
case, and the arrangement can be contrasted with the truly spectral palette pub-
lished in these years by the teacher of technique at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the
genre-painter J.-G.Vibert, in his Science of Painting.** What seems chiefly to concern
Seurat is to reconcile as far as possible the traditional, tonally arranged academic
palette, running from white to black through yellow, red, and blue, with the order of
hues in the solar spectrum; and this is of some importance for the assessment of the
role of tonal values in Seurat’s painting.
Rood, whose experiments with disc-mixtures were conducted in watercolours,
listed a palette of gamboge, Indian yellow, chrome yellow, vermilion, red lead,
carmine, Hoffmann’s violet, cobalt blue, cyan blue, Prussian blue, and emerald
green, many of which had to be mixed on the palette to achieve the appropriate
effect on the discs.’ It is a palette similar in character to the one reconstructed for
Seurat above, and although it is more traditional than that of the French painter, it
also excludes earth-colours.
That Seurat continued to use earths at least until 188 4°
suggests either that he had not read (or had not understood) Rood by that date, or
that he was not yet interested in the method of optical mixing for which Rood’s
suggestions about pigments would have been especially helpful. The emergence of
a regularly dotted technique only in the later stages of painting La Grande Jatte
suggests that the latter hypothesis is the case.

Painterly experiment
Seurat styled his new method of working ‘peinture optique’>' It was based on a
specific philosophy of perception; and it might well be that the painter’s evident
disregard of current theory had no damaging consequences for his work, which
could have started with a few simple notions, for example of optical mixture, and
then developed under the independent momentum of his practice. He did, after all,

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 THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT — A REAPPRAISAL

claim that he had ‘discovered scientifically the law of pictorial colour... with the
experience of art’.**It is one of the strengths of Homer’s study that he shows how
Seurat’s technical strategies were modified with each of the major compositions of
the 1880s as a result of a continuous programme of experimentation. Here I shall
look at three aspects of the method that might be expected to depend essentially on
this programme: viewing distance, the relationship of contrasts to mixtures in the
structure of the surface, and the relationship of hues to values.
Homer, following Fénéon, has opted for a relatively fixed viewing distance, at the
point where the eye has difficulty in resolving the discrete marks into a single tone,
and in the effort to do so continually changes its focus, producing that rich shim-
mering effect which Rood characterized as ‘lustre’.33Homer cites Pissarro’s dictum,
that a picture should be seen at a distance ‘which allows its colors to blend’, which
that painter thought was usually three times the diagonal of the canvas.* Signac,
too, seems to have felt that the colours should fuse, and sought to devise a technique
of blending the brushstrokes where this did not happen at the appropriate dis-
tance.** But what is very striking in La Grande Jatte and Les Poseuses, as well as in 104, 29
several late works like La Poudreuse in London, is the great variety in size and shape
of Seurat’s brushstrokes; and we know from Signac that at least the two earlier
pictures were painted in a studio too confined to allow the artist to stand back very
far, with the result that he found the dots too small for the large size of the canvas.3°
Seurat must clearly have had his reasons for the variety in his touch, and in some
cases they are very obvious: sometimes, for example, he wanted to firm up the
contours of his shapes by making the dots along them much smaller than average,
and hence fusible by the spectator closer to the surface of the picture.*” But this
cannot be the only reason.
In his classic study of the technique of Impressionism,J. Carson Webster showed
that optical mixtures in La Grande Jatte seem in some cases to offer no advantages
over ordinary palette-mixtures;** and this can be demonstrated even more effec-
tively in the case of the recently cleaned Bathers at Asniéres,a pre-Divisionist work of 107
1883-4 that received a few local revisions in the later technique in 1887. The
retouchings in bright blue and orange on the back of the central bather fuse at a
distance to a warm bluish-pink, which is very close to the original palette-mixed
shadows under his arm. It seems clear that Seurat was not so much interested in the
optically-mixed tone as in the lively texture created by the separated dots them-
selves. In the area around the hat on the grass in this picture, the darkened yellow
revisions — due, according to Signac, to inferior paints and already apparent very
soon after Seurat’s death*? — can still be seen clearly at the far end of the gallery, long
after the other retouchings have disappeared.
Seurat must have realized after only a few experiments with optical mixture that
there is, indeed, no constant viewing-distance for fusing the various separate colours.
In particular, he must have noticed that contrasting values resist fusion far longer
than even complementary hues,*° and this is surely of the greatest consequence
to our understanding of his use of values in the structure of his major paintings.
Yet there is no indication in Seurat’s work that he sought to vary the size of dot for
specific hues, to achieve fusion at a constant distance, and it is difficult to resist the

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THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT —A REAPPRAISAL

Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asniéres, 1883-4. That Seurat repainted only parts of his Bathers in a dotted
technique in 1887 suggests that even at this late date he did not insist upon a unified surface nor a fixed
viewing distance. (107)

conclusion that, as Meyer Schapiro noticed long ago, the dotting has itself an impor-
tant aesthetic, and even a political resonance, in that it draws attention to its own
mode of operation, and makes itself accessible to every spectator.*'
Seurat’s major compositions, up to Le Cirque of 1890, rest on a magnificent series
108, II] of charcoal and conté drawings, and it was the secure knowledge of tonal structure
that these studies provided that made the painter feel free to ignore some of the
more problematic aspects of the theory of colour. In an article on Signac, Fénéon
noted that contrasts of value ‘regulate’ contrasts of hue;** and Seurat himself copied
from Chevreul a passage that includes substantially the same point:‘To put a dark
colour near a different but lighter colour is to heighten the tone ofthe first and to
lower that of the second, independently of the modification resulting from the
mixture of the complementaries.’’ As Seurat told his fellow Neo-Impressionist H.
E. Cross, the ‘ensemble’ first presented itselfto his imagination ‘by the masses, and
by the interplay of values’;** and Signac told Daniel Catton Rich that even during
the course of working on the final canvas of La Grande Jatte the painter would fix
the large conté studies of figures against the appropriate part of the picture to assess
the effect.*5

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 THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT — A REAPPRAISAL

It was probably this tonal anchor that allowed Seurat to overcome the contradic-
tions inherent in a method that sought to combine optical mixture which creates
soft contours with complementary contrast which requires hard ones.
As Signac wrote in his attack on mindless ‘pointillism’ in his pamphlet From
Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism:
The role of dotting [Pointillage] is more humble: it simply makes the surface of
the paintings more lively, but it does not guarantee luminosity, intensity of colour,
or harmony. For the complementary colours, which are allies and enhance
each other when juxtaposed, are enemies and destroy each other if mixed, even
optically.A red and a green surface, ifjuxtaposed, enliven each other, but red dots
mingled with green dots make an aggregation which is grey and colourless.*°
It was probably for this reason, too, that Seurat, finding that his optical mixtures
would not provide surfaces so intensely coloured that they could, when juxtaposed,
create of their own accord the contrast effects described by Chevreul, painted these
effects into his pictures, darkening edges where they met the light, and lightening 27-8
them where they met the dark, as well as tingeing the coloured boundaries with
their complementaries.*’ His ‘optical painting’, deprived of the powers of nature
itself, could be truly optical only in one dimension.

Georges Seurat, The Nurse, 1884. The large number of conté crayon drawings prepared for each of
Seurat’s major compositions — here for La Grande Jatte — show how firmly the paintings were based on
a tonal rather than chromatic structure. (108)

iy
THE TECHNIQUE OF SEURAT — A REAPPRAISAL

The primacy of Chevreul

Seurat emerges as a painter who, unlike some ofthe critics of Impressionism such as
Duranty and Huysmans, was not really abreast of the colour-science of his period,
even though it had been specifically popularized for the use of artists.‘* But his
painterly sensitivity and technical ingenuity nevertheless enabled him to extract
from the theoretical literature a number of simple concepts and put them to work
in the formation ofa new style, avoiding many of the pitfalls that situations of such
enormous complexity were bound to present. What is most surprising is that
Fénéon’s ill-informed resumé of some of the principles he found in Rood’s text-
book should for so long have passed muster, not simply with painters like Signac or
Pissarro, to whom, when Seurat himself was not forthcoming, he turned for the
checking ofhis texts,” but also with a polymath trained in the natural sciences like
Charles Henry.*° Perhaps the separation ofthe spheres ofart and science at this time
was rather more complete than we have been led to expect.
What, then, was Seurat after in his theoretical reading, and in particular, why did
he remain attached to the superannuated Chevreul in the face of the more recent
work of Helmholtz, which was readily available to him in Rood and in many other
French sources? It was I think chiefly because ofhis overriding preoccupation with
harmony:‘Art is Harmony, as he put it at the head ofhis statement in the 1890 letter
to Beaubourg; and Chevreul had far more, and far simpler things to say about
harmony than any of his successors. Most important, Chevreul had equated the
maximal contrast of the complementaries with maximum harmony.*' Rood, in the
chapter of his treatise on “Combinations of colors in pairs and triads’, in which he
chiefly discussed harmony, was content essentially to follow Chevreul; but it is clear
that his own preferences as a painter and a theorist were rather for ‘the small inter-
val’ (that is, juxtapositions of colours close to each other on the circle) than for
maximal contrasts.** Seurat’s aesthetic credo of 1890, although it begins by stating
that harmony is the analogy of similar elements as well as of opposites, gives no
further attention to the former; and it has frequently been observed that his style of
Neo-Impressionism differs from that of, say, Signac or Pissarro precisely in a liking
for sharp contrasts, especially in the period 1886-7.
Can Seurat’s technique, therefore, be understood as ‘scientific’, and if so, in what
sense? I think it can, and most of all in its experimentalism, which provided an
unusually precise focus for the assessment of visual effects, and allowed Seurat, as
well as his many successors in the years up to the First World War, to test the effec-
tiveness of their methods, and, of course, ultimately to reject them. Seurat’s pro-
gramme of experimentation is also seen in a negative light in his obsessive concern
with the chronology of his researches, and in his wish, expressed in his letter to
Fénéon ofJune 1890, to set the record of his own priority straight.53 The idea of
painting as a progressive series ofvisual discoveries is, of course, as old as art histori-
ography itself, but with Seurat it took on a particular urgency, and has become part
of the mythology ofspecifically modernist art.

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 17 - Seurat’s Silence

eG THE NOTABLY synaesthetic effect of many of Seurat’s major paintings: the

shouting boy in Bathers at Asniéres, or the razzmatazz of the Grande Jatte, Parade,
Chahut and Cirque,’ my title may seem to be something of amisnomer; one recent
commentator has reminded us that Seurat’s art was seen by at least one of his con-
temporaries, Paul Alexis, as positively Wagnerian.? In this chapter I am concerned
with Seurat’s science, but I am equally concerned with his unusual silence about it:
as he wrote in 1888 to Paul Signac,‘I don’t talk much.’3
That Seurat opened himselfto some people and not to others is no more than we
should expect; but it has been particularly unfortunate for his posterity that he was
not very forthcoming to the critic Félix Fénéon, who passed on the most extensive
and circumstantial account of Seurat’s theories but had to rely on another Neo-
Impressionist, Camille Pissarro, for the details.* It was not until 1890, four years after
the advent of Neo-Impressionism at the last Impressionist exhibition in Paris, that
Seurat himself supplied Fenéon with a defensive and somewhat tendentious account
of his own part in the movement.And what did Pissarro really understand of Seurat’s
principles, if his own approach to the dotted technique was so divergent from that
of the painter he acknowledged as the movement’s leader?
Much has been said and written about these principles and their limitations; here
I want simply to point out that the demands placed on an aspiring ‘scientific’ painter
in late nineteenth-century France were very considerable, and that even in the
several handbooks of popular science for artists which may have come Seurat’s way,
and which help to define the French aesthetic of the day as indeed ‘scientific’, these
demands were sometimes seen to be too great.

Helmholtzian chromatics

The key theorist of the period was the German physicist and physiologist Hermann
yon Helmholtz, who in the 1850s and 1860s had effectively displaced the French
chemist Chevreul as the leading scientific interpreter of colour for painters. Although
the distinction between additive light- and subtractive pigment-mixture had been
explored by a number of scientists earlier in the century, it was Helmholtz who
made it widely known. His fundamental article on colour-mixing had been pub-
lished in Germany in 1852, and was almost immediately translated into French.’
In it, Helmholtz showed that the mixture of lights yielded only two complemen-
tary colours (i.e. colours mixing to white), spectral yellow and indigo, which in

219
SEURATS SILENCE

Violet. |Bleuindigo Bleu Vert bleu. Vert. Jaune vert, Jaune.

cyanique.

Rouge. Pourpre. |Rose foncé. Rose Blanc. Jaune Jaune d’or. Orangé.
blanchatre blanchatre.

Orangé. Rose foncé. Rose Blanc. Jaune Jaune. Jaune,

blanchatre. blanchatre

Jaune. Rose Blanc. Vert Vert Jaune vert.

blanchatre. blanchatre blanchatre

Jaune vert.| Blanc. Vert Vert Vert.

blanchatre. blanchatre

Vert. Bleu Bleu d’eau. Vert bleu.

blanchatre

Vert bleu. Bleu d’eau.|Bleu d'eau

Bleu Bleuindigo
cyanigue.

Hermann von Helmholtz’s table of colour-mixtures, based on experiments with spinning discs — the
first sign that painters’ traditional assumptions about the mechanics of mixture were no longer valid.
Colours are given along the top and left, their product at the intersection. The table was reproduced
in a number of French artists’ handbooks of the 1860s and 1870s. (109)

pigment-terms could be matched, he said, by chrome yellow and dark ultramarine.

In disc-mixtures the same effects would be achieved by using gamboge and azurite,
and in this technique of mixing, red and green produced yellow. Helmholtz pointed
out that these results conflicted with the experience of painters; yet he devised a
10g table of mixtures which became part of the diagrammatic component of several
French handbooks on painting in the 1860s and 1870s, after it had been republished
in Helmholtz’s monumental Tieatise on Optics of 1867.°
One of the first French aesthetic writers to acknowledge Helmholtz was Auguste
Laugel, who in a handbook of 1869, Optics and the Arts, published a colour-circle
Ilo based on his scheme of complementary colours adding up to white, but at the same
time acknowledged that the complications of this scheme might make the ‘cruder’
Chevreulean colour-star devised by Delacroix more useful to painters.” Seurat
also had a copy of aHelmholtzian scheme taken from Rood; but as we saw, at the.
106 foot of studies for Parade of c. 1887-8 he drew a diagram similar to the Delacroix
star, and, of course, Delacroix was an artist he especially admired as a ‘scientific’
painter. He continued to refer to this simpler arrangement until the end of his life .
Another important French handbook of a decade later, The Scientific Principles of
the Fine Arts (1878) by the Viennese physiologist Ernst Briicke, went so far as to
argue that, in the face of the complexities of recent scientific research, it was quite
impossible for a late nineteenth-century painter to appropriate modern theory in
the way that Leonardo da Vinci had been able to do — Leonardo, whose scientific
writings were being closely studied by the mathematician and aesthetician Charles
105 Henry at the time he met Seurat in 1885.°Today’, as Briicke wrote,

220
 SEURAT’S SILENCE

BLEU D’|OUTREMER

VERT BLEU ROUGE

Helmholtz’s complementaries in August Laugel’s colour-circle, from L’Optique et les Arts, 1869.
Laugel’s was perhaps the first attempt, in a painters’ handbook, to incorporate the Helmholtzian
complementaries in a traditional format. But he warned that artists might find them too nuanced
to remember. (110)

it is difficult for the artist to be taught the theoretical science he needs, and
even more difficult for him to learn it. Leonardo da Vinci was thoroughly
familiar with all the knowledge of his day; he knew geometry, mechanics,
physics, physiology, anatomy, all that was known of them in his time. That is
impossible now because of the developments which all the sciences have
undergone.*

As an appendix to Briicke’s book, Helmholtz’s important lecture “On the relation

of optics to painting’ was printed in a French version. In the late 1860s this had
been one of the first arguments by a scientist against the possibility of replicating
the visible world in painting. In a discussion of colour-contrast, for example,
Helmholtz argued that the limitations of pigments and of environmental lighting
made it impossible for pictures to reproduce the effects of natural light and colour:
If, therefore, with the pigments at his command, the artist wishes to reproduce
the impression which objects give, as strikingly as possible, he must paint the
contrasts which they produce.?

One of the phenomena which Helmholtz cited in this instance was irradiation, by
the action of which the colour ofa bright object spread to the surrounding space in
the visual field; and this was taken up in a series of articles on The Phenomena of
Vision (1880) by the Swiss aesthetician David Sutter, which Seurat certainly read."°
It is particularly in the cunningly managed contrasts of Seurat’s conté crayon draw- ITI
ings that we sense a familiarity with these scientific arguments.
SEURAT’S SILENCE

Georges Seurat, Seated Nude Boy, 1883, a conté crayon study for Bathers (107), illustrating Helmholtz’s
dictum that ‘the impression which objects give’ must be rendered by ‘the contrasts they produce’. (111)

Whether or not Seurat knew much of Briicke’s and Helmholtz’s ideas, he cer-
tainly knew Helmholtz’s name,"' and could have read about some of his optical
experiments in Théorie Scientifique des Couleurs of 1881 (the French version of
Modern Chromatics by Ogden Rood of Columbia College, New York), which we

i) i)
 SEURATS SILENCE

know the painter consulted."? But a rather sceptical attitude to the applicability
of the most up-to-date theory might well have been fostered in Seurat by his
contact with the two most theoretically oriented of the Neo-Impressionists, Albert
Dubois-Pillet and Louis Hayet.

Dubois-Pillet and Hayet

Dubois-Pillet, an army officer and amateur painter, was much older than Seurat, 113
and was the chief organizer of the group of Indépendants to which the Neo-
Impressionists belonged. Although he was devoted to Seurat’s example, he sought
from about 1887 to develop the theory of pointillism by turning to Thomas Young,
the English polymath whose early nineteenth-century work on colour-vision was
first given international prominence by Helmholtz, and whose fundamental doc-
trine of the three colour-receptors in the eye was summarized in Rood’s book.
According to Dubois-Pillet’s early biographer Jules Christophe, whose account of
Young's theory comes straight from Rood, the painter hoped to apply the English
Scientist's conclusion that each receptor is variably sensitive to each of the three
primary colours of light — red, green and violet — by including traces of these three
primaries in the passage from tone to tone and from light to shade." The exact
method of proceeding is far from being clear, and Christophe remarked that
Dubois-Pillet’s reasoning had ‘failed to convince all his colleagues’.
Louis Hayet, five years younger than Seurat, whom he met in 1885, was not at 112
all inclined to be reticent about his extensive programme of investigation into
colour-relationships. Like Dubois-Pillet, he developed an interest in colour while
on military service; and in 1886 and 1887 he devoted much time and thought to the
construction of ten colour-circles incorporating the newest conceptions of com-
plementarity, one of which he sent to Seurat, and three others to other painters in
the Neo-Impressionist group. Pissarro’s version appears to be the only one of these 99
circles to have survived, and Pissarro commented that Hayet ‘had not taken account
of the large or small intervals [des grandes et des petites distances] between the hues,
so that they are no use to us’.'’ Hayet was able to construct only a forty-division
circle on the Chevreulean model, but, as he wrote to Pissarro in December 1886, 100
he hoped to be able to quadruple this number," and we know from other experi-
ments that he was also much concerned to bring precision to a three-dimensional
colour-solid, co-ordinating hues and values, and to the phenomenology of optical
mixture.'7 In spite of Pissarro’s reservations about Hayet’s methods, the younger
painter’s conception of mixture was, in its emphasis on close tones, closer to Pissarro’s
and Signac’s approaches than to Seurat’s. Hayet called Seurat’s use of complementary
dots the ‘unified mode’ because of its neutralizing effect (juxtaposed complemen-
taries mix to grey),and opposed it to his own ‘pluralist’ mode. In his notes he took a
stand against Seurat’s practice:
Example of unity and plurality: if I have to represent a pure scarlet, | cannot
render it in either of these modes except with scarlet; but what if, instead of
SEURAT’S SILENCE

Louis Hayet, Banks of the Oise, 1888. Hayet, the most theoretically oriented of the Neo-Impressionists,
used soft optical mixtures and attacked Seurat for his crude contrasts. (112)

pure scarlet, it is sort of brick-red or a muted scarlet? Seurat represents that sort
of colour by scarlet desaturated with the help of its complementary. In the
pluralist mode, on the other hand, it could be obtained by the optical mixture of
various oranges, of various carmines, of various violets; there are nuances which
have still to be precisely established. It is easy to understand that the pluralist
mode will give more flexible and harmonious hues because it offers a larger
choice of forms of expression. It is immediately apparent that we need a colour-
99 circle to attain this; and it was that which, later on,I set out to construct."
Hayet also claimed to have discussed these ideas with Seurat and Pissarro in 1887;
and he went so far as to propose that the Neo-Impressionists should set up what
he called ‘an Institute for experimental research into the laws of optics as they relate
to painting’, a proposal remarkably close to one mooted forty years later by the
Russian Suprematist Malevich, and again with pointillism in mind.'? Hayet com-
plained that on this occasion he had met with a rebuff, since the group thought that
their theories stood in no need of improvement.
Whatever credence we may give to Hayet’s recollections, written down a quarter
of a century after the event, it seems clear that he was an obsessive who was likely

iS)
 SEURAT S SILENCE

Albert Dubois-Pillet, Saint-Michelle

d’ Aguille in Snow, 1889-90. The artist
attempted to apply the theory of the
English scientist Thomas Young
concerning the perception of red,
green and violet as the primary colours
oflight, but fellow-Neo-Impressionists
were little able to grasp his system. (113)

sooner or later to become a bore. Even Camille Pissarro, the least contentious ofall
the members of the Neo-Impressionist group, when Hayet criticized the work of
his son, Lucien, could not refrain from complaining about Hayet’s scathing attitude
to the world, and also about his superficiality: ‘in spite of all his grand airs, Hayet
only understands the surface of things’.*°
It is also clear that Seurat, for his part, was a highly experimental artist who mod-
ified his methods from picture to picture. But it is one thing to experiment and
quite another to be able to give a coherent account of the underlying principles of
this experimentation. Seurat’s silence reminds us of Pissarro’s reaction to the critic
Fénéon’s constant requests for more technical information. In a letter of February
1889 in response to the critic’s queries about his own conception ofpassage, or tonal
liaison, Pissarro wrote:

It would be difficult to say anything about this; I am trying at this very

moment to master the technique which ties me down and stifles the spon-
taneity of impressions on the canvas. It would be better to say nothing about it,
nothing definite yet.*"
This was, like Seurat’s, the wise silence of someone still working on the problem.

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SEURATS SILENCE

Vibert and science

The ambivalent attitude of the Neo-Impressionists to the details of theory is also

illuminated by the amusing attack on ‘scientific’ theories of colour for painters by
the teacher of painterly technique at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the year of Seurat’s
death, J.-G.Vibert.Vibert was a painter of genre and also a gifted short-story writer,
who in his handbook The Science of Painting, first published in 1891, presented a
vivid tableau of a young artist on a visit to the labyrinth of the scientists, where
he finds Chevreul, Thomas Young and Helmholtz, all of whom claim to have dis-
covered the truth about colour. Chevreul tells the painter that there is no room for
ultramarine in the colour-circle; and Young and Helmholtz present him with their
bewildering triad of light-primaries (which had also been dismissed as irrelevant to
painters by Pissarro’s friend Félix Bracquemond).After wandering helplessly among
other divergent opinions, the artist emerges, grey and in his fifties, to be greeted at
the entrance by Common Sense, who tells him that there have been magicians of
colour called Veronese, Rubens and Delacroix who knew more about colour than
any scientist, ‘for with their colours they created a language which speaks to the soul,
which communicates emotion and life, before science came to doubt even that
coloured rays influence the brain’.*
After this vigorous attack on the pretensions of science, it may be surprising to
find that Vibert, like Seurat and other Neo-Impressionists, had developed a spectral
palette.
A well-known remark of Seurat’s to Gustave Kahn might suggest that the painter
felt that,‘with the help of art’, he had mastered scientific colour before he mastered
line;** but the chronology of his works indicates that the move towards an ever
more homogeneous colouristic surface was anticipated in his drawings, which,
108, III from round 1881, made a skilful use of rough paper to create in conté crayon optical
11g greys of extraordinary refinement. Yet, as Herbert has demonstrated, it is these
drawings which link Seurat most clearly with Symbolism, with Redon and with the
most Wagnerian of French painters, Fantin-Latour.** Seurat was Wagnerian, too, in
his search for the ultimate division of tone; but he also came close to Symbolist atti-
tudes in his colour.’

Indefinable colour
97 In a letter to Signac from Honfleur in June 1886 Seurat spoke of the sea as of ‘an
almost indefinable grey’.*° We too would, I think, be hard put to find colour-terms
for the subtly dissolving areas of pinks, blues, greens and oranges which are, miracu-
lously, common to Seurat’s marines and his figure-subjects at this time. Here surely
is a democracy ofstyle. But in Seurat’s day the language of colour was no less con-
tentious an issue than its physics. Synthetic dyes and their marketing had led to a
plethora of fashionable terms which could only confuse.Vibert had his Chevreul in
The Science of Painting tell the young artist that his numbered colour-system had
enabled him to replace uncertain and ephemeral terms such as ‘dove-grey’, ‘dead

226
 SEURAT’S SILENCE

leaves’ ,‘thigh-of-excited-nymph pink’ or ‘Dauphin’s-poo’ (caca-Dauphin); and these

were the sort of names which had also been condemned by Bracquemond.”” The
instability of the intermediate tones, as opposed to the primaries and secondaries,
must have been brought home to Seurat from the time of his schooldays, in the
colour-star published in Charles Blanc’s Grammar of the Arts of Design (1867), which
changed some of the terms for the intermediates from its source, the treatises of
J.-C. Ziegler: cadmium to saffron, indigo to campanule (bell-flower), and demonstrated
how non-standard these terms still were. It also suggests the potential for poetic
associations among these terms, where the primaries and secondaries retained their
by-now prosaic labels red, green, orange and so on.”
Seurat was reluctant to talk in more than the most general terms about the
colour he was creating because it was impossible to talk of these colours at all; even
mathematical labels were out of court because of the perceptual variables among
spectators. It was the old problem, that we may quantify the stimuli but not the per-
ception, a problem which had been re-stated very forcefully in Seurat’s lifetime by
the German psychologist Gustav Fechner, at the very moment that he was propos-
ing a means of quantifying sensation.*? One of the many paradoxes in Seurat’s
method is that the technique of dotting, which allowed him to analyse light in
painting to an unprecedented degree — as he told Fénéon, ‘the purity ofthe spectral
element’ was the keystone of his technique*® — should have produced many
‘colours’ which because of their fluid, shimmering character, defy analysis.

227
 18 - Matisse’s Black Light

N THE THIRTEENTH number of the arts review Verve (1045), Which its editor, Matisse’s
friend Tériade, devoted to the painter's recent work under the title De la Couleur,
the elderly artist gave a new twist to his life-long preoccupation with art as process
by setting beside each of the sixteen colour-reproductions a diagram of the precise
palette he had used for the painting, even to the extent of giving, in some cases, the
name of the colour-supplier, Lefranc.' These ‘palettes’ were surely made to satisfy
a public curiosity, rather than as an aide-memoire for the artist himself and one of
the colours listed on them most intriguingly is ‘black’. Thus the door of La Porte
Noire of 1942 was painted with ‘pure Prussian blue’ (blew de prusse pur), but the
darkest blues in Le Tabac Royal of 1943 were made with ‘pure black on blue’ (noir pur
sur bleu). The background darks of La Robe Jaune et la Robe Ecossaise (Les Deux Amies)
I14 of 1941 were ‘black on red’; and the black of Danseuse, fond noir fauteille rocaille of
1942 was specified as ‘ivory black’ (noir d'ivoire). Other blacks in the series were
simply described as noir, but in a striking paradox, the grey dress in L’Idole of 1942 is
characterized as ‘black white’ (blanc noir), An even greater paradox, perhaps, is the
original stencilled print of 1943 which served as the title-page to the album, where,
above the title De la Couleur initialled by Matisse, and above two landscape-like
strips ofyellow and brown, rises a multi-rayed sun which is entirely black.
On Colour included a short untitled essay by Matisse on the relationships of
modern painters to tradition, which barely mentions colour, It has been suggested

Matisse’s colour-diagram for

the painting Danseuses, fond
noir, fauteille recaille of 1942,
including (as no. 1) noir divoire,
(114)
 MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

T400-— 57. 8

Matisse’s black sun,

1943, used as the title-
page of De la Couleur
in the review Verve,
1945. (115)

that, as Matisse wrote to Tériade in 1944, he was too exhausted to write on a subject
which ‘disgusted’ him. But a year after the Verve article, Matisse wrote in another
review a short note on black as a colour in its own right in which he appealed to the
example ofJapanese prints, of Manet, and of a painting of his own, The Moroccans, 1 ef
painted more than thirty years earlier.‘
A remark in a treatise on colour by the nineteenth-century Japanese draughts-
man, painter and printmaker Hokusai — which could well have been familiar to
Matisse, since it had been published in a French translation in an 1895 article on
Hokusai’s technical treatises — also listed a whole range ofblacks:

There is a black which is old and a black which is fresh. Lustrous [brillant] black
and matt black, black in sunlight and black in shadow. For the old black one
must use an admixture of blue, for the matt black an admixture of white; for
the lustrous black gum [colle] must be added. Black in sunlight must have grey
reflections.>

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MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

Edouard Manet, Portrait of Zacharie Astruc, 1866. Matisse particularly admired this painting for its
‘luminous black’. (116)

Here, with the addition ofa highly reflective medium, black may have lustre or bril-
lance; but it was in modern French painting that Matisse detected that even matt
black, as in his black sun in Verve, was not simply used as a colour, but specifically as
a colour oflight.

Matisse’s Manet

In his note on black as a colour, Matisse mentioned two Manets, Breakfast in the
Studio of 1868, in which the velvet jacket of the young boy in the centre (Leon
Leenhoft) was of a ‘frank and luminous black’ (un noir franc et lumineux), and the
116 Portrait of Zacharie Astruc of 1866, where the black-velvet suit worn by Astruc had
the same luminous quality. The portrait was perhaps the more significant picture for
Matisse, not simply because Manet showed Astruc as a connoisseur of the Japanese
prints to which Matisse referred later in his note, and which appear as an album on
 MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

the writer's table, but also because Manet had divided his composition boldly into
two tonal areas, light on the left, dark on the right, and furnished the right-hand
portion with a whole gamut ofblacks. The black-haired Astruc in his black suit and
black silk cravat is set against a flat black ground. It was relatively simple to argue for
the luminosity of a lustrous material such as velvet, especially when it clothed a
three-dimensional form, but to set black against black required extraordinary per-
ceptual virtuosity, especially in the handling of auniform background which, from
the 1910s, became a special area of experiment for Matisse, and conspicuously in
the great Moroccans of 1915-16. II7
Matisse may have been able to examine both the Portrait ofAstruc and Breakfast in
the Studio in the gallery of the Impressionist dealer Durand-Ruel in the late 1890s,
before they were sold on;° he was himself introduced to Durand-Ruel about this
time by his friend Simon Bussy.? But in an interview with André Marchand in
1947, Matisse stated that it had been the veteran Impressionist Camille Pissarro who
had observed to him one day that Manet ‘made light with black’.* Matisse had also
been introduced to Pissarro by Bussy in the spring of 1897, and he went with the
old painter to see the newly displayed Caillebotte Bequest of Impressionist works at
the Luxembourg Museum soon after the exhibition opened that year. It is tempting
to think that the remark about Manet’s black was made on that occasion, and that it

Henri Matisse’s The Moroccans, 1915-16, where the praying figures are set against a flat black
background. (117)
MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

was linked to Pissarro’s observation on Matisse’s major painting of that same year,
The Dinner Table, that ‘it is impossible to create light with white’.? For the more
important of the two Manets in the Bequest was The Balcony (1868-9), which sets
the landscape-painter Antoine Guillemet, in a black coat, against the deep luminous
darkness of aroom in Manet’s studio on the rue Guyot in Paris, in which can just be
discerned the figure of the youth, Leon Leenhoff, who also posed for the Breakfast.'°
The austere, symmetrical format of a dark space between shutters recalls one of
Matisse’s first paintings in the period when he first became so pre-occupied with
98 black: the large French Window — Collioure (1914), in which it is still just possible to
detect a balcony grille and the shapes of landscape or figure, which were then
blacked-out in such an unrelenting way.'! When this painting was exhibited for the
first time, in the United States in 1966, that modern American master of black,Ad
Reinhardt, identified it as one of the most significant European paintings of 1914."*
In its original form the French Window had reversed Manet’s viewpoint to present,
albeit in an unprecedentedly reduced format, the motif which had occupied
Matisse for a number ofyears, that of awindow opening on to landscape or sea. In
reverting to Manet’s own subject of an opening into a dark room, Matisse seems to
be presenting a quality of luminous blackness as the main subject of the painting. I
say ‘seems’, because the lack of a signature and date has already suggested that
Matisse regarded the work as unfinished; but in a number of signed and dated
paintings of the following years, such as The Moroccans, black fulfills no less signifi-
cant a role, and there is good reason to believe that in them Matisse saw himself as
striking out in an important new and experimental direction.

Half a scientist
When in the 1940s Matisse reconstructed the outline of his ‘black’ period during
the First World War, he dated his discovery of black light, not from the French
Window of 1914, and still less from the highly original series of black-ground
monotypes which he began in the winter of that year,"? but rather from a smaller
118 painting of a year or so later, the Gourds, of which Matisse claimed, in an answer to a
questionnaire sent to him by Alfred Barr in 1945:‘in this work I began to use pure
black as a colour oflight and not as a colour of darkness’.'t Gourds were also the
subject of ablack-ground monotype in 1916, but there the white-line image was
presented three-dimensionally in a sharply receding space. In the painting all the
objects are seen flattened against a two-dimensional ground which is bisected
emphatically into areas of black and grey-blue.
In a letter of late 1914 Matisse had told his close friend the painter Charles
Camoin how he had borrowed from Félix Fénéon, now of the Bernheim-Jeune
Gallery, two small Seurat panels, one of them highly coloured, which set him
thinking about Seurat’s composition in relation to that of Delacroix’s mural of
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel in the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. The Delacroix
was rather cobbled-together, whereas Seurat had organized his material ‘more
scientifically’,
 MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

In Gourds of 1915-16 Matisse lays out his objects like a set ofscientific specimens, flat against a black
and grey-blue ground. It was in this work, he wrote, that he ‘began to use pure black as a colour of
light and not as a colour of darkness’. (118)

offering our eyes objects constructed by scientific means, rather than with the
images [signes] which arise from feeling. This lends his works a positive quality,
a rather inert stability arising from his composition, which is not the result ofa
mental act [une creation d’esprit], but of a juxtaposition ofobjects."
This sounds remarkably like the method of Gourds, of which Matisse also said to
Barr in 1945 that it was ‘a composition of objects which do not touch — but which
all the same participate in the same intimite’.
But Fénéon also owned a number of strikingly flat and sparsely constructed
black conté crayon drawings by Seurat, including The Balcony (1883-4), The Gateway 119
(1882-4), and probably The Nurse (1884), whose radically stylized back seems to be 108
behind both the right-hand figure in The Moroccans and the third of the series of 117
Backs sculpted by Matisse in 1916."°

33
MATISSE S$ BLACK LIGHT

Georges Seurat, The Balcony,

1883-4, a conté crayon
drawing owned by the critic
Fénéon and possibly shown to
Matisse. (119)

Modern commentators have also pointed to the black ground of Picasso’s 1915
Harlequin, also in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a painting which
Matisse noted in a letter to Derain early the following year, but without alluding to
the colour.'’ All these could plausibly have offered very striking visual stimuli to the
118 painter; but what made Matisse respond in Gourds to the idea of black as light in
such a dramatic way?
The concept of black as a colour (not simply as a darkener) had been much
debated in painterly circles since the Renaissance, and had been more or less gener-
ally accepted by the close of the nineteenth century.'* Among Matisse’s contempo-
raries, a painter well-read in theory, such as Malevich, might even interpret the
Fraunhofer absorption lines (lines at certain wavelengths where radiation — light —
is absorbed by elements in the atmosphere) as evidence that there was black (as well
as white, the sum ofall the colours oflight) in the spectrum itself.'? But the notion
of black as a light is so novel, so paradoxical and so radical, that it invites a more
thorough circumstantial examination. A recent perceptualist analysis links the
development of the idea to Matisse’s move from a well-lit to a dark studio in the
autumn of 1913, and appeals to the laws of simultaneous and value contrast which
make the lights look lighter as they abut on the areas of dark.’ Such effects were

234
 MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

indeed abundantly present in Seurat’s drawings, although, because he did not use
absolutely flat, dense tones, he was obliged to represent, and not simply to create
them. Certainly Matisse recalled that ‘blacks and their contrasts’ first came to be
exploited in The Moroccans; and in addition, a prolonged inspection of Matisse’s 117
sizeable paintings will induce a strong, luminous after-image of the blacks. But
quite apart from the question of whether Matisse’s work, with its complex rhyth-
mic surfaces, invited this sort of inspection, there was another approach to black
which seems to have been crucial to this period of experimentation, and that was
the idea of black light as a physical phenomenon, which was then a fashionable
topic in French science.
In his 1914 letter to Camoin, Matisse followed his mention of Seurat with the
confession that:

I am a romantic, but with a good half of the scientist, the rationalist, in me,
which makes for a struggle from which I emerge sometimes triumphant, but
breathless.”
Already in his 1908 Notes of a Painter, where he had expressed dissatisfaction with
the limitations of Neo-Impressionist technique, Matisse had looked forward to
defining ‘certain laws of colour’ by studying the colour-handling of many intuitive
artists:*> an aspiration which was very far from being purely intuitive itself. Matisse’s
interest in Bergson’s philosophy of duration has long been appreciated;** but his
knowledge of contemporary scientific ideas has been less examined. In the letter to
Derain early in 1916, Matisse drew that painter’s attention to some ‘dizzying’
hypotheses he had found in the book Science and Hypothesis (1902) by the distin-
guished mathematician Henri Poincaré, and said that he had been particularly
impressed by the notion that:
Movement exists only by means of the destruction and reconstruction of
matter.*
Poincaré’s account in this book of one of the leading tendencies of modern physics
also sounds remarkably like Matisse’s characterization, in his response’to Barr, of the
intimité of objects in Gourds: 118
new relations are continually being discovered between objects which seemed
destined to remain for ever unconnected; scattered facts cease to be strangers
to each other and tend to be marshalled into an imposing synthesis. The march
of science is towards unity and simplicity.”°
His book had been commissioned by the editor ofthe series Bibliotheque de Philoso-
phie Scientifique, Gustave Le Bon, who was also much concerned with the instability
of matter, and who quoted Poincaré enthusiastically in his own L’Evolution des
Forces of 1907. And it was Le Bon who, from 1896, began to develop the theory of
Black Light.”
The 1890s was a decade in which interest in all forms of radiation, which had
begun to occupy scientists since the Romantic period, took on a more precisely
phenomenological form. It was the period of the discovery of X-rays by Rontgen,

235
MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

and of radium and uranium by Marie and Pierre Curie, who, with Henri Bequerel,
won the Nobel Prize for their work on radioactivity in 1903. Le Bon, who had
made his reputation earlier in the century with a study of the psychology of crowds,
gave a candid account in one of his most popular books of how he came to publi-
cize his own work on radiation:
The appearance in 1896 of the work of Réntgen on the X-rays determined
me to publish immediately, in order to settle the order of dates, a note on some
particular radiations capable of passing through bodies...1 called them by the
name of Black Light by reason of their sometimes acting like light while
remaining invisible.**
The rays in question were radioactive particles such as cathode rays (later removed
by Le Bon from the category of Black Light), the long-wavelength radiations in the
infra-red of the spectrum and beyond, and radiation due to invisible phosphores-
cences. Although the term Black Light was not generally accepted, Le Bon’s work
was widely regarded by 1900 as having demonstrated that invisible radiation was a
universal property of matter: the physiologist Albert Dastre of the Sorbonne told
readers of the non-specialist Revue des Deux Mondes in 1901:
Not a sunbeam falls on a metallic surface, not an electric spark flashes, not a
discharge takes place, not a single body becomes incandescent, without the
appearance of a pure or transformed cathode ray.To Gustave Le Bon must be
ascribed the merit of having perceived from the first the great generality of
this phenomenon. Even though he had used the erroneous term of lumiére
noire, he has none the less grasped the universality and the principal features of
this product. He has above all set the phenomenon in its proper place by trans-
ferring it from the physicist’s cabinet to the great laboratory of nature.”
The fundamental premise of Le Bon’s theory was the recognition that in the con-
tinuous spectrum of radiation the visible spectrum, that is, visible light, formed less
than a tenth of the whole. Thus ‘the invisible region of the spectrum constitutes...
the most important portion ofthe light. It is only the sensitiveness of the human eye
which creates the division between the visible and invisible parts ofthe spectrum.’3°
It might be that there were animals able to see into those parts of the spectrum
invisible to the human eye, but it was certainly the case that Black Light could be
registered on photographic plates. Le Bon published a number of experiments
using statuettes to demonstrate that photographs could be made in total darkness by
Black Light, which, since it had the same properties of rectilinear propagation and
refraction as visible light, produced perfectly sharp images. In one experiment, a
replica of the Venus de Milo was coated with photo-sensitive sulphide of calcium
and exposed to light for three or four days until it had become ‘entirely dark’ by

. 4y 3h 2h iH
Gustave Le Bon, The ‘black spectrum’, 1908, from L’Evolution des Forces, showing how little of the
spectrum of radiation is composed of visible light. (120)

236
 MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

Gustave Le Bon’s ‘black light’ experiment with Venus de Milo statuettes. Coated with photo-sensitive
sulphide of calcium and exposed to light until they blackened, they were then photographed in
darkness by the ‘invisible rays emitted by them eighteen months after having been struck by light’
(as the original caption has it). The black patches are uncoated areas. (121)

photo-chemical action. It was then placed in complete darkness and photographed

with a Black Light camera for from eight to fifteen days, until a perfect image was
obtained.3' In another, using statuettes of the Buddha or Baccantes, the invisible
rays emitted from the coated surfaces in a completely blacked-out room were
joined to the rays from a special ‘dark lantern’ which itself emitted only Black Light,
with the result, reported Le Bon, that

the observer sees, at the end of one or two minutes, the statue light up and
come forth from the darkness. The experiment is a very curious one, and has
always vividly impressed the spectator. It is, in fact, very strange to see the dark

iw) bo“NI
 MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Mlle Yvonne Landsberg, 1914. (122)

238
 MATISSE’S BLACK LIGHT

radiations of the lamp, added to the dark radiations of the sulphide, produce
visible light. It is almost the converse of the celebrated interference experl-
ments of Fresnel, in which light added to light produced darkness. In my
experiment, it is darkness added to darkness which gives birth to light.”
Le Bon might almost be describing the coming into light of the variegated silver
Jug in Matisse’s Gourds — the highest contrast with the black in the picture—andthe 118
mysteriously flat grey gourd, which speaks across the composition to the grey of the
casserole and the blue-grey of the lighter ground itself. Certainly the slanting edge
of the black suggests that these objects are caught in a shaft of Black Light.

Dark light
Le Bon’s experiments were published in a popular book: his L’Evolution des Forces
sold twenty-six thousand copies and was in print until at least 1917; and his concept
of universal radiation remained interesting, at least to newspaper journalists, for
many years. It has been suggested that Matisse read an article published in L’Intran-
sigéant in 1913 which claimed that the rays emanating from human bodies, as well as
from plants and minerals, could be photographed, and that this reading relates to the
extraordinary Portrait of Mile Yvonne Landsberg (1914), on which, after many sittings 12 1S)

and repaintings, Matisse finally scratched arching lines of force around the young
body.*3 Emanations have rarely been so graphic; but in the present context what is
perhaps even more striking is that here, as in Matisse’s portrait of his wife painted
the previous year, the large eyes, those windows of the soul, have been completely
blacked out.
So far as I know, the name of Gustave Le Bon appears nowhere in Matisse’s writ-
ings, but there is at least one slight indication that he might have looked at the long
Black Light section in L’Evolution des Forces. Another experiment published there 123
illustrated an apparatus designed by the scientist to demonstrate the transparency of

Matisse will have seen this

ilustration of Gustave Le Bon’s
experiment to prove that invisible
light can penetrate an opaque
substance, from L’ Evolution des
Forces, 1908. (123)
MATISSE S$ BLACK LIGHT

Matisse’s design for a black chasuble, 1950-2, inscribed with the Provencal word esperlugat, meaning
‘to open the eyes’. (124)

opaque bodies to invisible light. It consisted ofan ebonite plate to which metal stars
had been glued, placed beneath a photographic plate of which the upper half had
been exposed to candlelight. When exposed to full sunlight and developed, the
lower half of the plate was black, while the upper half showed the image ofthe half-
stars. Their metal had protected the plate from infra-red rays passing through the
bo
ebonite. The resulting image is strikingly close to Matisse’s design for the title-page
wn of Verve in 1945, and would have been even more so in the negative, where, as Le
Bon points out in his caption, the half-star shape rising above the ‘horizon’ would
have been black.
In spite of the great interest shown in his work in the 1890s, especially in France,
and in spite of the popularity of his later books, Le Bon’s reputation as a physicist
scarcely survived the turn of the century. It was argued that his essentially qualita-
tive experimental procedures were faulty, and — in England — that his results had for
the most part been anticipated at Cambridge.** Black Light was not a concept
which had any lasting impact on the study of radiation. Matisse’s ‘black light’, on the
other hand, propelled partly by the inner turmoil brought about by illness and war,
had a long life ahead of it. The ‘black’ paintings of 1914-16 were joined by a cluster
of predominantly black subjects around 1940;%* and at the close of Matisse’s life, by
cut-paper designs such as The Sorrows ofthe King (1952) and the series of maquettes
for black chasubles for the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence (1950-2), most of which
are now in the Matisse Museum at Nice.’° One of these, bearing the inscription
esperlucat,a Provengal word meaning ‘to open the eyes’ or ‘to perceive’, may serve as
a summary ofthe painter's fifty-year meditation on ‘black light’. What proved to be
contingent and provisional in science has revealed itselfasenduring in art.

Nv 40
 I9 - Colour as Language in
Early Abstract Painting

ae HISTORY OF ABSTRACT PAINTING 1s only beginning to be written, and it seems

clear that, appropriately enough in a period of post-modernism, philosophers
of art are generally more concerned with problems of abstracting, and of its con-
comitant, representing, than with the essential issues in the history of abstraction
itself. It has not proved difficult with hindsight to trace continuities between repre-
sentational and non-representational art; and the long careers of several of the
key figures, like Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, who began with representa-
tion, have seemed to give the plotting of these continuities some sort of validity.
Kandinsky, however, in an unusually candid autobiographical essay, gave a rather
different account of his feelings when he at last realized that his pictures were
harmed by the presence of a recognizable subject:
A terrifying abyss of all kinds of questions, a wealth of responsibilities stretched
before me.And most important of all: What is to replace the missing object?’
Kandinsky’s dilemma points to the importance of content in early abstraction; but
the criticism of abstract art, as it developed from the earliest years, about the time of
the First World War, has been very little concerned with content. The primary as
well as the secondary sources tell, for the most part, a story of abstraction as essen-
tially an autonomous, even hermetic, non-representational activity; and this has
enabled opponents like the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss or the art-historian
Ernst Gombrich to suppose that what they see as the failure of abstraction is due
to its very impoverished semantic credentials.* As I shall show at the close of this
chapter, there is a very direct way in which one branch of early abstraction, Russian
Suprematism, owed its force to a context of debate on the fundamentals of lan-
guage; but for the moment I want to look chiefly at the question of colour in early
abstraction, for colour was an area of especial semantic richness at the beginning of
this century, and it offers an aspect of content in early abstract painting which is as
complex and as resonant as, say, the iconography of the Madonna in the Italian
Quattrocento.
A good starting-point is, again, Kandinsky, whose discussion of colour in his first
major publication, On the Spiritual in Art (1911-12), has come in for a good deal of
attack, even from supporters of abstraction like Stephen Bann, who has written:
‘I would reject as utterly implausible the specific equations of form, colour and
meaning propagated by Kandinsky.?

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COLOUR AS LANGUAGE IN EARLY ABSTRACT PAINTING

Colour in Theosophy and in Kandinsky

Kandinsky was not alone in proposing that colour and form constitute a language
of affects. Yet ifwecompare Kandinsky’s treatment of colour with that of one ofhis
sources in the literature of the Theosophical movement, we shall see how much
more rigorous the painter is. The Theosophical system in Besant and Leadbeater's
Thought-Forms (1901), although it incorporates notions of amoral colour-space —
lightness and purity as opposed to darkness and corruption — seems to be a quite
arbitrary arrangement: two widely separated classes of red, for example, are given
quite antithetical connotations of‘Pure affection’ and ‘Avarice’The . Theosophical
texts are concerned to interpret colours as they are experienced by the adept in
auras, or ‘thought-forms’ (see p. 267 below); Kandinsky on the other hand starts
from what he considers to be the properties of colours themselves: their polar con-
trasts of warm and cool, light and dark, or complementarity; and he articulates these
into a set of antitheses which provide a tightly interlocking armature for his mean-
ings. The respective treatments of green are instructive: in Thought-Forms Besant
and Leadbeater write:
Green seems always to denote adaptability; in the lowest case, when mingled
with selfishness, this adaptability becomes deceit; at a later stage, when the
colour becomes purer, it means rather a wish to be all things to all men, even
though it may be chiefly for the sake of becoming popular and bearing a good
reputation with them; in its still higher, more delicate and more luminous
aspect, it shows the divine power of sympathy.*
For Kandinsky, however, who had been especially attracted to green in his earlier,
representational phase as a painter, it was now a product of the coming-together of
the eccentric yellow and the centripetal blue, and it was thus expressive of calm, but
also of boredom:
Thus pure green is to the realm of colour what the so-called bourgeoisie is to
human society: it is an immobile, complacent element, limited in every
respect. This green is like a fat, extremely healthy cow, lying motionless, fit
only for chewing the cud, regarding the world with stupid, lacklustre eyes.*
The values attributed to specific colours are often very similar in the Theosophists
and in Kandinsky — the spiritual blue and the earthly or intellectual yellow, for
example — but only Kandinsky is prepared to argue for them according to a publicly
recognizable set of principles.
125 Kandinsky’s arrangement of colours into a polar scheme shows clearly that
78 he was heir to earlier colour-systems, and especially to those of Goethe and the
Viennese psychologist Ewald Hering, whose theory of colour-perception was
based on the three oppositions (opponent-colours), black-white, red-green, and
blue-yellow.The painter probably found Hering’s ideas in the well-known standard
psychological textbook of Wilhelm Wundt.° His views are thus far from arcane,
‘implausible’ or even very individual, for they rest in principle, if not always in
detail, on a widely debated body of psychological doctrine which included effects

242
 COLOUR AS LANGUAGE IN EARLY ABSTRACT PAINTING

Kandinsky’s pairs of opposites, from On the Spiritual in Art, 1911-12. His scheme is close to the
Viennese psychologist Ewald Hering’s ‘opponent colours’, although his orange-violet opposition and
his characterization of black and white as ‘death’ and ‘birth’ are both unusual. (125)

of synaesthesia very familiar to the painter: Kandinsky’s understanding of the

timbre of the flute as light blue, for example, followed a theory that had been
mooted in the 1870s by several psychologists and aestheticians, and was appropri-
ated by Wundt.”

Nature and system

In The Raw and the Cooked Lévi-Strauss argues that painting can never constitute an
abstract system on a par with music, since its forms and colours are necessarily
rooted in nature.* He has clearly overlooked the developments in chromatics and
psychology to which I have just referred; but he has also, and perhaps more surpris-
ingly, neglected the Enlightenment prototypes of these late nineteenth-century
schemata, notably the circular systems of the entomologists Moses Harris and Ignaz
Schiftermiiller, whose dual reference to nature and to system 1s immediately clear.
As part of the great eighteenth-century enterprise of cataloguing the whole of the
natural world, Schiffermiiller’s and Harris’s scales epitomise what Foucault has
termed the method of Enlightenment taxonomies; but, as their titles, respective-
ly Versuch eines Farbensystems and The Natural System of Colours, make clear, they also
represent aspects of Foucault’s system: self-contained and internally coherent
schemes of colour-articulation, based upon the notion of primary and secondary
characteristics, and of contrast or harmony.’ Although the modern Munsell and
CIE (Commission Internationale d’Eclairage) systems have become more complex
and more open-ended, they are no less systematic, and as early as the second half of
the nineteenth century it had become quite in order for the popularizers of colour-
theory to refer to it in terms of a‘grammar’."®
I do not propose to examine here the many problems facing the users of these
very simple early schemata, problems which the later developments were designed

243
COLOUR AS LANGUAGE IN EARLY ABSTRACT PAINTING

to reduce. But there is one factor which I think has an important bearing on the
role ofcolour as system in early abstract painting.AsHarris had already shown, the
painter's application of the principles of contrast, as presented in his Natural System
of Colours (c. 1776), was made very difficult by his inability to find colorants which
would exactly match ideal colours. The developing paint-industry of the nine-
teenth century addressed this problem: the Englishman George Field, for example,
who was both a theorist and a manufacturer, was careful to specify the pigments he
used in his diagrams; and by the 1880s the influential circle of contrasts published by
Ogden Rood was able to give precise pigment-equivalents for complementaries,
and Seurat was able to set his palette with a series of paints approximating to the
colours ofthe solar spectrum, at least in hue."
This increasing range of colorants was of great importance in the practical appli-
cation oftheory, and in particular for theories ofthe affects of colours on spectators,
who could now be presented with standard, measured hues, so that dependence on
language, and hence on associations, could be reduced to a minimum. Not that
technology had yet succeeded in providing a categorically ‘pure’ primary colour:
it is no surprise that early abstraction, especially in Russia and Germany, sought
to exert its influence on paint-manufacture, or that the most influential colour-
theorist of these years, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, was in the 1920s and 1930s an
important consultant to the paint-industries of several countries. The Hungarian
painter Vilmos Huszar, who introduced Ostwald’s system into the Dutch De Styl
group in 1917, noted once again that the aspiration for ‘pure’ colours was still frus-
trated by imperfect materials.'* Of this group Mondrian, who perhaps more than
any of its other artists had the capacity to produce work of great formal and
colouristic sensitivity, continued to be vexed by the problem of finding a perfect
red, and his reds even more than his other ‘primary’ colours continued to be struc-
turally complex well into the 1920s.'’ Mondrian, too, was an admirer of Ostwald’s
principles (see the following chapter), and as late as 1920 he was still using the
fourth ‘primary’ colour, green, which Ostwald had adopted from Hering, as were
Huszar, and the founding father of the De Stijl group, Theo van Doesburg.'4

The significance ofprimaries

The scheme of*primary’ colours was the most resonant aspect of the colour-debate
among painters in these years, and the apparently straightforward adoption ofthree:
red, yellow and blue, plus the three ‘non-colours’, black, white and grey, within De
Sujl was far more complex than it seems. Van Doesburg came to take a broadly
phenomenological position, treating these colours as energies to be used in the
dynamic articulation of two- or three-dimensional space.'’ Bart van der Leck, the
painter to whom may belong the credit for having impressed the privileged status
of red, yellow and blue on the other members of the group, thought of these
colours as the direct embodiment of light.'® The architect and designer Gerrit
Rietveld, whose red-blue chair of the early 1920s came to symbolize the movement
as a whole, held the mistaken view that red, yellow and blue are the ‘primaries’ of
 COLOUR AS LANGUAGE IN EARLY ABSTRACT PAINTING

ipEmains
ped17 ae

The Last Futurist Exhibition, 0.10, Petrograd, 1915. Malevich has placed his Black Square (on a white
ground) in the traditional position of the most important icon in the Russian house — in the ‘red’ corner
of the room, so making this corner of the exhibition-space symbolically black, white and red. (126)

colour-vision;’? and the painter and sculptor Georges Vantongerloo, although he

had been briefly a follower of Ostwald, developed about 1920 a wide-ranging spir-
itual interpretation of colour-harmony using a mathematical analysis of wavelength
in the spectrum.'* Even Mondrian, as late as 1929, was still thinking of his colours in
symbolic terms: red was more ‘outward’ or ‘real’ and blue and yellow were more
‘inward or ‘spiritual’, in a way which relates to his early interest in Theosophy and
in the theory of Goethe, which had been re-stated by Mondrian’s friend, the Dutch
Theosophist Schoenmaekers in 1916." (Goethe had posited two primaries, yellow
and blue, but the red, Purpur, which was derived from them by a process of ‘aug-
mentation’ was for him the noblest and the highest colour.) What unites the De Stijl
artists beyond all these distinctions is a belief in the importance of primariness as
such, and this was clearly the legacy of the reductive and symmetrical colour-
systems of the nineteenth century.
Red, yellow and blue are not, of course, the only ‘primary’ triad, or even the most
privileged one. The much older and more universal set, black, white and red, has
recently come into prominence again in anthropological studies of language,
chiefly in connection with the evolution of non-European cultures, where the ear-
liest colour-categories were those of light and dark, followed almost universally by a
term for ‘red’.”° But this triad also has a long history in the Indo-Germanic lan-
guages and their cultures (as readers of Grimm’ fairy-tale Snow White will recall, the
heroine was compounded of these three colours). In early abstract painting this

245
COLOUR AS LANGUAGE IN EARLY ABSTRACT PAINTING

Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist

Painting,1917-18, an example from
his great ‘white on white’ series.
(127)

set had an especially prominent place in Russia in the first school of geometric
126 abstraction, the Suprematism of Malevich. In an essay of 1920 Malevich divided his
movement into three phases, according to the proportion of black, red and white
squares introduced into its pictures. Black represented a worldly view of economy,
red revolution, and white pure action; and of these, white and black were more
important than red, and white the culmination of all.** Although Malevich paid a
rather ambivalent tribute to colour-science, considering black and white ‘to be
deduced from the colour spectra’,*? and although the command of many nuances
127. of white which informs his great series of‘white on white’ paintings may have been
stimulated by the revival of interest in early Russian icons, with their creams and
off-whites which often served as a surrogate for gold,** there can be little doubt that
the place of white in the Suprematist colour-system was essentially associative and
literary. Malevich’s best-known statement,

246
 COLOUR AS LANGUAGE IN EARLY ABSTRACT PAINTING

the blue of the sky has been defeated by the suprematist system, has been
broken through, and entered white, as the true, real conception of infinity, and
thus liberated from the colour background of the sky... Sail forth! The white,
free chasm, infinity, is before us...?5

echoes the transcendent interpretation of white as it appears in the poetry of the

Russian Symbolists Belyi (whose name of course means ‘white’) and Blok.”®

A language of colour
Malevich was also a friend of the poet and theorist Velimir Khlebnikov and of the
linguistic scholar Roman Jakobson, through whom the work of the burgeoning
Moscow Linguistic Circle on basic phonetics must have become very familiar to
him. Khlebnikov had indeed collaborated with Malevich in 1913 on the opera
Victory over the Sun,in which one aria was composed entirely of vowels and another
entirely of consonants; and the painter’s austere geometric designs for the sets and
costumes of this production have rightly been seen as embodying the seeds of the
Suprematism which emerged two years later.” Both Khlebnikov and Jakobson
were interested in that aspect of synaesthesia known as audition colorée, in which
spoken sounds, particularly vowel-sounds, were involuntarily associated with
colours ;and Jakobson indeed seems to be one ofthe very few students oflanguages
to have maintained an interest in the phenomenon (see Chapter 21). The sound-
colour association is probably best known from one of the earliest recorded exam-
ples, Rimbaud’s Sonnet des Voyelles (p. 263 below), but by the time ofthe First World
War it had become a major preoccupation of experimental psychologists. In 1890
the Congrés Internationale de Psychologie Physiologique set up a committee to
investigate the phenomenon, and this was productive of a spate of publications, but
even before that, audition colorée had been investigated on a statistical basis in the
influential aesthetic publications of G.T. Fechner.**
Jakobson, who had become friendly with Malevich by 1916, may have already
begun to relate infant preferences for black, white and red to the early development
of speech-sounds, in which ‘a’ (which was often associated with red in these psy-
chological experiments) provided the basic phonetic contrast to ‘w’, which accord-
ing to several authorities was associated with black.* In a manifesto of 1919,
Khlebnikov appealed to the painters of the world to help in the establishment of a
universal language, for
the task of the colour-painter is to give geometrical signs to the basic units of
understanding...It would be possible to have recourse to colour and express
M with dark blue,W with green, B with red, E with grey, L with white...*°
Painterly and linguistic research in Russia was thus directed to the identification
and expression of fundamentals, and this area of enquiry became part of the cur-
riculum of the Soviet State Art Schools in the 1920s, a period which saw perhaps
the last major flowering of interest in audition colorée until very recent times.
COLOUR AS LANGUAGE IN EARLY ABSTRACT PAINTING

The painter and teacher K. V. Matiushin’s vast array of colour-charts, Moscow, 1924, suggesting the
laboratory rather than the studio. (128)

Kandinsky, who had been engaged on drawing up some of the teaching pro-
grammes there immediately after the Revolution, took with him an interest in this
sort of research when he returned to Germany and the Bauhaus later in the
decade." In Russia, indeed, where Ostwald’s colour-theories were widely adopted,
it was the psychological laboratories of late nineteenth-century Germany which
i) CO provided the models for the art institutions of the Revolutionary and immediately
post-Revolutionary periods.
We are now,I think, in a better position to interpret an extravagant remark by the
Suprematist Ivan Klyun, who in a manifesto of 1919, summarized the theme ofthe
present chapter in claiming:
our colour-compositions are subject only to the laws of colour and not to the
laws of nature.*3
Early abstract artists were thus presented with a number of well-articulated colour-
systems which allowed them to consider colour as in the nature ofa language. But it
is not surprising that their use of this language should have depended upon princi-
ples of salience and symbolism, rather than on notions of mere perceptibility. Nor is
it altogether surprising — although it may be a matter of regret — that this language
of colour, which seemed around 1900 to offer the prospect of universality, should
have turned out to be so thoroughly hermetic.
 20 - A Psychological Background for
Early Modern Colour

6 ee. TODAY HAVE A REMARKABLE relationship with colour. Our time, which
depends on the past more than any other for its forms, has produced a kind of
painting in which colour is independent. Thus
’ claimed the critic Karl Scheffler in
an essay, Notizen tiber die Farbe’, in the journal Dekorative Kunst in 1901. Scheffler’s
view of the centrality of colour in modern painting was reinforced by many critics
and artists in France and Germany before the First World War, and if colour came to
play a leading role in early abstraction, this was not so much because it had lost its
traditional mystery, but rather that this mystery had been deepened and ramified by
developments in colour-study during the second half of the nineteenth century, to
the point where it could become a central preoccupation of painters seeking new
means of expression.
The aims of abstraction were spiritual, but to realize those aims, painters were
ready and able to use the very substantial body of colour-theory which had been
published by 1900.The classic studies of Goethe (1810) and M.-E. Chevreul (1839)
had established the study of colour firmly on a subjective basis, and the developing
science of experimental psychology, and later of phenomenology, gave a good deal
of attention to the perception of colour. Experimental psychologists frequently
drew on their experience of painting: several, like David Katz, were themselves
painters, and others, like Miiller-Freienfels, were also historians of art. Their tastes
were usually conservative, but this was not always so.
In 1913 a painter from the Cleveland School of Art and a physiologist from the
Western Reserve Medical School published a study which examined, not simply
the physiological basis of Neo-Impressionism, but also the reaction against Neo- »
Impressionism in the work of the Fauves, who had found, like many other artists
around 1906, that the pointillist technique produced a decidedly achromatic, greyed
effect, and who sought to base a new colouristic style on the contrast oflarge areas
of flat tint.’ Matisse’s thoroughly phenomenological ‘Notes of a Painter’, in which
he described his painting procedure as starting from the immediate, naive sensation
of a colour-patch set down on the canvas, was published in the same year, 1908, as
E. Utitz’s Principles of the Aesthetic Theory of Colours (Grundztige der aesthetischen Far-
benlehre), which claimed that the painter ‘does not take his habitual colours [i.e. the
colours expected in objects, and hence perceived in them] to his subject, but gives
himself up naively to the immediate impression’. This view was quoted approvingly
by David Katz in an early classic of phenomenology, The Modes of Appearance of
Colours and their Conditioning by Individual Experience (Die Erscheinungsweise der
Farben und Ihre Beeinflussung durch die Individuelle Erfahrung,1911).The interests and

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

even the methods adopted by painters and psychologists were very much in tune.
A series of studies carried out in the Leipzig psychological laboratory of Wilhelm
Wundt in the 1890s and early years of this century was directed towards establishing
colour-aesthetics on an empirical basis by means of controlled experiments with
many subjects. In an early study of 1894, Jonas Cohn had already discovered that
most of his subjects (who were all educated men) preferred combinations ofhighly
saturated colours, and particularly saturated complementaries, and he noted that
this preference had hitherto been regarded as peculiar to primitives and the uncul-
tivated. In a series of experiments of 1910-11, F Stefanescu-Goanga came to the
conclusion that the feelings produced in his subjects by colours were the direct
effect of sensory perception, rather than the result ofassociations, which were sec-
ondary phenomena.” This work tended towards the view that colour-sensations
themselves could be free of associative elements — could be more abstract.
It is not at all certain how far these studies were accessible to painters in the way
in which the earlier, simpler and more comprehensive manuals of Goethe,
Chevreul and Ogden Rood had been; but what is clear is that, in the early develop-
ment of abstraction, painters interested in colour were experimenting in very much
the same way as the psychologists; that they used analogous experimental proce-
dures, and sometimes came to very similar conclusions. Painting had been estab-
lished as an experimental activity in the 1880s by Seurat: after the death of Cézanne
in 1906 it became more insistently so; and if we examine painterly practice and
theory in the years around 1912 with a view to discovering its preoccupations and
motivating forces, we may go far towards reconstructing the processes of trial and
error which more than ever shaped the non-representational painting of that time.

Kandinsky’s grammar of colour

The first colours that made a strong impression on me were bright, juicy
green, white, carmine red, black, and yellow ochre. These memories go back
to the third year of my life. I saw these colours on various objects which are no
longer as clear in my mind as the colours themselves.
(W. Kandinsky, Reminiscences, 1913, trans. Herbert)

In this opening passage of his essay in autobiography Kandinsky presents himself

not simply as an instinctive, inveterate colourist, but also as an introspector who
seems to be describing the experience of what Katz in 1911 had characterized as
film colours: colours which are perceived as only loosely attached to objects.
Commentators on Kandinsky’s theory of colour, as set out in On the Spiritual in
Art (1911-12), have emphasized its links with Theosophy, in particular with the
writings of Rudolph Steiner with which the painter had become very familiar in
the years after 1908. It has been suggested that Kandinsky became interested in
modern psychology only after the war, at the Bauhaus, where the experimental
method was very much part of his teaching. But this is to underestimate the extent
to which Theosophical writers were themselves indebted to recent discoveries in
experimental psychology; and the colour-formulations of Kandinsky’s treatise

250
 A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

Kandinsky’s early abstraction still draws

substantially on the imagery of his earlier
paintings. Here in the decorative mural for
Edwin Campbell of 1914, the middle section
includes a sweeping yellow and scarlet form
close to the trumpets played by angels in
some of his Apocalyptic subjects, for
example the 1911 Resurrection in Munich.
Kandinsky’s synaesthetic instincts - and
perhaps also his reading - associated scarlet
and the sound of the trumpet. (129)

suggest a far earlier interest than that. One of his preoccupations at this time was
the establishment of a ‘grammar’ of painting on a level with what he saw as the
‘srammar’ of music: again and again he quoted a remark of Goethe’s, that painting
needed a thorough-bass — the eighteenth-century method of establishing a base-
line in a score which predetermined the subsequent elaboration of the other parts —
and this is a quotation not without its irony in the context of 1912, since at this time
Kandinsky’s friend and collaborator Arnold Schoenberg was asserting that the
method was entirely outmoded (Theory ofHarmony, 1911).
Kandinsky had been concerned with the theory of colour at least since 1903,
the year of the German translation of Signac’s manifesto From Delacroix to Neo-
Impressionism, and it is very likely that he had already read Scheffler’s article of 1901
on colour, cited above, for he referred to it in On the Spiritual in Art, where the
treatment of mental disturbances by chromotherapy was one of the subjects under

251
A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

discussion. Some aspects of the dynamic of colour which Kandinsky made the basis
of his colour-system have rightly been traced to a pamphlet on chromotherapy by
A. Osborne Eaves, Die Kriifte der Farben (The Powers of Colours) of 1906, where red
and blue were characterized as the most contrasting and the most therapeutically
effective colours, and where Kandinsky made his characteristic diagrams of expan-
sion and contraction in the margin of his own copy. But Kandinsky’s system was
based upon the primary polarity of yellow and blue which goes back ultimately to
Goethe’s table of plus and minus, active and passive colour-sensations (Theory of
Colours, § 696), albeit much amplified by Wundt in his Principles of Physiological
Psychology (1874, sth edn 1902) into what he called the ‘unique contrast of feeling
[Stimmung] in colour’: the lively yellow and the calm blue. Wundt had described a
two-fold movement from yellow to blue — an unstable, labile progression through
red, and a stable, balanced, restful progression through green — which colour,
according to Kandinsky, also represented ‘the passive principle’.
In his discussion of synaesthesia (the simultaneous response of two or more
senses to a single stimulus) Wundt introduced some musical-chromatic examples
which are close to Kandinsky’s: their scarlet trumpet was a very traditional equiva-
lent which goes back to the eighteenth century, but the light blue of the flute is a
more recently experienced correspondence, noted in the psychological literature
of the late nineteenth century. And like Wundt’s pupil Stefanescu-Goanga, Kandin-
sky felt that ‘the theory of association is no longer satisfactory in the psychological
sphere. Generally speaking, colour directly influences the soul’
But the detailed correspondences between the ideas of Kandinsky and those of
Wundt and his school are only occasional, and rather unimportant: what is more
interesting is the painter’s method of proceeding in his enquiry, whose conclusions
were, as he said, the result of ‘empirical feeling’ ‘not based on any exact science’, but
which could be substantiated by ‘proceeding experimentally in having colours act
upon us’. Kandinsky, who had been trained in law and ethnology before he turned
to painting, was no stranger to the experimental method. It was not until after the
publication of On the Spiritual in Art early in 1912, under the influence of the Amer-
ican printer Edward Harms, that he subjected Goethe’s Theory to experimental
testing with the prism, hoping in vain to substantiate Steiner’s Theosophical inter-
pretation of that work: but that he should have felt such experimentation to be
appropriate at all is witness to a remarkably positivist element in his mind.
After the war Kandinsky introduced the study of the medical and physiological,
as well as the occult aspects of colour into his proposals for the curriculum of the
Moscow Institute of Art Culture; and three years later, at the Bauhaus, he dropped
the occult, and added psychology, stressing that all these studies should be carried
out by means of exact measurements and experiments. His most notorious excur-
sion was the test with a thousand postcards sent out to a sample of the Weimar com-
munity, asking that the three ‘primary’ colours, red, yellow and blue, should be
allotted to the three ‘primary’ shapes, the triangle, circle and square. The question-
naire produced an ‘overwhelming majority’ in favour ofthe yellow triangle, the red
square, and the blue circle. But like its results, the psychological presuppositions of
this survey had already been suggested in Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Artin 1912,

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August Macke, Colour Circle II (Large), 1913.

The young Westphalian painter’s circle is close
to Delaunay’s experiments with Circular Forms of
the same year, but Macke adds dynamism to his
version with a spiralling shape and contrasts of
blue and red, yellow and green. (130)

where he proposed that ‘sharp colours have a stronger sound in sharp forms (e.g.
yellow in a triangle). The effect of deeper colours is emphasized by rounded forms
(e.g. blue in a circle), Introspection needed only the authority ofa statistical survey
to become the compelling basis of a universal pictorial language.
Kandinsky’s interest in a universal language of colour is nowhere more apparent
than in the almanac of the Munich Blue Rider group (p. 193 above). His stage-piece
The Yellow Sound, published there, is one of the earliest manifestations of synaesthe-
sia as an aesthetic principle. But more important, the almanac brought together for
the first time high art and popular art, the art of children and amateurs, art from
Africa, Asia, Polynesia and the Americas. The group’s leading enthusiast for non-
European art was August Macke, who wrote for it an essay on masks. But Macke 101, 130
also found himself increasingly unhappy with the introspective emphasis of
Kandinsky, and looked for a more objective handling of colour.This he found in the
work of the French painter Robert Delaunay, whose Paris studio he visited in 1912.

Delaunay’s practical theory

In these years [about 1912] whole treasures of patience, analysis, research and
learning were devoured in the studios of the young painters in Paris, and sheer
intelligence welled up more intensely than ever before. The painters looked at
everything: contemporary art, and art in every historical style, the expressive
means of all peoples, the theories of all periods. Never before had so many
young painters been seen in the museums, studying and comparing the tech-
niques of the Old Masters. They looked at the artistic productions of savages,
of primitive peoples, and the evidence of prehistoric art. At the same time they
were much occupied with the latest theories of electro-chemistry, biology,
experimental psychology and applied physics...

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

The poet Blaise Cendrars, writing in Aujourd’hui in 1931 (138f), is describing here
the Paris circle ofartists which included Robert Delaunay, whom he had met at the
end of 1912. Delaunay was still working on a series of paintings of Windows which
he had begun a year earlier, but probably in 1913 he began painting the Sun and
Moon series which was to mark an entirely new direction in his work, and was
effectively to form its basis until his death in 1941.The painter and his critics have
seen the work ofthis period as the first non-representational art in France, and it is
worth examining the painting ofthis seminal year 1912 in the light of the theory of
art that Delaunay began to elaborate at the same time, for the comparison will show
how close he was also to developing an experimental method.
Delaunay called this style of painting Simultané, taking up the term applied by
Chevreul to a particular kind of colour-contrast which he had made the focus of
his 1839 treatise, On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast ofColours, declaring that,
in the case where the eye sees at the same time two contiguous colours, they
will appear as dissimilar as possible, both in their optical composition and in
the height oftheir tone. (§16)

Delaunay may have studied Chevreul as early as 1906, when his painting and that of
131 his friend Jean Metzinger passed through a Neo-Impressionist phase. The large,
square brushstrokes which characterize the work of this period were a reaction
against the greying effect of Seurat’s smaller dots, and, in Delaunay’s Landscape with
Disc of 1906/7 (Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne), were also used as an expressive means:
the vibration created by the refusal of the large colour-patches to mix optically has
a direct relation to the dynamic subject of the painting, the sun. This picture also
makes some play with complementary after-images (red-green), but there is no
reason to suppose that it represents any sustained study of Chevreul.
When, probably early in 1912, Delaunay wrote to Kandinsky outlining his
theories, he had shifted to a rather different approach, claiming:

the laws I discovered...are based on researches into the transparency of colour,

that can be compared with musical tones. This has obliged me to discover the
movement of colours.
In France colour-dynamics had been the particular concern of Charles Henry, who
105 in his Cercle Chromatique (1889) had presented red as moving vertically upwards, blue
as moving horizontally from right to left, and yellow as moving from left to right.
Delaunay also shared the preoccupation with colour-movement with Kandinsky,
whose On the Spiritual in Art he had just received from the artist, but could not read.
But that the movement could be achieved through the means of transparency was
very much Delaunay’s own conception, and like colour-movement itself, had very
little to do with Chevreul. Chevreul had, however, introduced a discussion of
stained-glass windows, and especially rose-windows, as a brilliant example of simul-
taneous contrast, and he attributed their beauty

1 To their presenting a very simple design, the different, well-defined parts of

which may be seen without confusion at a great distance.

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 A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

Jean Metzinger like Delaunay turned the pointillist ‘dot’ into a mosaic of close-packed ‘cubes’. This
more abstract method, as he explained in 1907, was not intended for ‘the objective rendering oflight’,
but to capture ‘iridescences and certain aspects of colour still foreign to painting’. The handling of the
sun of Landscape (Coucher de Soleil) of 1906/7 is close to Delaunay’s in Landscape with Disc. (131)

2 To their offering a union of coloured parts distributed with a kind of symme-

try, which are at the same time vividly contrasted, not only among themselves,
but also with the opaque parts which circumscribe them. (§ 435)

Both these features were to be applied by Delaunay in his Windows;which make

substantial use of contrast and symmetry. Delaunay’s interest in transparency was
also stimulated by his study of stained glass at Laon, where he worked in 1907 and
again early in 1912, and in the Paris church of Saint-Severin, the subject of a series
ofpaintings in 1909 and 1910. Perhaps, too, it was the experience of these windows
which led him to the Windows series of 1909-12, where the technical problems of
conveying transparency were addressed for the first time.* In the earliest of the
series, The City II (1910-11, New York, Guggenheim Museum), the upper part of
the window has been treated in a pointillist technique while the lower parts are
largely handled in flat tones, so as to convey the varying qualities of reflected
(iridescent) and transmitted light. Later, as in Window on the City No. 3 (1911-12,
Guggenheim), the whole surface has been treated in the chequerboard manner, and
there is little doubt that Delaunay was concerned to render an all-over transparency
by means of the phenomenon of lustre. This effect had been well described by the
Ogden Rood, in Modern Chromatics:
theorist most used by the N eo-Impressionists,

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A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

If the coloured lines or dots are quite distant from the eye, the mixture is of
course perfect...but before this distance is reached there is a stage in which
the colours are blended, though somewhat imperfectly so that the surface
seems to flicker or glimmer — an effect that no doubt arises from a faint per-
ception from time to time of its constituents. This communicates a soft and
peculiar brilliancy to the surface, and gives it a certain appearance of trans-
parency: we seem to see into it and below it.
And Rood continues:

With bright complementary colours the maximum degree of lustre is obtained:

when the colours are near each other in the chromatic circle, or dull or pale,
the effect is not marked, but exists to the extent of making the surface appear
IOI somewhat transparent.
The palette of the first of the pictures of the Windows series is indeed dull or pale,
and it was not until Simultaneous Windows early in 1912 that Delaunay began to work
out his composition in strong simultaneous complementary or near-complementary
contrasts of orange and green, yellow and purple, and to abandon the use of a
dotted technique (which survives only in a few residual touches on the painted
frame) in favour of angular planes of colour, derived from a study of Picasso’s Cubist
work of 1910-11, and more interestingly, from the late works of Cézanne. Now the
colour-patches are bounded, sometimes by hard edges, sometimes by soft grada-
tions made by glazing or scumbling the colours over one another: transparency is
achieved by the most direct of painterly means.
Delaunay continued to work on the Windows series throughout 1912, but in his
statements of intention made later that year the emphasis on transparency has gone.
The Essay on Light, which was composed during the summer of 1912, attributed the
movement of colours less to transparency than to the qualities of hue:
Movement is given by the relationship of unequal measures, of contrasts of
colours among themselves which constitute Reality. This reality has depth (we
see as far as the stars), and thus becomes rhythmic Simultaneity.

That summer Delaunay was staying outside Paris, and according to his wife Sonia
he was much occupied with the clouds and the heavenly bodies by day and night:
the material of his new repertory of Disc subjects in 1913(for example Sun, Moon,
Simultané I:see Colour and Culture, pl. 208).’ The use of the term simultaneity suggests
a renewed interest in Chevreul, and by August 1912 Delaunay was no longer speak-
ing in terms of depth: he was now focusing solely on the complementary contrast
of colours as pictorial means. Of Seurat he wrote:
His creation remains the contrast ofcomplementary colours (optical mixture by means
of dots... since it is nothing but a technique, does not have the same importance
as contrast. THE MEANS OF CONSTRUCTION FOR PURE EXPRESSION).

The aspect of Chevreul’s work which now absorbed Delaunay was painting in flat
tints, whose characteristics, according to Chevreul, ‘necessarily consist in the per-

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 A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

fection of the outlines and colours. These outlines contribute to render the impres-
sion of colours stronger and more agreeable...’ (§303). For Chevreul in 1839 such
painting had only a decorative, accessory function, but the Delaunays did not feel
the distinction, and Sonia had recently been experimenting with flat colours in
appliqué textiles and in bookbindings decorated with collage.° This new experi-
ence culminated in Robert’s Disc of 1914, an experiment designed to test the
psycho-physiological effects of certain colour-combinations, and painted in bands
of flat colour with hard contours.As Delaunay wrote to Mlle de Bonin, the near-
complementaries of blue and red at the centre of the circle produced a slow-
moving contrast, and the dissonances towards the edges moved rather faster.’
The summer sky gave Delaunay the experience necessary to create a number of
pictures of 1912-13: the Circular Forms, with references to sun and moon, several of
which, like the Sun No. 1, are painted in largely flat tints, and have very pronounced
and regular contours. It was perhaps this picture to which Delaunay referred in a
letter of 2 June 1913 to August Macke:
My last picture is the ‘Sun’: it shines more and more strongly the more I work
on it:it is from this movement that from now on all my new Synchromies will
be born. The ‘Windows’ saw the opening of them.
The place of Delaunay’s Disc of 1914 in his experimental approach to painting
cannot be overestimated. The Circular Forms, like Kupka’s Discs of Newton of 1912, 47
are still subject-pictures, and it is arguable that Delaunay, unlike his German admuir-
ers Klee and Marc, had no conception of anon-objective art before the First World
War: but the Disc and its antecedents show clearly that Delaunay conceived of the
role of the painter in relation to his expressive means as akin to the role of the
experimental psychologist.

Mondrian’s primary order, Ostwald’s theory of harmony

The colour-interests of painters before the First World War had been nourished by
rather traditional sources of theory: the texts to which they referred had for the
most part been published in the 1870s, and some of the most important go back
to the early years of the nineteenth century. But during the war a new body of
colour-theory was published in Germany which came to dominate the field of
colour-studies for the next decade. It was the work of the veteran chemist Wilhelm
Ostwald, who had occupied himself in his retirement with problems of colour-
measurement. Ostwald felt that there could be no certainty in colour-studies until
colour was quantified, from the psychological as well as from the physical point of
view. He drew particularly on the work of G.T. Fechner (Elemente der Psychophysik,
1860), who had shown that stimuli relate to sensations, not in a direct but in a pro-
portional way: a simple arithmetical progression in sensations must be based on a
geometrical progression in the stimuli.
Ostwald applied these findings to colour first of all by establishing a scale of greys
between white and black, in which each perceptual step was made by increasing the
 BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR
A PSYCHOLOGICAL

The chemist Wilhelm Ostwald’s colour-circle of 1916, giving an unusually prominent place to green. (132)

proportion of black to white geometrically (i.e. by squaring the quantity of black).

This grey-scale he then applied to scales of each of the hues on his colour-circle,
which at first had one hundred hue-divisions, but was then simplified to twenty-
i) four. These twenty-four hues were based on the system of four psychological
primaries, red, yellow, blue and green, which Ostwald derived from Ewald Hering
(Lehre vom Lichtsinne, 1878) who had divided colour-sensations into ‘complemen-
tary’ pairs: black and white, blue and yellow, green and red. Although green had
traditionally been regarded as a mixed colour, Hering had claimed that perceptually
it was autonomous, and it can be seen to play a large part in Ostwald’s circle, which
includes nine greens. Ostwald was well aware of the novelty of this arrangement,
and explained that ‘the beginner’ would probably have difficulty in distinguishing
so many: ‘this is due to the fact that this area of the colour-circle is very little known
to us, since the colours hardly occur in nature’.
During the preparation ofa colour-atlas to demonstrate the colour-solid based
on these principles, Ostwald had noticed that individual sections of the solid, which
showed complementary hues with equal degrees of value on the grey scale, were
particularly pleasing, and he concluded that the principles of colour-harmony
depended on the balance of values (the black and white content of each hue), and,
among the hues round the colour circle, on the juxtaposition of those which are
found at intervals of 3, 4,6, 8 or 12. Harmony, he said, is order, and it was this order
in colour which he felt he had finally established.
Ostwald’s theory was first published in 1916 in a short book, Die Farbenfibel
(The Color Primer), and was immediately taken up by the Dutch movement De Stijl,

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 A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

In the Composition with Grey, Red, Yellow and Blue of 1920 the De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian uses the red
that he regarded as an ‘outward’ colour together with the more ‘inward’ blue and yellow — but
combined with greys, to which he gives the unusual role of ‘primary non-colours’ — suggesting the
continuing influence of Ostwald, for whom grey was the chief controller of harmony. (133)

founded in 1917 by Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Bart van der Leck and
Vilmos Huszar, who published an article on Ostwald’s system in the first volume of
the group’s magazine.* Huszar stressed that Ostwald, who as a chemist had given
particular attention to the properties of available pigments, was far more useful to
artists than earlier theorists, and that his system was the first to be based on geome-
try, a feature which would especially appeal to the De Stijl group members who
were establishing a geometrical aesthetic. He was, however, quick to warn of the
subjectivity of colour-sensations, and to insist that Ostwald’s circle of hues had no
compelling aesthetic validity — and it is true that Ostwald’s four primaries had
a limited interest for the group apart from Mondrian and van Doesburg, who con-
tinued to make use of green.’ Far more important to De Stijl was the concept of

iS)
A PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND FOR EARLY MODERN COLOUR

harmonizing colours by balancing their white and black content: and the first
painter to show a close interest in this aspect of Ostwald’s ideas was Mondrian.
Mondrian had been painting in a brilliant, Fauve-like palette since about 1908,
and about the same time a brief involvement with Neo-Impressionism had led him
to formulate a simple doctrine of pure colours laid side by side ‘in a pointillist or
diffuse manner’. But the impact of Cubism from 1911 to 1912 directed his attention
away from questions of colour, and it is only in the 1914 sketchbook that we find
hints that he had come across Kandinsky’s On the Spiritual in Art, and had been
pondering the complementary relationship of red and green as female and male,
external and internal colours.'? Mondrian’s characterization of red and green as
respectively external and internal might simply refer to their role in the modelling
of flesh, but the context suggests that they were far more than this, and, although
they are not Kandinsky’s values for these colours (p. 242), they are very close to those
of the Theosophists, to whom Mondrian had been attached since 1909. In Besant
and Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1901) red, Mondrian’s female, material colour, is
characteristic of pride, avarice, anger and sensuality, and green, his male, spiritual
value, of sympathy and adaptability.'' By 1917, perhaps following the lead of Huszar,"*
Mondrian had adopted a basic palette of white, black and grey, plus three primaries,
red, yellow and blue. He still regarded red as essentially an ‘outward’ colour, and,
following Goethe, Kandinsky and the Dutch Theosophist H. Schoenmaekers, he
claimed that yellow and blue were more ‘inward’, but that, for the moment, the
three primaries together could not be dispensed with in painting."
Mondrian’ earlier interest in green as a male and internal colour may have been
reinforced about 1920 by his knowledge of Ostwald’s emphasis on unnatural greens,
for in a number of Neo-Plastic paintings of that year he experimented with a dis-
tinctly greenish yellow or yellow green. Yet, unlike van Doesburg or Vantongerloo
among De Stijl artists, he never used green as a fourth Ostwaldian primary.'* On the
other hand, he was certainly very much affected by Ostwald’s views on grey.
In a footnote to an article dealing with colour in the journal De Stijl, Mondrian
wrote that black and white might be mixed with yellow, red and blue and yet these
would still remain primary colours.'’ In his painting of the period he used planes
of very desaturated primaries which may be clearly related to Ostwald’s view
that colour-harmony was to be achieved chiefly by regulating value. The earliest
composition to make use of this principle seems to be Composition — 1916 in the
Guggenheim Museum in New York, but the idea was explored far more systemati-
cally in 1917 and 1918, for example in Composition with Colour-Planes No. 3, Compo-
133 sition: Colour-Planes with Grey Contours and Composition with Grey, Red, Yellow and
Blue of 1920; and well into the 1920s Mondrian was mixing a good deal ofgrey into
his primary colours.'®
During that decade he moved away from this interest in desaturation and in
grey, but the colouristic element in his Neo-Plasticism, his first thoroughly non-
representational style, during and immediately after the war, had been given a
powerful impetus by Ostwald’s promise that it was possible to quantify the psycho-
logical response to colour, and thus to make it into a mathematical study.

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 21 - Making Sense of Colour — The
Synaesthetic Dimension

Perception and deception

\VAaeea TO ST PETER’S in Rome have often marvelled at the full-size mosaic
reproductions of Renaissance and Baroque altarpieces in many of the chapels
there. These copies of oil paintings were made, largely in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, in the Vatican workshops set up by Pope Gregory XIII in the
late sixteenth century to reproduce specially designed cartoons. In the 1620s the
mosaic craftsmen began to reproduce oil paintings, and in due course copied in this
more or less permanent form the works of several old masters such as Raphael.'
These deceptive productions were not only impressive to worshippers or tourists,
they had much to interest the colour-scientist and psychologist as well. When the
Scottish optical physicistJ. F Forbes visited Rome in the 1840s he remarked that:
the immense collection of artificial enamels employed in the Vatican fabric
of mosaic pictures seems to offer an unrivalled opportunity of forming...a
classification [of colours].... The material is a soft and fusible enamel, and
the formation of 18,000 tints was effected by an ingenious artist named
Matteoli... The rough cakes of enamel are preserved in separate cupboards or
pigeon-holes, surrounding a hall of great length appropriated to this purpose
by Pope Pius VI. But the main intention of the work being completed within
St Peter’s, it has not been thought worthwhile to preserve the integrity of
the collection...and it is certain that though still reputed to contain 18,000
modified colours, the effective number is vastly smaller.
Forbes was able to secure a sample of 941 pieces with ‘a great preponderance of
indefinite colours’, but particularly, whole packets were composed of ‘specimens
scarcely sensibly differing from each other’. This, he thought, was only natural in
sets designed to imitate oil paintings; and he also noted,‘many of the suites of indef-
inite colours are exquisitely beautiful’. The accompanying list of Italian colour-
names for these samples gave 142 under blue-grey-greens (veroli), 100 under greys,
100 under flesh-pinks (carnagioni), 91 under blues (turchini), 60 under yellows, and
so on.*
Twenty years later the English psychologist Francis Galton found that, so far
from decreasing, the range of the coloured cubes used in the Vatican fabbrica
had increased to 25,000, and that they were kept in numbered trays or bins, so that
the mosaic workers could simply call for them by number; and on a return visit to
the Vatican, twenty years after this, he discovered that the number of bins had
MAKING SENSE OF COLOUR

increased to 40,000, although only 10,752 (!) were classified. Like Forbes, Galton
hoped to acquire a set of standard cubes to be supplied to art schools by the South
Kensington Museum, but the Vatican asked too high a price.’
The Vatican practice of numbering nuances of hue has been adopted by most
modern colour-systems, although the range of nuances has been substantially
reduced: the American Munsell system, which is very generally used as a standard
for surface colours, comprises somewhat over fifteen hundred plastic chips. And
although a modern dictionary of European colour-names lists about five thousand,
many of these are short-lived fashion names, and only around a dozen are in
common use.‘ There is thus a marked discrepancy between the large number —
some psychologists say millions — of perceivable colours and the handful of names
we use to identify them. Language labels only those few segments of the continu-
ous colour-space which are important to us, and thus the study of colour as we
understand it becomes very much the study of colour-language.
This radical imbalance between sensation and language means that the experi-
ence of colour will be very largely associational. Colour has always lent itself very
readily to association and symbolizing, whether on the general level of identifying
the sensuous, unstable, indeterminate characteristics of colour as such with the
female, as opposed to the determinate, stable, male element of line or form;> or
grouping individual colours into categories such as ‘warm’ and ‘cool’;® or character-
izing colours as, for example, ‘cheerful’ or ‘sad’.? But the course of the nineteenth-
century developments in the physiology of the nervous system, in experimental
aesthetics, as well as in the understanding ofpainting as less and less related to direct
representation, increased the tendency to detach colour-expression from associa-
tion, and to see colour as evoking immediate physical and mental responses.

The unity of the senses

One of the most interesting and still one of the most problematic of the links
between colour-concepts and colour-perceptions is synaesthesia, the involuntary
psychological mechanism by which two sensations are simultaneously triggered by
the same stimulus. Synaesthesia conflicts with the classical doctrine, first articulated
by Aristotle (De Anima, II, 6, 418a; III, 1, 425a-b), that each of the five senses has
its own discrete area of operation;* and it may have been investigated more widely
in the late nineteenth century because it also conflicted with Johannes Miiller’s
modern, and still widely influential, version of this idea in the principle of the
‘specific nerve energies’. Miiller’s agument that sensation was dependent upon
the internal character of the five senses, rather than on the nature of the external
stimulus, so that the same stimulus acting on different nerves gave rise to different
sensations, and vice-versa, had been anticipated in the late eighteenth century by
the English doctor John Elliot, whose work on the senses had been translated into
German in 1785 and was known to Miiller. But it was the comprehensive hand-
109-10 book ofphysiology (1838) by Miiller, the teacher of Helmholtz, which brought the
question into the centre of psycho-physiological debate, and so came to have a

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 MAKING SENSE OF COLOUR

long-standing effect on the general understanding of the subjective representation

of the world.°
During Muller's lifetime several cases of synaesthesia were reported in the medical,
as well as in imaginative literature, and began to attract the attention of psycholo-
gists, especially in Germany, Switzerland and England. G. T. Fechner studied a
number of cases of colour-synaesthesia in his Primer ofAesthetics of 1876-7,'° and by
1890 the number of reported cases had become so numerous that the Congrés
Internationale de Psychologie Physiologique set up a committee to make system-
atic investigations.
The most familiar branch of synaesthesia is colour-hearing (audition colorée), and
the best-known type of colour-hearing is musical." It is easy to see how attractive it
has seemed to find points in the continuum ofspectral colour analogous to discrete
pitches in the continuum of sound whose relationships have been regarded as
harmonious in the Western tradition; and Newton gave great authority to this sort 60
of enquiry.'* I do not propose here to look again at this much-studied area of
synaesthetic experience, but rather to consider another very common type: the
involuntary association of verbal sounds, especially vowel-sounds, with colours.
This was a frequently-reported synaesthetic phenomenon in the late nineteenth
century, and it still accounts for a good deal of psychological research."} But it was
given a particular impetus, not in psychology but in literature, by Rimbaud’s sonnet,
Voyelles (Vowels), of 1871, with the opening line:
A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles...

which must remain untranslated, because it was the sounds and not the visible
letters that were generally thought to evoke the synaesthetic effect. Although the
poet soon disclaimed any involuntariness for the colour-vowel correspondences in
his poem, which he had invented, he said, specifically to open it up to all the senses
(and it does indeed introduce analogies of touch and smell as well as of colour), the
work was very quickly adopted by the scientists.’ But it was almost certainly
Rimbaud’s poetic reputation and the growing Symbolist movement which made
the phenomenon of particular interest to artists and writers. As the’distinguished
French psychologist Alfred Binet wrote in 1892, audition colorée had become a vogue
in science, literature, poetry, and the theatre:
While medical doctors have preferred to see in audition colorée nothing but a
disturbance in sensory perception, literary people believe that they have found
in it a new form ofart.’®
Perhaps one of the very few visualizations of coloured words from this period 1s by
the American architect and designer E. J. Lind, who put together his ideas on this 102
subject in the 1880s, although he traces them back to 1850 when he was a student at
the School of Design in Somerset House in London. There, one or other of the
then very common analogies between music and colour may have been on the
agenda:"° two of the extensive treatments of colour, those by George Field and 134
David Hay, recommended in the 1853 Manual of Colour by the Art Superintendent
of the School of Design from 1852, Richard Redgrave, included highly specific

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MAKING SENSE OF COLOUR

AEIOU
MODERN DIATONIC.

red. blue.green,
yellowpurplebown,
Golden.silver. ick
While voletor
Left: George Field’s “Colours and Sounds’ from
Chromatics, 1845, one of many diagrams ofthe
Romantic period to link the scale of colour and
the diatonic musical scale. (134)

Above: Francis Galton’s coloured vowels, from

Inquiries into Human Faculty, 1883. Here, for
example, A is yellow, E is green, O is red. Galton
was perhaps the first psychologist to illustrate the
phenomenon ofcolour-hearing. (135)
‘SUNOTOD
GNV
SGNNOS
JO
AIVOS
SNODOIVNV

*AUVILUAT,

Enharmonie, Chromatic, Diatonic.

Genus Spissum.

ANCIENT HARMONIC GENERA.

treatments of the analogy with music. Field’s Chromatography (1835) argued that the
painter should follow the musician in matters of harmony, identifying blue specifi-
cally with C; and Hay’s Laws of Harmonious Colouring (4th ed., 1838) include a scale
linking music and colour in the most direct way.'7
4 But Lind’s interest in the colour of words probably developed out of the growing
literature of the 1880s, and perhaps from the discussion in Francis Galton’s important
"35 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, which was first published in
1883 and included a diagram of a coloured alphabet. Galton discussed colour-hearing
in the context of many varieties of visionary experience and colour-association,
and he summarized its characteristics as follows:
the vowel sounds chiefly evoke [colour-associations] ...the seers are invariably
most minute in their description of the precise tint and hue of the colour.
They are never satisfied, for instance, with saying ‘blue’, but will take a great

264
 MAKING SENSE OF COLOUR

deal of trouble to express or to match the particular blue they mean...no two
people agree, or hardly ever do so, as to the colour they associate with the same
sound.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Galton found that the tendency to colour-
hearing was hereditary.'’ Thus his emphasis was both on the involuntary character
and on the extraordinary concreteness of the phenomenon.

Colour and physiology

In the course of his discussion of colour-hearing Lind mentioned a recent discov-
ery, that:
when the colored light of the solar spectrum is cast on colored worsteds
placed in a vessel convenient to receive the rays, sounds will be emitted, louder
or fainter according to the colors of the rays directed upon them, the green ray
upon the red worsted or the red ray upon the green worsted, giving out the
most powerful sounds, thus demonstrating that colored sounds are not so
speculative after all.’
This disturbing positivism is characteristic of the period: it was also the physiological
psychologists who decided to investigate colour-hearing in 1890; and the period
saw the development of techniques to investigate the general effects of colour on
the human organism. This was the era of chromotherapy, and in a letter of 1880
Galton observed:
there is no doubt that blue has a calming effect and red an irritating one, for
the Italian mad-doctors find an advantage in putting their irritable patients in
a room lighted with blue light, and their apathetic ones under red light.”°
One of these ‘mad-doctors’ might well have been the psychologist later famous for
his positivist criminology, Cesare Lombroso, who was said on one occasion to have
treated an ‘hysterical’ patient who had lost her sight, but was able to read with the
tip of her ear:
Asa test, the rays of the sun were focused upon her ear through a lense, and they
dazzled her as if turned upon normal eyes, causing a sensation of being blinded
by unbearable light. Still more puzzling to Prof. Lombroso was the fact that
her sense of taste was transferred to her knees and that of smell to her toes.*!

Interest in the variable effects of different coloured lights on plants, animals and
human beings had been growing throughout the nineteenth century,” and had 136
attracted the attention of, for instance, Galton’s cousin, Charles Darwin. As Binet
suggested in 1892, these early experiments in synaesthesia were posited on the
belief in some anomaly in the nervous system which might be understood and
treated in purely physiological terms. About the time of the First World War a good
deal of work was being done to give a specifically therapeutic function to the deco-
ration of hospital wards, although in Britain at least, the medical establishment 103

265
MAKING SENSE OF COLOUR

Charles Féré’s graph of

the greater and lesser
effects of colours on
muscular activity, 1887.
His was one of the first
attempts to tabulate the
physiological action of
colour on the human
organism. (136)

remained sceptical, and this scepticism has accounted, perhaps, for the very limited
modern research into the physiological effects of exposure to colours.”
Most recent work on colour-word synaesthesia has been conducted by neurolo-
gists, who are largely concerned to understand the mechanisms of transference from
one mode ofbrain activity to another, and they have emphasized the absolute nor-
mality of the experience.”
During the high period of colour-hearing, however, this faculty was seen as a
symptom of abnormality, of heightened sensibility, and the belief that colour could
exert an immediate, non-associative effect on the human organism became crucial
to avant-garde artists such as Kandinsky who were concerned to develop a non-
representational art in the early years of this century.
In his 1912 book, On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky concluded a review of some
of these synaesthetic experiments with the thought that their effects
would seem to be a sort of echo or resonance, as in the case of musical instru-
ments, which without themselves being touched, vibrate in sympathy with
another instrument being played. Such highly sensitive people are like good,
much played violins, which vibrate in all their parts and fibres at every touch
of the bow.”

Here Kandinsky, who as we have seen was not only a string-player but also seems to
have possessed a synaesthetic gift himself, was writing in a remarkably positivist vein;
but we must remember that neither in his writings nor in his paintings of these years
did he abandon associations. Nor did he engage with the specific topic of colour-
vowel synaesthesia until he was teaching at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, and possibly
then only as a result of his teaching experiences in Moscow just after the war.”°

Synaesthesia and aesthetics

[am of course unable to enter into the neurological arguments in any detail, but it
seems likely that one of the most serious obstacles to a neuro-physiological inter-
pretation of colour-hearing has been the almost complete lack of unanimity about
the colours attached to particular vowels.As Galton wrote in 1883:

266
 MAKING SENSE OF COLOUR

Persons who have colour associations are unsparingly critical. To ordinary

individuals one of these accounts seems just as wild and lunatic as another, but
when the account of one seer is submitted to another seer, who is sure to see
the colours in a different way, the latter is scandalised and almost angry at the
heresy of the former.’
The Theosophist Cyril Scott, who re-told in his Philosophy ofModernism the experi-
ences of Professor Lombroso, cited above, was nonplussed at these disagreements,
and argued that
we must only expect anything like accuracy from persons who have gone
through the necessary occult training.
Galton’s subjects had clearly not experienced ‘with the pineal gland [the organ
of psychic perception]’, thought Scott, ‘but merely by a process of imaginative
association’.** It is true that several of the best-known synaesthetes, the Russian
composer Scriabin, the Russian Symbolist poet Andrei Belyi and the Russian
painter Kandinsky, were sympathetic to Theosophy or clairvoyance; but even direct
contact with spiritual correspondences did not guarantee uniformity of experi-
ence. Annie Besant, co-author of that most influential Theosophical handbook
of colour, Thought-Forms, first published in 1901, explained her methods in an early
article:

Two clairvoyant Theosophists observed the forms caused by definite thoughts

thrown out by one of them, and also watched the forms projected by other
persons under the influence of various emotions. They described these as fully
and accurately as they could to an artist who sat with them, and he made
sketches and mixed colours, till some approximation to the objects was made.
Unfortunately the clairvoyants could not draw and the artist could not see, so
the arrangement was a little like that of the blind and lame men — the blind
men having good legs carried the lame ones, and the lame men having good
eyes guided the blind. The artist at his leisure painted the forms, and then
another committee was held and sat upon the paintings, and in the light of the
criticisms then made our long-suffering brother painted an almost entirely
new set — the most successful attempt that has hitherto been made to present
these elusive shapes in the dull pigments of earth.”

So, although a recently reported case study of nine female students has found a
very high degree of consistency in the attribution of white to O, white or pale grey
to I and yellow or light brown to U,*° and a remarkable study carried out half a
century ago by the structural linguist Roman Jakobson found that in several cases,
Czech, German, Serbian and Russian speakers found E was always either yellow or
bright green,*' regularities have in fact been very hard to identify; and it has come
to be argued in some quarters that the discrepancies may be reconciled by assuming
that the synaesthetic process lies in a pre-perceptual stage of neural activity.” But
if, at the level of perception, synaesthetic correspondences are no more universal
than the symbolic attributes of colour have proved to be, this must have serious

267
MAKING SENSE OF COLOUR

consequences for the place of synaesthesia in the experimental aesthetics which

Fechner had sought to introduce.As an early twentieth-century commentator on a
French Gesamtkunstwerk based on The Song of Solomon put it:‘to the man who has
no such turn of his thought, the whole experiment must seem futile to a high
déoree
Perhaps it is not surprising that the non-associative interpretation of colours
with verbal sounds should have reached its apogee in a period when linguistics
itself, in the tradition of the Symbolist René Ghil, was increasingly concerned with
The Moscow Linguistic
the structural, non-representational elements of language.
Circle, of which Jacobson was a member, was much concerned with phonetics,
and also took audition colorée on board.*+ Jakobson, indeed, was still investigating
the phenomenon well after the Second World War. It had long been felt that the
Russian language lent itself especially to audition colorée,** and one of the most
remarkable instances of this was that of ayoung woman, E. Werth, studied by Jacob-
son in the United States in the 1940s, two of whose half-dozen languages were
Serbian and Russian. Werth had spoken Serbian and Hungarian since infancy, and
to these added French, German, English and Russian, in that order. She was able to
make clear distinctions between the colour-characteristics of each of her languages:
As time went on words became simply sounds differently colored, and the
more outstanding one color was the better it remained in my memory. That is
why, on the other hand, I have great difficulty with short English words like
just, jot, jug, lie, lag, etc. Their colors simply run together and are obscured by
the longer words that stand near them.
I like to play with words. I like to listen to new sound-combinations and to
arrange them in color-patterns. For example, Russian has a lot of long, black
and brown words, like Serbian words; in both these languages the combina-
tions of ya or yu are little sparkling stars. The German scientific expressions are
accompanied by a strange, dull yellowish glimmer, the word English and many
English words are steel blue to my mind. Hungarian with its frequent cs, 2s, cz,
sz twinkles in violet and dark green, while French, the language I love most, is
richest in colors, colors that at the same time carry a tone; hence a vivid
mental picture when I listen to French.*°
Werth’s gender may have been of some significance. As in other areas of sensibility
to colour, colour-synaesthetes have in modern studies been predominantly female,
and a questionnaire launched in England in 1992 elicited 210 responses from women
claiming to be colour-sound synaesthetes, but only two from men.” If this gender
bias turns out to be an intrinsic characteristic of the phenomenon it must further
compromise the aspiration to integrate synaesthesia into a modernist-inspired uni-
versal language of the sort proposed by Khlebnikov in 1919 (p. 247).
The history of synaesthesia suggests that the very senses themselves, which have
generally been thought of as bodily functions, are not exempt from, or are by and
large the products ofcultural conditioning.

268
Acknowledgments
Notes to the Text
Select Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
 Acknowledgments

Many of the chapters have their origin in articles and conference 1983,Common Denominators in Art and Science; Chapter 10 appeared
papers written and published over the last thirty years, while others in 1971 in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXI;
are previously unpublished or are written specifically for this book. Chapter 11 is an expanded version of a study in Apollo, LXXX,
Chapter 1 stems from an article of 1984 in Interdisciplinary Science 1964; 12 appeared in the exhibition catalogue Turner en France, Panis,
Reviews, IX; Chapter 2 from part of the 1993 Darwin Lecture Series 1981, Centre Cultural du Marais.
on Colour at Cambridge University, first published in T. Lamb and Chapter 13 is a revised version of a paper presented at the sympo-
J. Bourriau (eds) 1995, Colour: Art and Science. Chapter 3 is a revised sium Runge Fragen und Antworten arranged by the Hamburg Kun-
version of ‘Colour in Western Art: An Issue?’ Art Bulletin, LX XI, sthalle in 1977, and published with the other papers in 1979 under
1990. the editorship of Hanna Hohl; Chapter 14 appeared in the catalogue
Chapter 4 arose from a research seminar at the University of East of the exhibition
The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790-1990, Edin-
Anglia and lectures given in 1977 at the University of East Anglia, burgh, London, Munich, 1994-5. Chapter 15 is an expanded version
the Colour Group Symposium, and in 1978 at the Centre for Byzan- of a paper given at the Journée Chevreul arranged by the Musée
tine Studies at the University of Birmingham. It was published in National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris in 1989, published in French
1978 in Art History, 1. My colleagues at the University of East Anglia in F. Viénot and G. Roque (eds), Michel-Eugene Chevreul: un Savant,
gave generous leave of absence to pursue these enquiries, and I am Des Couleurs!, 1997. Chapter 16 was first published in 1987 in Art
particularly indebted for help and advice to David Chadd, Robin Bulletin, LXTX and is reprinted here with revisions to the notes. I am
Cormack, Richard Gordon, Paul Hetherington, John Mitchell and especially grateful to Bob Herbert for having read my original type-
Paolo Vivante. Chapter 5 is an expanded version of apaper given in script and making several suggestions about the argument. Chapter
1995 at a Manuscript Workshop: Colour and Pigments in Manuscript 17 is an expansion ofa paper given in 1991 at the Seurat Symposium
Illumination, arranged by the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, at the Metropolitan Museum ofArt in New York. I am particularly
Cambridge. Another version was published in 1998 in Leids Kun- grateful to Bob Herbert for inviting me to contribute. Chapter 18 is
sthistorisch Jaarboek X1. Chapter 6, on the background to Ghiberti’s written specifically for the present book
Third Commentary, was first published in 1972 in Apollo, XCV. I am Chapter 19 is a revised version of paper given at the 1985 Royal
grateful for the generous advice of the late Andrew Martindale Institute of Philosophy conference at Bristol, published in A. Harri-
during its preparation. son (ed.), Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and Abstracting, 1987.
Chapter 7 is a modified version of a paper given in 1994 at the Chapter 20 originated as an essay first published in M. Compton (ed.),
conference El Color en el Arte Mexicano arranged by the Universidad Towards a New Art: Essays on the Background to Abstract Art, 1910-20,
Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, published in a Spanish version Tate Gallery 1980. Chapter 21 was first presented in 1994 as a paper
with the other papers. I am particularly grateful to Georges Roque at the conference Son et Lumiére held at Sussex University. I am
for giving me the occasion to investigate the subject of this paper, indebted to Nigel Llewellyn for inviting me to contribute.
and to Daniéle Dehouve for her advice on Nahuatl colour-terms. For permission to reproduce material am indebted to the editors
Chapter 8 derives from a paper on “Rainbow and Prism’ given in of Art Bulletin; Apollo; Interdisciplinary Science Reviews; Art History; the
Edinburgh in 1994 at the Interalia Conference Visions of Light, and Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes; the former Centre Cul-
another, “The De Coloribus of V. Scarmilionius’, presented to the turel du Marais, the University Presses of Cambridge and Aberdeen,
1995 Symposium ofthe Leonardo da Vinci Society and the Society to Prestel Verlag, D. Riedel Publishing Company and the Tate
for Renaissance Studies: Art and Science in the Italian Renaissance: Gallery.
Light. I am grateful to Richard Bright and Martin Kemp for their My great indebtedness to individuals is expressed above and in
invitations to contribute to these events. Chapter 9 originates in a the Notes to the Text below, but my greatest thanks go, as always,
paper given in at a conference arranged by the School of Epistemics to my family for their patience and support.
at Edinburgh University in 1981, first published in M. Pollock (ed.) cS.

270
 Notes to the Text

Introduction 143-55; ‘De Kleurentheorie in West-Europa van ca. 600-1200’,

ibid., VII, 30-50 (1966); ‘Geschiedenis van de kleurentheorie in de
I P. Brunette and D. Wills (eds) 1994. Deconstruction and the Visual zestiende Eeuw’, ibid., IX, 23-39 (1967); and a short anthology of
Arts, Art Media, Architecture. source-materials has been published by D. L. MacAdam 1970,
2 Brunette and Wills (op. cit.) 19: ‘The spatial arts: an interview Sources of Color Science. None of these studies gives any attention to
with Jacques Derrida’. the question of colour-terminology.
3 J. Derrida 1987, ‘R’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington 5 S. Skard, ‘The use ofcolor in literature: a survey of research’, Pro-
and I. McLeod, 169. ; ceedings of the American Philosophical Society, XC (1949); H. Diirbeck
4 V. Adami 1976, ‘Les régles du montage’, trans. G. Joppolo in 1977, Zur Charakteristik der griechischen Farbenbezeichnungen; J. André
Derriére le Miroir 220, Oct., 23, cit. J. P. Leavey
Jr, ‘Sketch: counter- 1949, Etude sur les termes de couleur dans la langue latine; N. F. Barley
points of the eye’ in Brunette and Wills (eds) op. cit. 193. 1974, ‘Old English colour classification: where do matters stand?’,
5 S. Melville, “Color has not yet been named: objectivity in decon- Anglo-Saxon England, IL.
struction’ in Brunette and Wills (eds), op. cit. 45. 6 B. Berlin and P. Kay 1969, Basic Color Terms, 2nd ed. 1991.
6 I. Kant (1790), Critique ofJudgement, trans.J.C. Meredith 1952, 14, 7 H. Zollinger 1979, ‘Correlations between the neurobiology of
cit. Derrida, op. cit. 77. Euler’s discussion is in Nova Theoria Lucis et colour vision and the psycho-linguistics of colour naming’, Experi-
Colorum,1746, for which see R. W. Home 1988, ‘Leonhard Euler’s entia, 35, 1-8.
“Anti-Newtonian” theory oflight’, Annals ofScience 45, 521-33. It is 8 There have been nods in the direction of the visual arts at sym-
striking that Kant (§42) adopts a 7-colour Newtonian spectrum for posia, for example, I. Meyerson, op. cit. n. 3 above; International
his neo-baroque scheme of colour-meanings in which, for example, Colour Association, Colour 73, London, 1973; F. W. Billmeyer and
red connotes sublimity and violet tenderness. For Kant’s lack of G. Wyszecki (eds), Color 77: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the
interest in the visual,J.Ward 1922, A Study of Kant, 237. International Colour Association, Bristol 1978.
7 L. Wittgenstein (1950), Remarks on Colour 1978, 20, 27, 34. 9 R. M. Evans 1948, An Introduction to Color; Judd and Wyszecki,
8 See espec. A. Morton, ‘Colour appearances and the-colour solid’ op. cit. n.2 above.
in A. Harrison (ed.) 1987, Philosophy and the Visual Arts: Seeing and to It may be hoped that with the recent foundation of substantial
Abstracting, 35-52; C. L. Hardin, ColorforPhilosophers, 2nd ed. 1988; and wide-ranging colour libraries like the Birren collection at Yale
J. Westphal, Colour: a Philosophical Introduction, 2nd ed. 1991. B. (see R. L. Herbert, “A Color Bibliography’, Yale University Library
Maund 1995, Colours: their Nature and Representation, offers a useful Gazette, 49 [1974], 3-49; 52 [1978], 127-65), the Colour Reference
survey of recent studies, while at the same time attempting to address Library at the Royal College of Art in London, and, ona lesser scale,
more traditional philosophical issues. the still-excellent collection of colour-literature at the Zentralinsti-
tut fiir Kunstgeschichte in Munich (see the extensive treatment of
the subject by its librarian: T. Lersch, ‘Farbenlehre’, Reallexikon zur
1 The Contexts of Colour deutschen Kunstgeschichte, VII [1974], cols 157-274), renewed attempts
will be made to approach the subject from a broader perspective.
1 R. W. Burnham, R. M. Haines and C. J. Bartleson 1963, Color: A Im W. Schéne, Uber das Licht in der Malerei, 3rd ed. 1979.
Guide to Basic Facts and Concepts, 11. 12 N. Bromelle 1955, ‘Colour and Conservation’, Studies in Conser-
2 D.B. Judd and G. Wyszecki, Color in Business, Science and Industry, vation II, 764.
3rd ed. 1975. 13 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, ch. 1.
3 The exceptions are popular coffee-table treatments such as H. 1% R. W. G. Hunt, ‘Problems in Colour Reproduction’, Colour 73,
Varley (ed.) 1980, Colour, and H. Kramer and O. Matschoss (eds) espec. 7ff; idem, The Reproduction ofColour, 3rd ed. 1975.
1963, Farben in Kultur und Leben; collections of rather heterogeneous 15 M. Baxandall 1972, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century
essays, such as I. Meyerson (ed.) 1957, Problémes de la Couleur; Italy, 3-11.
Studium Generale, XIII, 1960, T. B. Hess andJ.Ashbery (eds) 1969, 16 M. Merrifield, Original Treatises on the Arts ofPainting, 2nd ed. 1967,
Light: From Aten to Laser (Art News Annual, XX XV), Eranos Year- vol. II, 384-405.
book 41, 1972, M. Hering Mitgau, B. Sigel, J. Ganz and A. Morel 17 E. van Even, ‘Le contrat pour !’éxécution du triptique de Thierry
(eds) 1980, Von Farbe und Farben: Albert Knoepfl zum 70. Geburtstag, Bouts de la Collégiale Saint-Pierre 4 Louvain (1464)’, Bulletin de
Zurich; and M. Minnaert’s excellent handbook for the ordinary l’Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique,
observer of the outdoor scene, Light and Colour in the Open Air, 3rd 2nd series, XXXV, 474f (1898); P. Coremans, R. J. Gettens,J.Thissen,
ed. 1959. ‘La technique des Primitifs Flamands, II, T. H. Bouts: Le Retable du
4 Here, too, the few historical treatments of colour have tended to Saint Sacrement’, Studies in Conservation I (1952), 15ff. See now M.
reflect the physical or psycho-physical biases of their authors. K. T. Comblen-Sonkes 1996, The Collegiate Church ofSaint Peter, Louvain.
A. Halbertsma’s brief study, A History of the Theory of Colour, 1949, 1s 18 P. Coremans 1953, L’Agneau Mystique au Laboratoire (Les Primi-
the fullest treatment to date, but its 19th- and 20th-century sections tifs Flamands III, Contributions 4 l’étude des Primitifs Flamands),
are almost exclusively concerned with physical and ophthalmic 7off.
questions, and its earlier chapters depend almost entirely on material 19 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 34-6.
gathered by Goethe and first published in 1810;J.W. von Goethe, 20 For a recent assessment of the theoretical basis for the analogy
Zur Farbenlehre: Historischer Teil, in Goethe, Die Schriften zur Natur- colour-scale-musical octave, see C. Loef, ‘Die Bedeutung der Musik-
wissenschaft, ed. Matthaei, Troll, Wolf 1957, Weimar, I, vi (text); 1959, Oktave im optisch-visuellen Bereich der Farbe’, Von Farbe und Farben
IL, vi (Ergdnzungen und Erlauterungen). The earlier history of the theory (cit. n. 3above) 227-36.
of colour was later amplified in a rather inaccessible series of articles 21 R. Waller, ‘A Catalogue of Simple and Mixt Colours’, Philosoph-
by J. MacLean, “De Kleurentheorie van Aristoteles’, Scientiarum His- ical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, XVI, 24ff (1686). See
toria, VII, 109-16 (1965); ‘De Kleurentheorie der Arabieren’, ibid., also Judd and Wyszecki (op. cit. n.2 above) 373ff.

271
NOTES TO THE TEXT

22 Burnham, Haines and Bartleson (op. cit. n. 1 above) 209-10. considerations concerning the effects of ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colors on
energy conservation’, ibid. 23, 949-54. : ;
23 G. Bierson, ‘Why did Newton see indigo in the spectrum?’,
American Journal ofPhysics, 40, $20 (1972). . 9 A. Wierzbicka 1990, “The meaning of color terms: semantics,
cultures and cognition’, Cognitive Linguistics, I, 99-150. See also the
24 E. Fletcher (ed.) 1901, Conversations ofJames Northcote with James
more cautious remarks in H. B. Nicholson, ‘Polychrome on Aztec
Ward, 217-18. Cf. J. Burnet 1822, Practical Hints on Composition in
sculpture’ in E. H. Boone (ed.) 1986, Painted Architecture and Poly-
Painting, 23. Purkinje’s observations were stimulated by Goethe s
Theory of Colours, espec. §s4, and first publ. in J. E. Purkinje, chrome Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica, 147: ‘Certain associa-
tions seem reasonably obvious and ‘natural’, such as black with night
Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne II, 1825 (Opera
Omnia, vol. 1, 1918), 118f. and darkness and the sub-terrestrial realm, blue with the diurnal
celestial sphere and aquatic phenomena, green with vegetation and
25 J. Gage, ‘Colour at the Bauhaus’, AA Files, 1, $1 (1982), 1993,
259-63.
preciousness in general, red with sacrificial blood, and red and
26 Theophilus, On Divers Arts, trans. J. G. Hawthorne and C.)S. yellow in combination with fire and solar heat. However, more
Smith, 2nd ed. 1979, 24f. subtle and complex connotations were probably also involved...’.
27 Corot raconté par lui-méme, 1946, 83; for the Villalobos system see 10 J. G. Millais 1899, Life and Letters ofSirJ. E. Millais, 1, 240 and the
Burnham, Haines and Bartleson (op. cit. n. 1 above) 172. letter from ‘Chromos’ to Millais, publ. by P. Fagot, “Témoignages
28 Burnham, Haines and Bartleson (op. cit.) 91-2. synoptiques de William Blake et d’Emmanuel Swedenborge sur
29 See the technical notes in Rembrandt in the Mauritshuis, 1978. l’arc-en-ciel’ in P. Junod and M. Pastereau (eds) 1994, La couleur:
30 C. Hope 1980, Titian, 161-3. regards croisés sur la couleur, 93. Millais was, however, still having
31 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 168. trouble with the order of the rainbow colours in what seems to be a
32 R. Liebreich, ‘Turner and Mulready — On the effect of certain later picture: see J. Larmor (ed.) 1907, Memoir and Scientific Corre-
faults of vision on painting’, Notices of the Proceedings of the Royal spondence of the late Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Bt., 1, 20 (I owe this
Institution, VI, 450-63 (1872). The argument was countered by W. reference to Joanie Kennedy). On the perception and representa-
M. Williams 1872, Nature, 500, and especially in an anonymous tion of the rainbow, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, ch. 6.
review of Liebreich, ‘Painters and the Accidents of Sight’ in The 11 P. Syme, Werner's Nomenclature of Colours adapted to Zoology,
British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, 50, Oct. 1872, 284-306. Botany, Chemistry, Mineralogy, Anatomy and the Arts, 2nd ed. 1821, 11.
Cf. P. D. Trevor-Roper, The World Through Blunted Sight, 2nd ed. For Darwin’s use of Syme/Werner in 1832 and 1833, F. Burkhardt
1988, 2-3. See also below, ch. 3. and S. Smith (eds) 1985, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, I, 280,
33 J. Cowart,J.D. Flam, D. Fourcade andJ.H. Neff 1977, Henri 353.
Matisse: Paper Cut-Outs, 28-30. British Journal of Aesthetics, XVUI, 12 For Darwin’s few marginal notes in his copy of Syme, M. A. Di
1978; G. W. Granger, ‘Colour Harmony in Science and Art’, Colour Gregorio 1990, Charles Darwin's Marginalia, 1, col. 797. Some 1,868
73 (cit. n.8 above) 502-5. colour-notes on the feathers of Polypection Napoleonis use very
34 M. Sahlins, ‘Colours and Cultures’, Semiotica (1976), 16, 12. general terms and include a correction from ‘ashy brown’ to “black-
ish’ (Cambridge University Library, Darwin Papers 84.2, ff63-4).
13 W. Dacre (Nicholson), ‘Liberation of Colour’ (1944) in W.
2 Colour and Culture Nicholson 1987, Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writings, 125.
14 For faktura, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 225.
1 J. M. Oxbury, S. M. Oxbury, N. K. Humphrey 1969, “Varieties 15 D. Katz 1935, The World of Colour (repr. 1970).
of colour anomia’, Brain 92, 847-60; A. Damasio, ‘Disorders of 16 See H. P. Barlow andJ.D. Mollon (eds) 1982, The Senses, 112-13.
complex visual processing: Agnosiasis, Achromatopsis, Balint’s 17 M. Sahlins 1976, “Colors and Cultures’, Semiotica, 16, 8.
syndrome and related difficulties of orientation and construction’ in 18 T. D. Crawford 1982, ‘Defining “Basic color terms”, Anthropo-
M.-N. Mesulam (ed.) 1985, Principles of Behavioural Neurology, logical Linguistics 24, 338-43; B. Saunders 1995, ‘Disinterring Basic
259-88. See also M. H. Bornstein 1985, ‘On the development of Color Terms: a study in the mystique of cognitivism’, History of the
color naming in children: data and theory’, Brain and Language, 26, Human Sciences 8, 19-38.
85-6. 19 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, espec. 32-3.
2 U. Eco, ‘How culture conditions the colors we see’ in M. Blonsky 20 R. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: a Psychology ofthe Creative
(ed.) 1985, On Signs, 157-75. Eye, 2nd ed. 1974, 340.
3 M. Kemp, The Science ofArt, 2nd ed. 1991, Part III. 21 Sahlins 1976, 16. L. Wittgenstein 1978, Remarks on Colour, speaks
4 R. W. Darwin 1786, ‘On the ocular spectra oflight and colours’, casually ofthe colour circle (III, 80) and the ‘colour-octagon’ (III, 197).
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, LXXVI, ii, espec. 328. 22 For sinople and bloi, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 81-2, 90.
5 See G. Roque 1994, “Les couleurs complémentaires: un nouveau 23 Wittgenstein (op cit. n.21 above) I, 9-14. For Japan, N. B.
paradigme’, Revue d'Histoire des Sciences, XLVII, 405-33, espec. 414, MeNeill 1972, ‘Colour and Colour Terminology’, Journal ofLinguis-
423. This is the fullest historical study of complementary colours, tics, VIII, 21; for Slav terms covering yellow and blue, G. Herne
but for Newton see above, 142-3. 1954, Die slavischen Farbenbenannungen (Publications de l'Institut
6 J. Albers, Interaction of Color (1963), rev. ed. 1971, VIII, 22: “green Slave d’Upsal, 9) 73. P. Klee, Beitriige zur bildnerische Formlehre, ed.
or blue-green’. ‘This green is the complementary color of red or J. Glaesemer 1974, facs. 159. C. L. Hardin has pointed to some labo-
red-orange.’ ratory experiments which suggest that subjects may read a surface as
7 C. Hayter 1813, An Introduction to Perspective adapted to the capacities simultaneously red and green all over (Color for Philosophers, 2nd edn.
of youth..., pl. XIV, fig. 4. The earliest record I have found of a 1988, 124f).
perceptual classification of colours as ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ is in Johannes 24 R.E. MacLaury et al. 1992, ‘From brightness to hue: an explana-
Hiibner’s Curieuses Natur-Kunst-Berg-Gewerck und Handlungs-Lexicon, tory model of color-category evolution’, Current Anthropology 33,
Leipzig 1727, col. 1019: ‘dasz die maler die blauen farben Kalte farben 137-86. For Judaism and Pseudo-Dionysius, Gage 1993, Colour and
nennen, engl. cold, die gelben warme’ (cited in Grimm, Deutsches Culture, 60, 71.
Wéerterbuch, sv. kalt, col. 80). Earlier notions of colour-temperature
25 WR. Kuschel and T. Monberg 1974, ‘““We don’t talk much about
had depended on the doctrine of the mixture of the four tempera- colour here”: a study of colour semantics on Bellona Island’, Man 9,
ments, e.g. B. Telesius, Liber de Coloribus in Bernardini Telesii Vari de
213-42; for a further critique of the social attitudes implicit in
Naturalibus, Venice 1590, where white was the warmest colour,
colour-tests in anthropology, Saunders (op. cit. n. 18) 35 n. 17.
8 See the cautious scepticism ofP.O, Fanger, N. O. Breum, E. Jerking 26 T. Izutsu, “The elimination of colour in Far Eastern art and phi-
1977, ‘Can color and noise influence man’s thermal comfort?’ losophy’ in S. Haule (ed.) 1977, Color Symbolism: Six Excerpts from
Ergonomics 20, 11-18; T.C. Greene, P. A. Bell 1980, ‘Additional the Eranos Yearbook 1972, 167-95. ;

a2
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

27 J. Harvey 1995, Men in Black. frangaise?, Art de France, 11, 23-42. Souriau’s answer was yes: it is red,
28 C. Feéré 1887, Sensation et Mouvement, 41-6. white, and blue.
29 P. K. Kaiser 1984, ‘Physiological response to color: a critical
8 S.R. Weitman 1973, ‘National Flags: A Sociological Overview’,
review’, Color Research and Application 9, 29-36.
Semiotica, VII, 328-67. See also H. Fischer 1963, ‘Rot and Weiss als
30 I. Scott (ed. and trans.) 1971, The Liischer Colour Test, 68; cf. H. Fahnenfarben’, Antaios, [V, 136ff; L. Schmidt, ‘Rot und Blau. Zur
Eysenck 1941, ‘A critical and experimental study of colour prefer- Symbolik eines Farbenpaares’ in ibid. 168ff; and R. Girardet 1984,
ences’, American Journal ofPsychology 54, 386. ‘Les Trois Couleurs, ni blanc ni rouge’ in P. Nova (ed.), Les Lieuo de
31 M. Liischer, Psychologie der Farben, Basel, n.d. (1949), 32-3 for meéemoire, 1, La République, 5 ff.
Goethe and Kandinsky, 59 for the four humours. For Goethe and 9 For the ancient practice, see Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture,
Schiller, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 204. VII, 7-8; and Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 30. For an instance in
32 For a review of the extensive literature on children, Bornstein 15th-century Siena, see G. Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell’arte
(op. cit. n. 1 above) 72-93; for animals, A. Portmann, ‘Colour sense senese, 1854, II, 307, no. 215; and for another in Baroque Rome, see
and the meaning of colour from a biologist’s point of view’ in D. Mahon 1947, Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, 92. For 18th-
Haule, ed. (op. cit. n.26 above) 977, 1-22. century Spain see Z. Veliz 1986, Artists and Techniques in Golden Age
33 MacLaury, op. cit. n.24 above. Spain, 154.
34 N. A. Stekler and W. E. Cooper 1980, ‘Sex differences in color to G. Vasari, Le vite..., ed. G. Milanesi, 1878-81, II, 187-9. For a
naming of unisex apparel’, Anthropological Linguistics 22, 373-81; Baroque retelling of the story that stressed the Pope’s ‘eye’ over his
J. D. Mollon, ‘Colour vision and colour blindness’ in Barlow and ‘reason’, see G. D. Ottonelli and P. Berrettini, Tyattato della pittura e
Mollon (op. cit. n. 16 above) 187-9; Bornstein, op. cit. n. 1 above; scultura; Uso et abuso loro (Florence, 1652), ed. V. Casale 1973, 58f.
J. Mollon, ‘Seeing colour’ in T. Lamb andJ. Bourriau 1995, Colour: 11 Bernal (op. cit. n. 5above) 343.
Art and Science, espec. 139-40. 12 C. A. du Fresnoy (1667), The Art ofPainting, trans. W. Mason in
The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. H. W. Beechey 1852,
II, 274; see also E. Cropper 1984, The Ideal of Painting: Pietro Testa’s
3 Colour in Art and its Literature Diisseldorf Notebook, 252.
13).@? Blane 1867, Grammaire des arts du dessin, 22.
I See below p. 67. 14 H. Matisse, Ecrits et propos sur l'art, ed. D. Fourcade 1972, 201.
2 See particularly the remarks by J. Shearman on the distinction 15 P.O. Runge (1840), Hinterlassene Schriften, repr. 1965, I, 164; Marc
between historiography and science in ‘The Historian.and the to August Macke, 12 Dec. 1910 in W. Macke, ed. 1964, August
Conservator’, J. Shearman and M. B. Hall (eds) 1990, The Princeton Macke — Franz Marc Briefwechsel, 28.
Raphael Symposium. Science in the Service ofArt History, 7-8. 16 R. Matthai 1928, ‘Experimentelle Studien tiber die Attribute der
3 W. Menzel 1842, ‘Die Mythen des Regenhogens’ in Mythologische Farbe’, Zeitschrift
fiirSinnesphysiologie, LIX, 354; see also A. Lichtwark
Forschungen und Sammlungen, Stuttgart and Tiibingen, 241. (1891), Die Erziehung des Farbsinnes, 3rd ed. 1905, 5, 23.
4 For example, G. Dumeézil 1946, ‘““Tripertia” fonctionnels chez 17 H. B. Barlow andJ.D. Mollon (eds) 1982, The Senses, 187. Pos-
divers peuples indo-européens’, Revue d’histoire des religions, CKXXI, sibly the only scholar to contest these figures is G. S. Wasserman
54ff. For a critique, see C. Renfrew 1987, Archaelogy and Language: 1978, Color Vision: An Historical Introduction, 6of€.
The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, 25 ff. 18 One of the few studies of costume to address itself specifically
5 See particularly M. Bernal 1987, Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots to historians of art is by a pupil of Newton: E. Birbari 1975, Dress
of Classical Civilization, I, 240ff. Bernal documents the long-standing in Italian Painting 1460-1500. F. Brunello’s most important study is
European doubts about whether the ancient Egyptians were black L’Arte della tintura nella storia dell’ umanita, 1968 (also publ. in English,
or light-skinned. The transmission of the negative connotations of Vicenza 1968).
black Egyptians to the Christian tradition of the Devil has been 19 A. Hollander 1978, Seeing through Clothes; and R. Parker 1984,
studied by P. du Bourguet 1972, ‘La Couleur noire de la peau du The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of Femininity.
démon dans l’iconographie chrétienne: A-t’elle une origine précise?’, 20 G. Berkeley (1709), An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,
Actas del VIII Congreso Internacional de Arquelogia Cristiana (1969), XLII, Cll, CLVI, CLVII; J. W. von Goethe (1810), Theory of
Citta del Vaticano and Barcelona, 271-2. For Iconoclasts as blacks in Colours, trans. C. L. Eastlake (London, 1840), repr. 1970, Xxxviii-
Byzantium, see R. Cormack 1985, Writing in Gold: Byzantine Society xxxix. For the Sceptics, seeJ.Annas andJ.Barnes 1985, The Modes
and Its Icons, 136f. White and racialism has now been studied by of Scepticism, espec. 38-9; andJ.Locke, An Essay on Human Under-
Richard Dyer 1997, White. For another racially-linked colour preju- standing, 4th ed. 1700, II, xxii, vv. 2, 8, 10-11. See also M. Baxandall
dice, see R. Mellinkoff 1983, ‘Judas’ Red Hair and the Jews’, Journal 1985, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures,
ofJewish Art, LX, 31-46; and M. Pastoureau (1989), ‘Rouge, jaune et 76-80.
gaucher: Notes sur l’iconographie médiévale de Judas’ in Couleurs, 21 J. D. Mollon 1989, ““Tho’ she kneeled in that place where they
images, symboles, n.d., 69-83. erew...”. The Uses and Origins of Primate Colour Vision’, Journal
6 Victor Turner’s classic study, ‘Colour Classifications in Ndembu of Experimental Biology, CXLVI, 21-38. See also the discussion of
Ritual: A Problem in Primitive Classification’ (1966) in The Forest of infants’ observation of contour, as opposed to colour at the centre
Symbols: Aspects ofNdembu Ritual, 2nd ed. 1970, sof, should now be of forms, in M. H. Bornstein 1975, ‘Qualities of Colour Vision in
supplemented by R. Willis, ‘Do the Fipa have a word for it?’ in D. Infancy’, Journal ofExperimental Child Psychology, XIX, 415-16.
Parkin (ed.) 1985, The Anthropology of Evil, espec. 217ff. For a rather 22 See, for example, G. Mancini 1956, Considerazioni sulla pittura,
slight modification of the traditionally negative interpretation of ed. A. Marucchi, I, 162; Domenichino to Angeloni (1632) in Mahon
‘black’ among Afro-Americans, seeJ.E. Williams 1964, ‘Connota- (op. cit. n.9 above) 120; and G. P. Bellori (1732), Vita di Carlo
tions of Color Names among Negroes and Caucasians’, Perceptual Maratti in Le Vite...,ed. E. Borea 1976, 632. A critique ofthe later
and Motor Skills, XVUI, 729; andJ. E. Williams, R. D. Tucker, F. development of this view has been offered by L. Venturi 1933, “Sul
Dunham 1971, ‘Changes in the Connotations of Color Names ‘colore’ nella storia della critica’, L’Arte, [V, 228-33 (repr. in Saggi
among Negroes and Caucasians, 1963-1969’, Journal of Personality di critica, 1956, 159-69).
and Social Psychology, XIX, 228. 23 Fora brief survey of this tradition, see E. Strauss, “Zur Entwick-
7 A. L. Plehn 1911, Farbensymmetrie und Farbenwechsel. Prinzipien lung der Koloritforschung’ in Strauss, Koloritgeschichtliche Untersuchun-
der deutschen und italienischen Farbenverteilung (Studien zur deutschen gen zur Maleri seit Giotto und andere Studien, 2nd ed., ed. L. Dittmann
Kunstgeschichte, CXLII); E. von den Berken 1930, ‘Forschungen 1983, 331-41.
iiber die Geschichte der Farbe in der Malerei’, Forschungen und
24 L. Dittmann (1959), ‘Bemerkungen zur Farbenlehre von Hedwig
1962, “Y-a-t-il une palette Conrad-Martius’, Hefte des Kunsthistorischen Seminars der Universitat
Fortschritte, V1, 262-3; and E. Souriau

273
NOTES TO THE TEXT

Miinchen, v, 1963, 22ff. Conrad-Martius’s most important text in sive but very well-documented discussion by R. Verbraeken 1979,
Clair Obscur— histoire d’un mot. ;
this regard is H. Conrad Martius 1929, ‘Farben: Ein Kapitel aus der
38 Dittmann (op. cit. n. 26 above) 346; cf. also Strauss (op. cit. n. 23
Realontologie’, Festschrift Edmund Husserl, 339-70. For an_excep-
tionally vital and far from formalist analysis in the spirit of Conrad- above) 12.
1961, ‘Zur Kunst Cézannes’ in M. 39 J. Westphal, Colour: A Philosophical Introduction, 2nd ed. 1991, ch. 3.
Martius, see L. Dittmann
Westphal is mistaken in thinking that pigment-mixtures of yellow
Gosebruch (ed.), Festschrift Kurt Badt, 190-212.
and black yield brown (44, n. 7); the product here is green (F.
25, W. Schone (1954), Uber das Licht in der Malerei, sth ed. 1979. For
Kiesow 1930, ‘Uber die Entstehung der Braunempfindung’, Neue
an English summary, see A. Neumayer’s review in Art Bulletin,
Psychologische Studien, V1, 121ff); and idem 1982, ‘Brown’, Inquiry,
XXXVII, 1955, 301ff. Some extracts appear in English in W. Sypher
xxv, 1982, espec. 420. In note 32 here Westphal suggests circum-
(ed.) 1963, Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, 132-52. See
also the only English published study to draw on Sch6ne’s approach:
stances in which brown might be seen to be a spectral colour. See
P. Hills 1987, The Light of Early Italian Painting. Among the several also K. Fuld,J.S. Werner, B. R. Wooten 1983, “The possible ele-
mental nature of brown’, Vision Research, 23, 631-7; P. C. Quinn,
studies of light in European culture are V. Nieto Alcaide 1978, La
Luz, Simbolo y sistema visual (El espacio y la luz en el arte gotico y del J. L. Rosano, B. R. Wooten 1988, ‘Evidence that brown 1s not an
renacimiento); C. R. Dodwell 1982, Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective; elemental color’, Perception and Psychophysics, 43, 156-64.
D. Bremer 1974, ‘Licht als universales Darstellungsmedium’, Archiv 40 C. J. Bartleson 1976, ‘Brown’, Color Research and Application, 1,
fiir Begriffsgeschichte, XVII, 185-206 (with extensive bibliography); 188; M. Sahlins, ‘Colors and Cultures’ in J. L. Dolgin, D. S. Kem-
K. Hedwig 1977, ‘Forschungstibersicht: Arbeiten zur scholastischen nitzer, D. M. Schneider, eds 1977, Symbolic Anthropology: A Reader in
Lichtspekulation. Allegorie-Metaphysik-Optik’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch, the Study of Symbols and Meanings, 170.
LXXXIV, 102-26; idem 1979, ‘Neuere Arbeiten zur mittelalter- 41 Bartleson (op. cit. n. 40 above); B. Harrison 1973, Form and
fiirhrift
lichen Lichttheorie’, Zeitsc philosophische Forschung, XXXII, Content, 108-11.
602-15; Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, ch. 4. 42 Verbraeken (op. cit. n. 37 above) 59, 102; A. M. Kristol 1978,
26 Dittmann 1987, Farbgestaltung und Farbtheorie in der abendlandischen Color: Les Langues romanes devant le phénomene de la couleur, 103, 323,
Malerei, XI, n. 1. The reference is to M. Rzepinska, Historia Koloru w n. 41; K. Borinski 1918, ‘Braun als Trauerfarbe’, Sitzungsberichte der
dziejach malarstwa europejskiego, 3rd ed. 1989. Since I am not familiar bayerischen Akad. der Wissenschaften: Philosophische-Philologische Klasse,
with Polish I have relied for my assessment of Dittmann’s remark on Abhandl. x, 1-18; idem, ‘Nochmals die Farbe Braun’ in ibid. (1918),
I. M. Neugebauer 1979, ‘Die Farbe in der Kunst, Bemerkungen zu 1920, Abhandl. 1, 3-20.
einem Buch von Maria Rzepinska’, Zeitschrift
fiirAsthetik und allge- 43 Conrad-Martius (op. ‘cit. n. 24 above) 365, para. 283; Schone
meine Kunstwissenschaft, XXIV, espec. 228, and B. Zelinsky 1986, (op. cit. n. 25 above) 229-30; E. Heimendahl 1961, Licht und Farbe:
‘Maria Rzepifska tiber die Farbe’ in ibid., XXXI, espec. 182. Useful Ordnung und Funktion der Farbwelt, espec. 69; E. Strauss 1969, ‘Zur
discussions of Rzepinska’s book have appeared in English in Polish Wesensbestimmung der Bildfarbe’ (op.cit. n. 23 above), 18.
Perspectives, X11, 1970, 91-2 (by J. Przybos), and the Journal ofAes- 44 Dittmann (op. cit. n. 26 above) 70.
thetics and Art Criticism, XXXII, 1973, 555-6 (by M. Rieser). 45 H. Soehner 1955, ‘Velazquez und Italien’, Zeitschrift_fiir Kunst-
27 Dittmann (op. cit.) 290. geschichte, xviii, 22-7; K. H. Spinner 1971, ‘Helldunkel und Zeitlichkeit.
28 A good example is the contradictory characterizations of the Caravaggio, Ribera, Zurbaran, Georges de la Tour, Rembrandt’ in
colour of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (Louvre) by Lee ibid., xxxiv, 174. See also Dittmann (op. cit. n. 26 above) 231.
Johnson 1963, who notices a return to the early palette of Géricault 46 Veliz (op. cit. n. 9 above) 3, 109, 154. For Spain as an important
(L. Johnson, Delacroix, p. 38), and Jutta Held 1964, who saw in source for red earths (‘Spanish brown’) in the 17th century, see
Delacroix’s “complementaries’ a contrast to Géricault’s emphasis on R. D. Harley, Artists’ Pigments, c. 1600-1835: A Study in English Docu-
chiaroscuro (Farbe und Licht in Goyas Malerei, 152-3). mentary Sources, 2nd ed. 1982, 120.
29 Dittmann (op. cit) 39-40, 68-9. 47 See H. Jantzen’s remarks on Hetzer’s neglect of such considera-
30 Schone (op. cit. n.25 above) 32-6, 256-65. For the marked effect tions in his review of Tizian: Geschichte seiner Farbe in Deutsche
of the glass on the mural of the Baroncelli Chapel, see Hills (op. cit. Literaturzeiting, XLII, 1937. Cf. also Strauss (op. cit. n. 23 above) 9-
n.25 above) 83. 19. Sch6ne (op. cit. n. 25 above) was certainly less happy about the
31 Strauss (op. cit. n. 23), 340f. Cf. also his essay, ‘Zur Frage des problems he faced: see e.g. his remarks on Romanesque wall-
Helldunkels bei Delacroix’ in ibid., 135-51; K. Badt 1965, Eugéne painting, p. 31; and Dittmann (op. cit. n. 26 above, 47) expressed
Delacroix: Werke und Ideale, 46-74; and idem, Die Farbenlehre Van reservations about the condition of Masaccio’s frescoes in the
Goghs, 2nd ed. 1981. See also W. Hess, Das Problem der Farbe in den Brancacci Chapel in Florence, but not, for example, about Titian’s
Selbstzeugnissen der Maler von Cézanne bis Mondrian, 2nd ed. 1981. Bacchus and Ariadne in London (p. 174) or Seurat’s Grande Jatte in
32 H. Walter-Karydi 1986, ‘Principien der archaischen Farbenge- Chicago (pp. 307-8). From time to time Dittmann cites the work of
bung’, Studien zur klassischen Archiiologie. Festschrift Friedrich Hiller, the conservator Hubert von Sonnenburg in his notes, but none of
ed. K. Braun and A. Furtwingler, espec. 31. See also idem, ‘Ernst his work appears in the text.
Strauss’ Koloritforschuhng und die Antike’ in Munich, Galerie 48 See e.g. Capolavori e restauri, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, 1986-7;
Arnoldi-Livie, Ernst Strauss zum 80. Geburtstag 30 Juni 1981, n.d. A Venezia restaurata 1966-1986, Milan, 1986; The Hamilton Kerr Institute:
rather loose but well-documented overview of ancient symbolism The First Ten Years, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 1988; Art in
has now been given by L. Luzzato and R. Pompas 1988, Il significato the Making: Rembrandt, London, National Gallery, 1988-9, and
dei colori nelle civilta antiche. Impressionism, London, National Gallery, 1990-1.
33 U.M. Riith 1977, Die Farbegebung in der byzantinischen Wand- 49 Among them are the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,
malerei der spat-paleologischen Epoche (1346-1453), diss., Bonn, 644, Report and Studies in the History of Art (1967- ); National Gallery,
757, 801f and passim. London, Technical Bulletin (1977- ); Gli Uffizi: Studi e ricerche (1984- );
34 G. Hopp 1968, Edouard Manet: Farbe und Bildgestalt, 54. Hopp OPD Restauro: Quaderni dell’opificio delle pietre dure e laboratorio di
notes (p.100) that this green has not been noticed by later commen- restauro di Firenze (1986- ) and Science et technologie de la conservation et
tators, but more recently, Frangoise Cachin, in the catalogue of de la restauration des oeuvres d'art et du patrimoine (1988- ). See also the
the Manet exhibition in New York and Paris of 1983, talks of its article by J. Plesters, “Scienza e Restauro”: Recent Italian Publica-
‘violence’ (Paris, Grand Palais, Manet 1832-1883, 1983, 306-7). tions on Conservation’, Burlington Magazine, CXXIX, 1987, 172-7.
igs (op. cit. n. 34 above) 8sff; Cachin (op. cit. n. 34 above) 50 E.g. J. Bruyn ef al., Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, 1, 1625-31,
475. 1982;J.O. Hand and M. Wolff, National Gallery of Art, Washington:
36 Sch6ne (op. cit. n. 25 above) 5. Early Netherlandish Painting, 1986; H. W. van Os et al..,The Early
37 Dittmann (op. cit. n. 26 above) 195; he draws here on the obses- Venetian Paintings in Holland, 1978.

274
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

51 See particularly the series of articles generated by the ‘cleaning

145ff; and E. Bowron, ‘Oil and Tempera Mediums in Early Paint-
controversy’ at the National Gallery, London, in the Burlington ings: A View from the Laboratory’, Apollo, c. 1974, 380-7.
Magazine, CIV, 1962, 51-62, 452-7, and CV, 1963, 9off. The 61 H. Roosen-Runge 1967, Farbgebung und Technik friihmittelalterlicher
Gallery’s case was put in The National Gallery, January 1960-May
Buchmalerei: Studien zu den Traktaten ‘Mappae Clavicula’ und ‘Hera-
1962, 67-89. See also the general surveys by S. Keck, ‘Some Picture clius’; D. Winfield 1968, ‘Middle and Later Byzantine Wall-painting
Cleaning Controversies, Past and Present’, Journal of the American Methods’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XXI1,136ff and M. Kirby Talley
Institute
forConservation, XXII, 1984, 73-87; and A. Conti, Storia del and K. Groen 1975, ‘Thomas Bardwell and His Practice of Painting:
restauro, 1988. A Comparative Investigation between Described and Actual Paint-
52 ‘La Restauration des vitraux anciens’ (editorial), Revue de l’art, ing Technique’, Studies in Conservation, XX, 44-108. See also M.
XXXI, 1976, 6ff; and L. Grodecki, “Esthétique ancienne et moderne Kirby Talley 1981, Portrait Painting in England: Studies in the Technical
du vitrail roman’, Les Monuments historiques de la France, 1977, 17-30. Literature before 1700, and the collection, H. Althéfer (ed.), Das 19
53 The chief studies so far are A. Chastel et al. 1986, La Capella Jahrhundert in der Restaurierung, 1987.
Sistina, I Prima restauri: La Scoperta del colore; A. Conti 1986, Michelan- 62 The medieval compilation of ‘Heraclius’, De Coloribus et Artibus
gelo e la pittura a fresco. Tecnica e conservazione della Volta Sistina (a Romanorum has been re-edited by C. G. Romano, I Colori e le Arti dei
radical critique of the restoration); G. Colalucci, ‘Le Lunette di Romani e la compilazione Pseudo-Eracliana, Instituto Italiano per gli
Michelangelo nella Capella Sistina (1508-12)’ in E. Borsook and Studi Storici di Napoli, 1996. C. R. Dodwell’s standard edition of
F. Superbi Gioffredi 1986, Tecnica e stile, 76ff: F. Mancinelli 1988, Theophilus’s De diversis artibus has now been reprinted (1986), but
‘La Technique de Michel-Ange et les problémes de la Chapelle the best translation and commentary is still that by J. G. Hawthorne
Sixtine: La Création d’Eve et le Péché Originel’, Revue de l’art, LXXXI, and C. S. Smith (1963). Franco Brunello’s editions of Cennino Cennini,
9-19; J. Beck 1988, “The Final Layers, “L’ultima mano” on Il libro dell’arte, 1971, and the anonymous De arte illuminandi, 1975,
Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling’, Art Bulletin, LXXX, 502-3, and F. have valuable notes. The important De Clarea, an 11th- or 12th-
Mancinelli (ed.) 1994, Michelangelo: La Capella Sistina. Rapporto sul century MS in Bern, has been re-edited by R. Straub 1965, Jahres-
Restauro degli affreschi della volta, espec. III, 159-94. bericht der Schweitzerisches Institut fiir Kunstwissenschaft,1964, 81-114.
54 M. B. Cohn, Wash and Gouache: A Study of the Development of See also S. Pezzella 1976, II Trattato di Antonio da Pisa sulla fabri-
the Materials of Watercolor, Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum, cazione delle vetrate artistiche; Karel van Mander’s Den grondt der Edel vry
1977; London, Tate Gallery, Paint and Painting, 1982; Marseilles, Schilder-Const (1604) has been edited with a modern Dutch transla-
Centre de la Vieille Charité, Sublime Indigo, 1987; J. Krill, English tion by H. Miedema, 1973; P. Hetherington 1974, The ‘Painters’
_ Artists’ Paper: Renaissance to Regency, London, Victoria and Albert Manual’ of Dionysius of Fourna; P. Signac, De Delacroix au Néo-
Museum, 1987; J. Gage, George Field and his Circle from Romanticism Impressionisme, ed. F. Cachin, 1978 (English trans. F. Ratliff, Paul
to the Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism, 1990).
1989. 63 Bernard Bischoff 1984 published newly discovered Carolingian
55 J. W. Lane and K. Steinitz, ‘Palette Index’, Art News, Dec. 1942, or Ottonian texts on the manufacture of glass and the setting of
23-35, espec. 32; F. Schmid 1948, The Practice ofPainting; idem 1958, mosaics: Anecdota Novissima: Texte des vierten bis sechzehnten Jahrhun-
‘Some Observations on Artists’ Palettes’, Art Bulletin, XL, 334-46; derts, 221-3; a number ofearly recipes for MS illumination that have
idem 1966, “The Painter’s Implements in Eighteenth-Century Art’, not generally been noticed are in a medical MS at Ivrea: P. Giacosa,
Burlington Magazine, CVI, 519-21. A useful checklist of 282 artists’ ‘Un recettario del secolo XI esistente nell’archivio capitolare d’Ivrea’,
portraits including palettes, collected by Faber Birren and now at Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, ser. 11, XXX VIL,
Yale, is given in R. C. Kaufmann 1974, ‘The Photo-Archive of 1886, 651ff. For England: T. Hunt 1995, ‘Early Anglo-Norman
Color Palettes’, The Yale University Library Gazette, XLIX, 51-72. receipts for colours’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
Ernst Strauss (op. cit. n. 23 above, 13) has underlined the conceptual LVIII, 203-9; A. Petzold, ‘De coloribus et mixtionibus: the earliest
importance of the palette in the 20th century, See also Gage 1993, MSS of a Romanesque illuminators’ handbook’ in L. Brownrigg
Colour and Culture, ch. 10. (ed.) 1995, Making the Medieval Book, 59-65. For Italy, see now
56 M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy, R. Silva 1978, “Chimica tecnica e formole dei colori nel manoscritto
and ed. 1988, 6, 11. For Spain see Veliz (op. cit. n. 9 above) 118. lucchese 1939 del secolo XIV’, Critica d’Arte, XLIII, fasc. 160-2,
57 M. Merrifield, Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting, 2nd ed. 27-43; D. Bommarito 1985/1, ‘Il MS 25 della Newberry Library:
1967, I, 384-405. On pp. 388-9 of this edition of the Bolognese la tradizione dei ricettarii e trattati sui colori nel Medioevo e
MS, a complex recipe for a blue made from, among other colours, Rinascimento veneto e toscano’, La Bibliofilla, LXXXVIII, 1-38;
cinnabar, Roman vitriol, orpiment, and verdigris is claimed to be ‘an L. Miglio 1977-8, “Tra chimica e colori alla meta del Cinquencento;
azure better than German azure, and in appearance and colour... le ricette del MS 232 della biblioteca della citta:di Arezzo’, Annali
equal to ultramarine’. For some of these artificial blues, see M. V. della Scuola Speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell’ Universita di Roma,
Oma et al. 1980, ‘Synthetic Blue Pigments: Ninth to Sixteenth XVI-XVII, 194-213; A. Wallert, ‘Libro Secondo di Diversi Colori
Centuries. I, Literature’, Studies in Conservation, XXV, 53-63; idem e Sise da Mettere a Oro, a 15th-century technical treatise on manu-
1985, ‘II, Silver Blue’, ibid. XXX, 155-6. script illumination’ in A. Wallert, E. Hermens, M. Peek (eds) 199s,
58 The fundamental study ofItalian artists’ contracts is H. Glasser Historical Painting Techniques; Materials and Studio Practice, 38-47; E.
1977, Artists’ Contracts of the Early Renaissance. There 1s no comparable Hermens, ‘A seventeenth-century Italian treatise on miniature paint-
study of Northern contracts, but see above p. 14. For guild regula- ing and its author(s)’, ibid., 48-57; F. Tolaini 1996, ‘Proposte per una
tions, see L. Manzoni 1904, Statuti e matricole dell’arte dei pittori della metodologia di analisi di un ricettario di colori medievali’ in II Colore
citta di Firenze, Perugia, Siena, 32f, 87; and C. Fiorilli 1920, ‘I Dipin- nel Medioevo: Arte, Simbolo, Tecnica, Lucca, Istituto Storico Lucchese,
tori a Firenze nell’ arte dei medici, speciali e mercia1’, Archivio storico 91-116; S.Baroni, ‘I ricettari medievali per la preparazione dei colori
italiano, LX
XVIII, Il, 48. e la loro trasmissione’, ibid., 117-44; B. Tosatti Soldano 1978,
59 For the historian of colour in art, the most important publica- Miniatura e Vetrate Senesi del Secolo XII (Collana Storica di Fonti e
tions to come from conservation studies concern the history of Studi, 25). On some Dutch 17th-century pigment-terms, T. Goed-
pigments, for example, Harley, op. cit. n. 46 above; and R. L. Feller, ings and K. Groen 1994 in Hamilton Kerr Institute Bulletin, 2, 84-8.
ed., Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, I For French printed sources, A. Massing 1990, ‘Painting materials
1986; II, ed. A. Roy, 1993. For the late 19th century a key text is still and techniques: towards a bibliography of the French literature
J.-G. Vibert (1891), La Science de la Peinture, repr. 1981. before 1800’ in Die Kunst und ihre Erhaltung: Rolf E. Straub zum
60 On media, e.g., see M. Johnson and E. Packard 1971, ‘Methods 70. Geburtstag, 57-96; for German sources, U. Schiessl 1989, Die
Used for the Identification of Binding Media in Italian Paintings of Deutsch-sprachige Literatur zu Werkstoffen und Techniken der Malerei von
the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Studies in Conservation, XVI,
1530 bis. ca. 1950. See also H. J. Abrahams 1979, ‘A Thirteenth-

275
NOTES TO THE TEXT

Century Portuguese Work on Manuscript Illumination’, Ambix, groping towards a modern conception of three-dimensional colour-
XXVI, 97ff. E. Vandamme has published a 16th-century MS recipe space. C. Parkhurst, ‘Leon Battista Alberti’s Place in the History
of Color Theories’ in M. B. Hall, ed. 1987, Color and technique in
book from the Netherlands, together with a useful bibliography of
“Een 16e -eeuws zuidnederlands Renaissance Painting, Italy and the North, 161-204, presents some
contemporary printed sources:
valuable new material on Alberti’s Antique sources, but also
receptenboek’, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten
includes a quite unrealistic account of his medieval background.
Antwerpen, 1974, 101-37; M. Sanz has published an anonymous mid-
M. Barasch 1978, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of
17th-century Spanish painter's manual, now translated into English
Art, 27-31, confuses the relationship of the Latin and Italian versions
by Veliz (op. cit. n. 9 above) 107-27; and E. A. de Klerk a treatise
ofAlberti’s text on white, black, and the hues. Certainly in the Latin
by Cornelis Pieterz. Biens, published in Amsterdam in 1639, but
version Alberti shows himself anxious to distance himself from
now known only in a single copy: ‘De Teecken-Const, een 17de
eeuws Nederlands Traktaatje’, Oud Holland, XCVI, 1982, 16ff (with
‘the philosophers’ and to speak ‘as a painter’, which suggests that
English summary). he anticipated the objections of a learned audience. On the two
64 Urso von Salerno, De Commixtionibus elementorum libellus, ed. versions, see also N. Maraschio 1972, ‘Aspetti del bilingualismo
A. Stiirner, 1976, 111-16. There is also a reference to painting in the albertiano nel ‘De Pictura’, Rinascimento, 2nd ser., XII, 183-228,
De coloribus by a follower of Urso (ed. L. Thorndike, ‘Medieval Texts espec. 208-14 on colour-terms. See also L. Gérard-Merchaut 1991,
on Colors’, Ambix, VU, 1959, 7). For the earliest extant oil painting ‘Les indications chromatiques dans le De Pictura et le Della Pittura
on panel, from late 13th-century Scandinavia, see C. Périer-D’leteren d’Alberti’, Histoire de l’Art, XI, 23-36.
1985, Colyn de Coter et la technique picturale des peintres flamands du XV" 72 Alberti, De Pictura, 1, 10, I, 47, and for the contemporary discus-
siecle, 14; and for early oil painting on walls, to which Urso seems to sions of Sendivogius at Cracow and Hamerlin in Vienna, G. Rosin-
refer, see H. Travers Newton 1983, ‘Leonardo de Vinci as a Mural ska 1986, ‘Fifteenth Century Optics between Medieval and Modern
Painter: Some Observations on His Materials and Working Methods’, Science’, Studia Copernicana, XXIV, 127, 152ff (Polish with English
Arte lombarda, LX VI, 72. summary). See also J. S. Ackerman 1980, ‘On Early Renaissance
65 A. Callen 1982, Techniques ofthe Impressionists, espec. 18-27. This Color Theory and Practice’, Studies in Italian Art and Architecture,
study draws on the far richer documentation ofCallen’s 1980 disser- Fifteenth through Eighteenth Centuries (Memoirs of the American Academy
tation, ‘Artists Materials and Techniques in Nineteenth-Century in Rome, XXXV), 3.
France’, PhD diss., London. 73 De Pictura, Il, 48; cf. S. Pezzella (op. cit. n. 62 above). Both Albert
66 A notable exception is D. Cranmer. ‘Painting Materials and Tech- and Antonio da Pisa describe the way that the interposition of white
niques of Mark Rothko: Consequences of an Unorthodox Approach’ makes the other colours ‘joyful’, and Alberti uses the same idea
in Mark Rothko 1903-1970, London, Tate Gallery, 1983, 189-97. when he recommends colours for dress in I libri della famiglia (Opere
67 The post-Antique history of colour as it relates to theories of volgari, ed. C. Grayson 1960, I, 202).
perception has now been well covered in two studies in English: 74 The best edition is K. Bergdolt 1988, Der Dritte Kommentar
D. C. Lindberg 1976, Theories of Vision from Alkindi to Kepler; and Lorenzo Ghibertis: Natunvissenschaften und Medezin in der Kunsttheorie
N. Pastore 1971, Selective History of Theories of Visual Perception, der Friihrenaissance. Ghiberti’s sources have been listed most acces-
1650-1950. A still-useful general history of colour-theories is K. T. sibly by G. ten Doesschate 1932, “Over de Bronnen van de 3de
A. Halbertsma 1949, A History of the Theory of Colour, although its Commentaar van Lorenzo Ghiberti’, Tijdschrfit voor Geschiednis,
early chapters are based almost entirely on material gathered by 432-7. Also G. F. Vescovini 1965, ‘Contributo per la storia della
Goethe: J. W. von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre: Historischer Teil, in fortuna di Alhazen in Italia: Il volgarizzamento del MS Vaticano
Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, ed. R. Matthaei, W. Troll, 4595 ed il ‘Commento Terzo’ del Ghiberti’, Rinascimento, 2nd
K. L. Wolf, Weimar, I, no.6, 1957 (text); II, no. 6, 1959 (Ergdnzun- ser., V, 18-41.
gen und Erldaurungen). 75 C. Maltese, ‘Il colore per Leonardo dalla pittura alla scienza’ in
68 Recent studies of Theophilus have stressed the intellectual P. Rossi and E. Bellone, eds 1981, Leonardo e l'eta della ragione, 171-
background of his writing: W. Hanke 1962, Kunst und Geist: Das 84; idem, ‘Leonardo e la teoria dei colori’, Rémisches Jahrbuch fiir
philosophischen Gedankengut der Schrift, ‘De Diversis Artibus’ des Kunstgeschichte, xx, 1983, 211-19.
Preisters und Monachus Theophilus; L. White, Jr 1964, ‘Theophilus 76 M. Kemp 1990, The Science ofArt, 268f.
Redivivus’, Technology and Culture, v, 226f& J. van Engen 1980, 77 Maltese, ‘Leonardo e la teoria...’ (cit. n. 75 above) 218;J.Gantner
‘Theophilus Presbyter and Rupert of Deutz: The Manual Arts and 1969, ‘Colour in the Work of Leonardo’, Palette, XXXII, 8-26.
Benedictine Theology in the Early Twelfth Century’, Viator, XI, 78 M. Barasch 1978, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory
1 soft. of Art, 64f; J. Gavel 1979, Colour: A Study of Its Position in the Art
69 V.J. Bruno 1977, Form and Color in Greek Painting, esp. 53ff. J.J. Theory of the Quattro- and Cinquecento, 111f;J.Bell 1993, ‘Aristotle as
Pollitt has criticized the version of the four-colour story given by a source for Leonardo’s theory of colour perspective after 1500’,
Cicero, and regarded as plausible by Bruno (J. J. Pollitt 1974, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LVI, 100-18. A useful
Ancient View ofGreek Art, 111). See also Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, collection of Leonardo’s notes on colour is in M. Kemp and M.
ch. 2. The fullest discussion of the context of Pliny’s and Cicero’s Walker, eds 1988, Leonardo on Painting. An Anthology of Writings by
account is H. Jiicker 1950, Vom Verhéiltnis der Romer zur bildenden Leonardo daVinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career as
Kunst der Griechen, espec. 140-57. an Artist, Pt IL.
70 D. R. Edward Wright 1984, ‘Alberti’s De Pictura’, Journal of the 79 Barasch, 53f M. Kemp 1981, Leonardo daVinci;: The Marvellous
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XLVI, 52-71. Alberti’s Italian and Works of Nature and Man, 97; and idem, 267f.
Latin texts have now been brought together by C. Grayson, ed. 80 Verbraeken (op. cit. n. 37 above) o1ff; G. F. Folena 1951,
1973, Alberti, Opere Volgari, 111, although Grayson has not accepted ‘Chiaroscuro Leonardesco’, Lingua nostra, XII, 56-62; Z. Z. Filipezak
the convincing arguments of Simonelli for placing the Italian 1977, ‘New Light on Mona Lisa: Leonardo’s Optical Knowledge
before the Latin version (M. P. Simonelli 1972, ‘On Alberti’s Trea- and His Choice of Lighting’, Art Bulletin, LIX, 518-22. C. J. Farago
tises and Their Chronological Relationship’, Yearbook of Italian 1991, ‘Leonardo’s color and chiaroscuro reconsidered: the visual
Studies, 1971, 75-102). force ofpainted images’, Art Bulletin, LXXIII, 63-88.
71 S. Y. Edgerton 1969, ‘Alberti’s Colour Theory: A Mediaeval 81 J. Shearman, 1962, ‘Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro’,
Bottle without Renaissance Wine’, Journal of the Warburg and Cour- ZeitschriftfiirKunstgeschichte, XXV, 30.
tauld Institutes, XXXII, 112ff. C. Maltese 1976, ‘Colore, luce e 82 J. Meder, Die Handzeichnung, 2nd ed. 1923, 116,136.
movimento nello spazio Albertiano’, Commentari, XXVIL, 238-46, 83 T. Brachert 1970, ‘A Distinctive Aspect of the Painting Tech-
has contested Edgerton’s view of Alberti’s traditionalism, but has nique of the Ginevra de’Benci and of Leonardo’s Early Works’ in
replaced it with an equally implausible notion that Alberti was Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Report and Studies in the

276
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

History ofArt 1969, 84ff idem 1974, ‘Radiographische Untersuchungen 96 For the earlier literature, see F. Amrine, ‘Goethe and the Sci-
am Verkiindigungsbild von Monte Oliveto’, Maltechnik/Restauro, ences: An Annotated Bibliography, VII, Color Theory and Optics’
LXXX, 180; and idem 1977, ‘Die beiden Felsgrottenmadonnen von in F, Amrine, F. J. Zucker and H. Wheeler 1987, Goethe and the
Leonardo da Vinci’ in ibid., LXX XIII, 11. Sciences: A Reappraisal (Boston Studies in the Philosophy ofScience,
84 Dittmann (op. cit. n. 26 above) r19; cf. W.J. Hofmann 1971, XCVII), 419-23; S. M. Gruner 1974, ‘Goethe’s Criticisms of Newton’s
Uber Diirers Farbe. Opticks’, Physis, XVI, 66-82; N. B. Ribe 1985, ‘Goethe’s Critique of
85 B. Saran 1972, ‘Der Technologe und Farbchemiker “Matthias Newton: A Reconsideration’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of
Griinewald’”’, Maltechnik, IV, 228ff. Science, XVI, 315-35; F. Burwick 1986, The Damnation of Newton:
86 Apart from the works by Barasch and Gavel (op. cit. n. 78 Goethe's Color Theory and Romantic Perception (chap. II ofthis study is
above), the chief studies have been J. A. Thornton 1979, ‘Renais- the best English account of Goethe’s theory and its reception); G.
sance Color Theory and Some Paintings by Veronese’, PhD diss., Bohme, ‘Is Goethe’s Theory of Color Science?’ in F. Amrine et al.,
University of Pittsburgh; idem, ‘Paolo Veronese and the choice of Goethe and the Sciences... ,147-73; H. O. Proskauer 1986, The Redis-
colors for a painting’ in M. Gemin (ed.) 1990, Nuovi Studi su Paolo covery of Color: Goethe versus Newton Today (a trans. of Zum Studium
Veronese, 149-65; P. Rubin 1991, ‘The art of colour in Florentine von Goethes Farbenlehre, 1951); D. L. Sepper, ‘Goethe against Newton:
painting ofthe early sixteenth century: Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Towards Saving the Phenomenon’, in Amrine ef al., 175-93; idem,
Pontormo’, Art History, XTV, 175-91; M. Hall 1992, Color and Meaning: Goethe contra Newton. Polemics and the Project
for a New Science of Color,
Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting; C. Wagner 1996, Farbe und 1988 (the most useful history of Goethe’s researches for readers
Matapher: Die Entstehung einer neuzeitlichen Bildmetaphorik in der without German); and M. J. Duck 1988, ‘Newton and Goethe
vorromischen Malerei Raphaels. L. K. Caron 1985, ‘Choices Concern- on Colour: Physical and Physiological Considerations’, Annals of
ing Modes of Modeling during the High Renaissance and After’, Science, XLV, 507-19.
fiirKunstgeschichte, XLVUI, 476-89; idem 1988, ‘The Use
‘Zeitchrift 97 D. Gray 1952, Goethe the Alchemist; and B. J. T. Dobbs 1975, The
of Color by Rosso Fiorentino’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, XIX, 355- Foundations of Newton’s Alchemy. See now the remarks of A. E.
78. | have tried to detach Giorgione and Titian from colour-theory Shapiro 1993, Fits, Passions and Paroxysms: Physics, Method and Chem-
in Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 34, but see D. Gioseffi 1979, istry and Newton’s Theories of Coloured Bodies and Fits of Easy Reflection,
‘“Giorgione e la pittura tonale’ in Giorgione: Atti del Convegno Inter- 74-6, 1160n.
nazionale di Studio per il 50 Centenario della Nascita 1978, 95, for an 98 See, however, the over-pessimistic discussion by M. K. Tor-
attempt to link Giorgione’s practice with the ‘four-colour theorem’ bruegge 1974, “Goethe’s Theory of Color and Practicing Artists’,
of mathematics. Germanic Review, XLIX, 189-99. Torbruegge finds little evidence of
87 For Arcimboldo, see T. D. Kaufmann 1989, The School ofPrague. Goethe’s effect on artists in any period, although his impact on the
Painting at the Court of Rudolph I; for Kepler, Opera Omnia, ed. C. early 20th century, on the avant-garde, and on other artists is well
Frisch 1858, I, 200; and for de Boodt, C. Parkhurst 1971, ‘A Color documented: A. Brass 1906, Untersuchungen tiber das Licht und die
Theory from Prague: Anselm de Boodt’, Allen Memorial Art Museum Farben, I, Teil. Brass was close to an unspecified group of artists in
Bulletin, XXUX, 3-10. Scarmilionius’s De Coloribus was published at Munich (M. Richter, Das Schrifttum tiber Goethes Farbenlehre, 1938,
Marburg in 1601. For the general cultural milieu of Prague, see R. J. no. 41). For the revival of interest in Goethe’s work in Kandinsky
W. Evans 1973, RudolfIIand His World; and Essen, Villa Hiigel, and and Mondrian, see below pp.195, 252, 260. The use of Goethe’s
Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Prag um 1600: Kunst und Kultur Theory by E. L. Kirchner and the Dutch painter Jan Wiegers was the
am Hofe Rudolphs I, 1988. subject of the exhibition, Goethe, Kirchner, Wiegers. De Invloed van
88 See Kemp (op. cit. n. 76) 275-82, for a summary of this litera- Goethe’s Kleurenleer, Groningen Museum, 1982.
ture. For Testa, see Cropper (op. cit. n. 12 above). 99 Most recently Heinz Matile has represented the view that
89 J. C. Bell 1985, “The Life and Works of Matteo Zaccolini (1574- Runge’s and Goethe’s views on colour were closely related: P. O.
1630)’, Regnum Dei, XLI, 227-58; idem 1993, ‘Zaccolini’s theory of Runge, Farben-kugel, Neudruck der Ausgabe Hamburg 1810 mit einem
color perspective’, Art Bulletin, LXXV, 91-112. Janis Bell is prepar- Nachwort von Heinz Matile, 1977, Nachwort 11-1; Matile (op. cit. n.
ing an edition of Zaccolini’s writings on colour, part of which 93 above) 148, and espec. 224-7 on Runge’s links with Goethe’s
appeared in her dissertation, ‘Color and Theory in Seicento Art. earlier Beitrage zur Optik; on p. 231 Matile points to some important
Zaccolini’s ‘Prospettiva del Colore’ and the Heritage of Leonardo’, differences between Goethe’s and Runge’s views, and on pp. 235-41
PhD diss., Brown University 1983. to their very similar approach to harmony. For a more sceptical
90 B. Teyssédre 1965, Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siecle de treatment, see below Chapter 13.
Louis XIV. For a brief English summary, see A. Soreil 1963, ‘Poussin 100 This was, however, only published in recent times: S. A. Forsius,
versus Rubens: The Conflict between Design and Colour in France’, Physica, ed.J.Nordstrém 1952, Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift, X, 316-
Palette, XII, 3-12; and for some Roman antecedents to this debate, 19. Forsius’s colour-space is not three-dimensional in the modern
see M. Poirer 1979, ‘Pietro da Cortona e il dibattito disegno-colore’, sense, as Runge’s is, since the Swede sought to incorporate black and
Prospettiva, XVI, 23-30. white into the two-dimensional section of the sphere. On Forsius,
g1 M. Rzepitska 1986, “Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and Its see R. L. Feller and A. S. Stenius 1970, ‘On the Color-Space ofSigfrid
Ideological Background’, Artibus et Historiae, XIII, 91-112. Forsius’, Color Engineering, VIII, 48-51.
92 Kemp (op. cit. n. 76 above) 286-90. tor H. Matile (op. cit. n. 93 above) has related Runge’s metaphysics
93 Colour-systems have been investigated by F. Gerritsen 1979, to Jacob Boehme’s colour-theory, 130-42; and to German Romantic
‘Evolution of the Color Diagram’, Color Research and Application, thought, ‘Runges Farbenordnung und die “unendliche Kugel” in
IV, 33ff C. Parkhurst and R. L. Feller 1982, “Who Invented the H. Hohl (ed.) 1979, Runge Fragen und Antworten, 269-72. The most
Color Wheel?’, ibid., VI, 219ff; M. Richter 1984, ‘The Develop- coherent account of Lomazzo’s colour-theory is now Kemp (op.
ment of Color Metrics’, ibid., IX, 69-83; S. Hesselgren, “Why cit. n. 76 above) 66-77.
Color-Order Systems?’ ibid., 220-28; H. Matile, Die Farbenlehre 102 Matile (op. cit. n. 93 above) 202-3.
Phillipp Otto Runges, and ed. 1979. 58-83; and Kemp (op. cit. n. 76 103 See M. Kemp, ‘Yellow, Red and Blue. The Limits of Colour
above) 289-92. ae Science in Painting, 1400-1730’ in A. Ellenius (ed.) 1985, The Natural
94 J. E. Purkinje 1918, Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sciences and the Arts (Actua Universitatis Upsaliensis, XXII), 98-105.
Sinne, IL (1825), Opera omnia, Prague, I, 118f and P. de la Hire 104 The German context has been outlined by B. Rehfus-Dechéne
(1685), Dissertations sur les differens accidens de la Viie I, V, in Baxandall 1982, Farbengebung und Farbenlehre in der deutsche Malerei um 1800. For
(op. cit. n. 20 above) 90. For some later painterly examples, see England, see G. Finley 1967, ‘Turner: An Early Experiment with
above, ch. 1. . Colour Theory’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
XXX, 357-66; P. D. Schweitzer 1982, ‘John Constable, Rainbow
95 On Meyer's contribution, see Strauss (op. cit. n. 23 above) 335.
NOTES TO THE TEXT

Science, and English Color Theory’, Art Bulletin, XLIV, 424-45; also in Hess (op. cit. n. 31 above), 64-9. See also C. Boyle-Turner
and Gage (op. cit. n. 4 above), 12-28. A study of the French litera-
1983, Paul Sérusier, espec. 84.
120 R. Shiff 1978, ‘Seeing Cézanne’, Critical Inquiry, IV, 786ff and
ture is one of the most urgent tasks of the colour historian. See now
‘The problem with colour: three theorists, Goethe, idem 1978, ‘The End of Impressionism: A Study in Theories of
B. Howells,
Artistic Expression’, Art Quarterly, new ser. I, 347ff.
Schopenhauer, Chevreul’ in P. Collier and R. Lethbridge (eds)
121 For extreme perceptualist views see G. J. R. Frankl (1951),
1994, Artistic Relations: Literature and Visual Arts in Nineteenth Century
France, 76-93.
‘How Cézanne Saw and Used Colour’ in J. Wechsler (ed.) 1975,
105 Matile (op. cit. n. 93 above) 185-91. Cézanne in Perspective, 125-30; H. Damisch, ‘La Géometrie de la
couleur’ in C. de Peretti (ed.) 1982, Cézanne, ou la peinture en jeu, 42.
106 J. Gage 1969, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth, espec. chap. 1 I;
and idem 1984, ‘Turner’s Annotated Books: Goethe’s Theory of 122 L. Gowing, ‘The Logic of Organized Sensations’ in W. Rubin
Colours’, Turner Studies, IV, 2, 34-52. G. Finley 1973 has pointed to (ed.) 1977, Cézanne: The Late Work, 55-71; E. Strauss (1980), “Nach-
Tumer’s positive evaluation of Newton about 1818: ‘A “New betrachtungen zur Pariser Cézanne-Retrospective 1978’ in Strauss
Route” in 1822: Turner’s Colour and Optics’, Journal ofthe Warburg (op. cit. n. 23 above) 164, 183. Both Gowing and Strauss seek to
and Courtauld Institutes, XXXVI, 380, n. 33. See also U. Seibold analyse the painter’s idiosyncratic terminology, but neither of them
1987, Zum Verstandis des Lichts in der Malerei J.M. W. Turners, PhD looks at its immediate context in French philosophy and psychol-
diss., Heidelberg, 101-11, and G. Finley, ‘Pigment into Light’: ogy. I have tried to make a start in ‘Constancy and Change...’ (cit.
Turner and Goethe’s “Theory of Colours” in F. Burwick and n. 118 above).
J. Klein (eds) 1996, The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in 123 Matisse (op. cit. n. 14 above) notable for its detailed index;
England and Germany, 357-76. D. Fourcade 1976, ‘Autres Propos de Henri Matisse’, Macula, 1;
107 L. Johnson 1963, Delacroix, 63-72, based on idem 1958, ‘Colour J. Flam (ed.) 1973, Matisse on Art (a shorter selection than the
in Delacroix: Theory and Practice’, PhD diss., Cambridge Univer- French, but with some pieces not in Fourcade); H. Roethel and
sity. See also J. B. Howell 1982, ‘Eugéne Delacroix and Color: H. Hahl-Koch 1980, Kandinsky: Die Gesammelte Schriften, 1; W.
Practice, Theory and Legend’, Athanor, I, 37-43. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. K. Lindsay and P. Vergo
108 For the note and the triangle, see Kemp (op. cit. n. 76 above) 1982; idem, Ecrits, ed. P. Sers 1975 (Vol. III of this edition includes
308;J.F .L. Mérimée (1830), De la Peinture a l’huile, 1981, ill. facing the unpublished notes for his Bauhaus lectures); F. Marc, Schriften,
272 and 274-5. For the date of the note, see below p. 297, col. 2, n. ed. K. Lankheit 1978; F. Kupka, La Création dans les arts plastiques,
15. Delacroix and Mérimée were both members of agovernment ed. and trans. E. Abrams 1989; R. Delaunay, Du Cubisme a l'art
committee on the arts in 1831 (L. Rosenthal 1914, Du Romantisme au abstrait, ed. P. Francastel 1957; R. and S. Delauney, The New Art
réalisme, 5). For Mérimée’s career, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, of Color, ed. and trans. A. A. Cohen 1978; P. Klee, Schriften Rezen-
214-15. zionen und Aufsaze, ed. C. Geelhaar 1976; idem, The Diaries, ed. F.
109 For the lecture notes, now in the Cabinet de Dessins of the Klee 1965; J. Spiller, ed. 1964, Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye; idem
Louvre, see Kemp (op. cit. n. 76 above) 310, and for Delacroix’s 1973, Paul Klee, The Nature of Nature (both extracts from Klee’s
proposed visit to the chemist, see Signac (op. cit n. 62 above) 76. Bauhaus lectures); P. Mondrian, The New Art -The New Life: The
110 For Blanc’s interpretation of Delacroix, see Johnson (op. cit. Collected Writings, ed. and trans. H. Holzmann and M. S. James
n. 28 above) 63-72; G. Roque 1996, ‘Chevreul and Impressionism: a 1986; T. van Doesburg, Scritti di arte di architettura, ed. S. Polano
reappraisal’, Art Bulletin, LX XVIII, 26-39. 1979; J. Baljeu 1974, Theo van Doesburg; W. Nicholson 1987,
111 M. Song,1984, Art Theories of Charles Blanc, 1813-1882. Unknown Colour, H. Hofmann, The Search for the Real, 2nd ed. 1967;
112 The colour-star in Grammaire des arts du dessin (1867), 599, K. Malevich, Essays on Art, ed. and trans. T. Andersen 1969-78;
derives fromJ. Ziegler 1850, Etudes céramiques, 199, repr. in idem idem, Ecrits, ed. A. Nakov, 2nd ed., 1986; and V. Knight (ed.) 1988,
1852, Traité de la couleur et de la lumiere, 16. Patrick Heron.
113 R. L. Herbert ef al.. 1991, Georges Seurat 1859-1891, 397-8. The 124J. E. Bowlt 1976, Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and
fullest account of the papier de Gauguin is in M. Roskill 1960, Van Criticism, 1902-1934; N. Watkins 1984, Matisse, drawing on his 1979
Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionist Circle, 267-8. Roskill inclined to dissertation, ‘A History and Analysis of the Use of Colour in the
think that the text, printed conveniently in L. Nochlin (ed.) 1966, Work of Matisse’, M.Phil. thesis, London, Courtauld Institute; V.
Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904, 166-7, was authenti- Spate 1979, Orphism; W. Rotzler, Johannes Itten: Werke und Schriften,
cally Turkish, but parts of it seem too close, e.g., to Blanc, Gram- 2nd ed. 1978; C. Lodder 1983, Russian Constructivism. A. Doig 1986,
maire, 606, not to arouse our suspicions. Theo van Doesburg: Painting into Architecture, Theory into Practice. C.
114 R. A. Weale 1972, ‘The Tragedy of Pointillisme’, Palette, XL, Blotkamp et al. 1986, De Stijl: The Formative Years. W. Venzmer
16ff; A. Lee 1987, ‘Seurat and Science’, Art History, X, 203-26. See 1982, Adolf Hoelzel: Leben und Werk.
also below Ch. 16. 125 H. B. Chipp 1958, ‘Orphism and Color Theory’, Art Bulletin,
115 A. Laugel 1869, L’Optique et les arts, 151. For Delacroix’s circle, XL, 55-63;J.E. Bowlt 1973-4, ‘Concepts of Color and the Soviet
see Johnson (op. cit. n. 28 above), 56, pl. 34. For Seurat’s, see below, Avant-Garde’, The Structurist, XIII/XIV, 20-9; C. Douglas, ‘Colors
pl. 106. without Objects: Russian Color-Theories (1908-1932) in ibid., 30-
116 Herbert (op. cit. n. 115 above);J.Arguélles 1972, Charles Henry 41; J. F. Moffitt, ‘Fighting Forms: The Fate of the Animals: The
and the Formation ofaPsychophysical Aesthetic. Occultist Origins of Franz Marc’s “Farbentheorie’”’, Artibus et Histo-
117 Badt (op. cit. n. 31 above). nae, XII, 1985, 107f R. Wankmiiller 1960, ‘Zur Farbe bei Paul Klee’,
118 E. van Uitert, “De toon van Vincent van Gogh: Opvattingen Studium generale, XI, 427-35; M. Huggler 1967, ‘Die Farbe bei Paul
over Kleur en zijn hollandse Periode’, Simiolus, Il, 1966-7, 106, 108-9 Klee’, Palette, XXII, 13-22; E. Strauss (1970), ‘Paul Klee: Das Licht und
(with English summary), has made a careful study of Vincent's early Etliches’ (op. cit. n. 33 above) 219-26; idem, ‘Zur Helldunkellehre
use of Fromentin and Blanc. See B. Welsh-Ovcharov 1976, Vincent Klees’, ibid. 227-39; L. Nochlin, ‘Picasso’s Color: Schemes and
van Gogh; His Paris Period, 1886-1888, 65-6;J.A. Walker 1981, “Van Gambits’, Arts in America, Dec. 1980, 105-23; 177-83; R. Bothner
Gogh’s Colour Theories and Their Relevance to the Paintings of 1987, ‘Mark Rothkos Modulationen’, Pantheon, XLV, 172ff. I have
the Arles Period’ in Van Gogh Studies; Five Critical Essays, 7, n. 6. I taken the discussion of Rothko rather further in ‘Rothko: Color as
have touched on Vincent's use of A. Cassagne, Traité d’aquarelle Subject’, an essay for the catalogue of the Rothko exhibition, Wash-
(1875) in ‘Constancy and Change in Late Nineteenth-Century ington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 1998.
French Painting’ in United Kingdom Instititute for Conservation 126 For example, C. C. Bock 1981, Henri Matisse and Neo-
Reprints, Appearance, Opinion, Change: Evaluating the Look of Paint-
Impressionism, 1898-1908; S. Buckberrough 1982, Robert Delaunay:
ings, 1990, 32-5. The Discovery of Simultaneity; G. Levin 1978, Synchromism and Ameri-
119 P. Séruster (1921), ABC de la peinture, 3rd ed. 19$0, 29, 94-5;
can Color Abstraction, 1910-1925; N. G. Parris 1979, ‘Adolf Hoelzel’s

278
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

Structural and Color Theory and Its Relationship to the Develop-

Gothic panel- and glass-painting has led Eva Frodl-Kraft to date
ment of the Basic Course at the Bauhaus’, PhD diss., University of
an interest in absolute rather than representational colour (chiefly
Pennsylvania; C. V. Poling 1973, ‘Color Theories of the Bauhaus in drapery) from this period: E. Frodl-Kraft, ‘Farbendualititen,
Artists’, PhD diss., Columbia University; idem 1982, Kandinsky- Gegenfarben, Grundfarben in der gotischen Malerei’ in M. Hering-
Unterricht am Bauhaus: Farbseminar und Analytisches Zeichnen (English Mitgau et al. (eds) 1980, Von Farbe und Farben: Albert Knoepfli zum
version: Kandinsky Teaching at the Bauhaus: Color Theory and Analyti- 70. Geburtstag, 298; idem 1977-8, ‘Die Farbsprache der gotischen
cal Drawing, 1987). Malerei’, Wiener Jahrbuch fiir Kunstgeschichte, XXX/XXXI, 89-178.
127 H. Weitemeier, Schwartz, Diisseldorf, Kunsthalle, 1981; M. See also above, n.73.
Besset et al., La Couleur seule: L’Expérience du monochrome, Lyon, 140 An exception is the remarkable exhibition held in 1983 in the
Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1988; P. Colt, intro., Color and Field 1890- Volkerkunde-Museum in Berlin: H. Nixdorff and H. Miiller,
1970, exhib. cat., Buffalo, 1970; M. Tucker, The Structure of Color, Weisse Westen— Rote Roben: Von den Farbordnungen des Mittelalters zum
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971; M. individuellen Farbgeschmack, Berlin, Staatliche Museen preussischer
Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art 1890-1985, Los Angeles, 1986. Kulturbesitz, 1983. See also the brief discussion by W. Briichner
128 J. Gage 1982, ‘Colour at the Bauhaus’, AA Files, 1. A good deal 1982, ‘Farbe als Zeichen: Kulturtradition im Alltag’, Zeitschrift
fiir
of
attention has been given recently to the history of colour-systems: Volkskunde, LXXVIUI, 14-27. There is much important material in
see n. 94 above and S. Wurmfeld 1985, Color Documents: A Presenta- English in J. Sekora 1977, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought,
tive Theory, New York, Hunter College; F. Birren 1979, ‘Color Eden to Smollett. See also M. Pastoureau, ‘Vers une Histoire sociale
Identification and Nomenclature: A History’, Color Research and des couleurs’ (cit. n. 5 above), espec. 31-40. The otherwise rather
Application, 1V, 14ff; R. S. Berns and F. W. Billmeyer, Jr 1985, sketchy study by M. Brusatin, Storia dei colori, 2nd ed. 1983 (French
‘Development of the 1929 Munsell Book of Color: A Historical version, 1986, English version, 1991) has some excellent material on
Review’ in ibid., X, 246-50; M. Richter and K. Witt 1986, ‘The colour in dress.
Story of the DIN Color Systems’ in ibid., XI, 138f F. W. 141 H. Siebenhiihner 1935, Uber den Kolorismus der Friihrenaissance,
Billmeyer, Jr 1987, ‘Survey of Colour Order Systems’ in ibid., vornehmlich dargestellt an dem Trattato della Pittura des L.B. Alberti,
XI, 173ff W. D. Wright, ‘The Historical and Experimental PhD diss., Leipzig.
Background to the 1931 CIE System of Colorimetry’ in Society of 142 J. Shearman 1965, Andrea del Sarto, 1, 135; the whole of the
Dyers and Colorists, Golden Jubilee of Colour in the CIE, London, account of Sarto’s colour in chap. VIII is masterly; idem (op. cit. n.
1981, 3-18. 81 above),14ff and M. B. Hall, ‘From Modeling Techniques to
129 G. J. von Allesch 1925, ‘Die aesthetische Erscheinungsweise der Color Modes’ in Hall (op. cit. n. 71 above) 3 and n. 9.
Farben’, Psychologische Forschung, V1, 1-91, 215-81. Allesch’s report 143 K. H. Tachau 1988, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Occam, 96,
was based on work with largely professional people in the early n. 34; cf. also 327, n. 36 and 329, n. 43. The discussion ofthe fall of
1900s (p.18); his results were reviewed in Fnglish by A. R. Chandler light on a dove’s neck or a peacock’s tail is here supplemented by
1934, Beauty and Human Nature. refence to the new (shot?) textiles. The ‘birds’ feathers’ tradition has
130 I owe this information to the kindness of Dr Anna Rowlands. been surveyed from the Peripatetic De coloribus to Newton by H.
For the prospectus, see H. M. Wingler, The Bauhaus, 3rd ed. 1976, Guerlac 1986, ‘Can There Be Colors in the Dark? Physical Color
31-3. ‘The physical and chemical theory of color’ and ‘rational Theory before Newton’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XLVU, 3-20.
painting methods’ were included under the general rubric of “Train- 144 Archivum franciscanum historicam, VI, 1914, nos 207, 208, 227,
ing in Science and Theory’. The Statutes of the Bauhaus of January and espec. 239 (cagnacolore). Donald King has kindly informed me of
1921 (Wingler, 44-8) include the ‘Preliminary Course’, but mention a Pisan brokerage list of 1323 referring to tartarini dicti cangia colore,
colour only under ‘supplementary subjects of instruction’. which suggests a Central Asian origin. See R. Kuehni 1996, ‘Can-
131 See the timetable of c. 1924 published by F. Whitford 1984, giante: a fabric and a coloristic device in the Art of the Renaissance’,
Bauhaus, 102. Color Research and Application, 21, 326-30.
132 P. Klee, Beitrége zur bildnerischen Formlehre, ed. J. Glaesemer 145 The most useful survey is still E. W. Bulatkin 1954, ‘The
1979. For the dating, see Matile (op. cit. n. 93 above) 373-4, n. 611. Spanish word ‘Matiz’: Its Origin and Semantic Evolution in the
133 T. Lux Feininger in J. D. Farmer and G. Weiss 1971, Concepts of Technical Vocabulary of Medieval Painters’, Traditio, X, 461ff.
the Bauhaus: The Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection, 47. A plan for the 146 As late as 1436 an inventory of St Peter’s in Rome described a
preliminary Course at Dessau, however (Wingler, 109), includes dalmatic and tunicle as ‘viridia sive crocea’ (E. Miintz and A. L.
colour under form. See also H. Diichting 1996, Farbe am Bauhaus; Frothingham 1883, I Tesoro della Basilica di S. Pietro, 65).
Synthese und Syndsthesie. 147 Gavel (op. cit. n. 78 above), 115, n. 15, distinguishes between
134 A. Lee 1981, ‘A Critical Account of Some of Josef Albers’ ‘colour-change’, which he sees as a modelling technique only, and
Concepts of Color’, Leonardo, XIV 99-105; see also letters from cangianti, which is related to specific textiles.
R. Arnheim and Lee in ibid., XV, 1982, 174-5. On Albers’s appro- 148 The best survey is still B. J. Kouwer 1949, Colours and Their
priation of Goethe’s name, but not his concepts, for his colour trian- Character: A Psychological Study. Several important essays on Western
gle, see also Torbruegge (op. cit n. 98 above) 198. For a general colour-symbolism from Antiquity until the 19th century were
survey of 20th-century theories ofcolour in relation to painting, see included in The Realms of Colour (Eranos Yearbook, 1972), 1974, and
E. C. Elliott 1960, ‘Some Recent Conceptions of Color Theory’, three of them were reprinted in S. Haule (ed.) 1977, Color Symbol-
Journal ofAesthetics and Art Criticism, XVII, 494-503; C. A. Riley ism. See also G. Ortiz 1992, El Significado de los Colores.
1995, Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy Painting and 149 G. Haupt 1941, Die Farbensymbolik in der sakralen Kunst des
Architecture, Literature, Music and Psychology. abendlandischen Mittelalters: Ein Beitrag zur mittelalterlichen Form-und
135 O. Wulff 1941, ‘Farbe, Licht und Schatten in Tizians Bildgestal- Geistesgeschichte.
tung’, ‘Jahhrbuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen, LXII, 108. 150 P. Dronke, ‘Tradition and Innovation in Mediaeval Western
136 H. Jantzen 1951, “Uber Prinzipien der Farbengebung in der Colour-Imagery’, Eranos Yearbook (cit n. 148 above), 51-107, repr.
Malerei’ in Uber den gotischen Kirchenraum, 61-7. in The Mediaeval Poet and His World, 1984. F. Haeberlein 1932-3,
137 T. Hetzer, Tizian. Die Geschichte seiner Farbe, 3rd ed. 1969, 116. ‘Zur Farbenikonographie des Mittelalters’, Annales instititorum, Rome,
See also R. Kudielka, ‘Zum Versuch, von Tizians Farbkunst ein V; idem 1939, ‘Grundziige einer nachantiken Farbikonographie’,
in G. Rémisches Jahrbuch
fiirKunstgeschichte, H1, 75-126, also remain, despite
auschaulichen Begriff durch Farbabbildungen zu geben’
Berthold (ed.) 1992, Schriften Theodor Hetzers, VII, 15-35. some attempts at visual colour reconstructions, closely based on
138 Wulff (op. cit. n. 135 above) 120; cf. also Lichtwark (op. cit. n. written texts.
16 above) 13. 151 See, for example, Haupt’s remarks on red and purple and yellow
CLXXIII. An extended study of northern and gold, c. 46f; also C. Meier 1977, Gemma Spiritualis: Methode und
139 Cennini, chap.

279
NOTES TO THE TEXT

Gebrauch der Edelsteinallegorese vom friihen Christentum bis ins 18 Jahrhun- example, P. Mitchell 1990, “Wright’s Picture Frames’ in J. Edgerton,
Wright of Derby, London, Tate Gallery.
dert, Bk I, 152. . ;
160 B. H. Crawford 1960, ‘Colour rendition and Museum Light-
152 For example, see Meier (op. cit.) 147ff, on the sard. See also her
ing’, Studies in Conservation, V, 41-51: H. Ruhemann 1961, ‘Experi-
general discussion of the problems of symbolic interpretation (I 974)
ences with the Artifical lighting of Paintings’ in ibid., IV, 83-85
in ‘Das Problem der Qualitatenallegorese’, Frihmittelalterliche Studien,
(repr. in The Cleaning ofPaintings, 1968, 344-8); G. Thomson 1961,
VIII, espec. 387ffon colour; also F. Ohly 1977, Schriften zur mittelal-
terlichen Bedeutungsforschung, XVI-XXI. For the ill-fated dictionary
‘A New Look at Colour-Rendering, Level of Illumination, and
Protection from Ultraviolet Radiation in Museum Lighting:, in
of medieval colour symbolism, C. Meier and R. Suntrup 1987, “Zum
ibid., VI, 46-70; B. H. Crawford and D. A. Palmer, ‘Further Inves-
Lexikon der Farbenbedeutungen im Mittelalter’, Frii/mittelalterlichen
Studien, XXI, 390-478 (including a sample entry on ‘red).
tigations of Colour Rendering, and the Classification of Light
153 See, for example, M. Bornstein 1976, ‘Name Codes and Color Sources’ in ibid., 71-82; R. A. Weale 1973, ‘La Lumiére dans les
Memory’, American Journal of Psychology, LXX XIX, espec. 274. Musées’, Chronique des Arts, suppl. to Gazette des Beaux-arts, July-
154 The classic treatment ofJ.B. Weckerlin 1905, Le Drap ‘escarlate’ Aug., 1-2; H. Lank 1984, “The Function of Natural Light in Picture
au Moyen Age, has now been subject to revision by J. H. Munro, Galleries’, Burlington Magazine, CXXVI, 4f& R. S. Berns and F.
‘The Mediaeval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour’ Grum 1987, ‘Exhibiting Art Work: Consider the Illuminating
in N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (eds) 1983, Cloth and Clothing in Source’, Color Research and Application, X11, 63-72.
Mediaeval Europe, 13f€ but there is no doubt that the documents 161 Schone (op. cit. n. 25 above) 260, n. 448.
record ‘scarlets’ of many hues. A similar case is the obsolete colour 162 The modern literature differs considerably in estimating this
term perse, which comprised many colours, and may also refer to a figure: for ‘some ten million colours’, see K. Nassau 1983, The
quality of cloth (below p. 68). Physics and Chemistry of Color, 7; for seven million, C. A. Padgham
155 M. Pastoureau 1979, Traité d’hérvaldique; and idem 1983, Armor- andJ.E. Saunders 1975, The Perception of Light and Colour, 104; for
ial des chevaliers de la Table Ronde. Arthurian heraldic blazon has also one million, H. Terstiege, ‘The CIE Colour-Coding System’ in J.
been treated in detail by G. J. Brault 1972, Early Blazon, Heraldic D. Mollon and L. T. Sharpe (eds) 1983, Colour- Vision: Physiology and
Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with Special Refer- Psychophysics, 563.
ence to Arthurian Literature. Many of Pastoureau’s essays have been 163 The standard study is now B. Berlin and P. Kay, Basic Color
gathered in L’Hermine et le sinople, 1982; Figures et couleurs: Etudes sur Terms, 2nd ed. 1991, but see also n. 183 below. On trichromacy
la symbolique et la sensibilité médiévales, 1986; and Couleurs, images (cit. in colour vision, see J. D. Mollon, ‘Colour Vision and Colour
n. 5 above). Pastoureau’s insistence on the abstract character of Blindness’ in Barlow and Mollon (op. cit. n. 17 above), 165ff. To
heraldic colour, restated recently in ‘Vers une histoire sociale des my knowledge, only one modern artist, Gerrit Rietveld, has related
couleurs’ (Couleurs, images, 43) seems to me to overlook the history his use of ‘primary’ colours (implausibly) to the mechanics ofvision.
and concrete character of heraldic language, which he has also noted For the notion of ‘primary colours’ in aesthetics, see E. E. Gloye
in passing (Couleurs, décors, emblémes’ in Figures et couleurs, 52). 1957-8, ‘Why are There Primary Colours?’ Journal of Aesthetics and
156 ‘Farbe (Liturgisch)’, Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, V1, Art Criticism, XVI, 128ff.
1981, cols 54-139. 164 P. Trevor-Roper, The World Through Blunted Sight, 2nd ed.
157 On Rubens, see C. Parkhurst 1961, ‘Aguilonius’ Optics and 1988, chaps I, III. See also R. W. Pickford 1965, “The Influence of
Rubens’ Color’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, XII, 35-49; M. Colour-Vision Defects on Painting’, British Journal of Aesthetics, LI1,
Jaffé 1971, ‘Rubens and Optics: Some Fresh Evidence’, Journal of 211ff idem, ‘Colour Defective Students in Colleges of Art’ in ibid.
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXIV, 326-66; and Kemp 1967, 132ff; ‘The Artist’s Eye’, British Medical Journal, 19 Aug. 1972,
(op. cit. n. 76 above) 275-7. On Poussin, see O. Batschmann, ‘Farb- 434 (cf. also correspondence in ibid., 586, 702, 826): P. Lanthony
genese und Primirfarbentrias in Nicholas Poussins “Die Heilung 1982, ‘Daltonisme et peinture’, Journal francais d'ophthalmologie, V,
der Blinden”’ in M. Hering-Mitgau et al. (n. 139 above), 329-36; 373-85, idem 1994, ‘J. J. Peintre Daltonien’, ibid., XVII, 596-602:
idem, Dialektik der Malerei von Nicholas Poussin, 1982 (English trans. R. W. Pickford and J. Bose 1987, ‘Colour Vision and Aesthetic
1990), chaps I, III; and Kemp (op. cit. n. 76 above) 278-81. On Problems in Pictures by Rabindranath Tagore’, British Journal of
Turner, seeJ.Gage, Colourin Turner (cit. n. 106 above), chap. 11. Aesthetics, XXVII, 70-5; G. H. Hamilton, ‘The Dying ofthe Light:
158 Fora structural analysis ofthis series, seeJ.Albrecht 1974, Farbe The Late Work of Degas, Monet and Cézanne’ in J. Rewald and
als Sprache: Robert Delaunay, Josef Albers, Richard Paul Lohse, 60-113. F. Weitzenhofter (eds) 1984, Aspects of Monet: A Symposiuim on the
159 The study of frames and hanging conditions has blossomed in Artist’s Life and Times, 223-37; O. Sacks 1995, “The case of the
recent years: seeJ.Foucart 1987, ‘Bibliographie du cadre’, Revue de colour-blind painter’ in An Anthropologist on Mars, 1-38; and P.
l'art, LX XVI, 60-62. This issue of the review also contains a number Lanthony 1989, Les Effets de cataracte sur les oeuvres picturales.
of important articles on framing from the Renaissance to the roth 165 I. M. Siegel and G. B. Arden, ‘The Effects of Drugs on Colour
century, including J. Foucart, ‘Etude critique de l’encadrement’, Vision’ in A, Herxheimer (ed.) 1968, A Symposium on Drugs and
7-14; C. Grimm, ‘Histoire du cadre: Un Panorama’, 15-20. See Sensory Functions, 210-28, espec. 217 on alchohol and tobacco.
also the number of The International Journal of Museum Management, 166 A. von Wattenwyl and H. Zollinger 1981, “Color Naming by
IV, 1985, devoted to framing; and the Cahiers du Musée National Art Students and Science Students’, Semiotica, XX XV, 303-15.
d’Art Moderne, XVII/XVIII, 1986, ‘L’Ocuvre et son accrochage’, 167 For the early history of chromotherapy, see R. D. Howat 1938,
which included two important essays on Matisse’s frames: D. Four- Elements of Chromo-Therapy, 1ff. The classic text is C. Féré 1887,
cade, ‘Crise du cadre: A Propos d’un tableau de Matisse, Le Peintre Sensation et mouvement. Kandinsky knew of the subject at least
dans son atelier’, 68-76; and J. C. Lebensztejn, “Constat amiable’, through the article by Karl Scheffler. ‘Notizen iiber die Farbe’,
84-91. There have also been a number of recent exhibitions on Dekorative Kunst, 1V, 1901: see below 251. See also B. D. Prescott
framing: Italienische Bilderrahmen des 14-18 Jahrhunderts, Munich, 1942, ‘The Psychological Analysis of Light and Color’, Occupational
Alte Pinakothek, 1976; La Cittd degli Uffizi, Florence, Uffizi, 1983; Therapy and Rehabilitation, XX1, 142-6; K. Goldstein, ‘Some Experi-
Prijst de Lijst, Amsterdam, Riksmuseum, 1984; The Art of the Edge:
mental Observations Concerning the Influence of Colors on the
European Frames 1300-1900, Chicago Art Institute, 1986; Oretcouleur:
Function of the Organism’ in ibid., 147-51. The article by E. and
Le Cadre dans la seconde moitié du dix-neuvieme siecle, Paris, Musée
P. Gruss 1982, ‘Der Einfluss des Farbsehens auf die Motorik bei
d’Orsay, 1989 (see the book of the exhibition, I. Cahn, Cadres de Gesunden, und Hirnkranken’, Festschrift
fiirH. Roosen-Runge, 277f,
peintres, 1989); Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, In Perfect Harmony:
is little more than a repetition of Goldstein’s experiments. For a
Picture and Frame, 1850-1920, 1995. Just as exhibitions of paintings survey of the hitherto meagre results in this branch of experimental
now encourage studies of problems of technique and conservation,
psychology, see P. K. Kaiser 1984, ‘Physiological response to color:
so scholars are beginning to take more notice of frames: see, for A Critical Review’, Color Research and Application, IX, 29-36.

280
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

168 The Liischer Colour Test, trans. and ed. I. Scott, 1971, 50.
181 W. Waetzoldt 1909, ‘Das theoretische und praktische Problem
169 The most extensive study seems to be H. J. Eysenck 1941, ‘A
der Farbenbenennung’, Zeitschrift
fiirAsthetik und allgemeine Kunst-
Critical and Experimental Study of Color Preferences’, American
wissenschaft, 1V, espec. 384 P. Coremans, ‘La Notation des couleurs.
Journal of Psychology, LIV, 388: blue, red, green, violet, orange, yellow.
Essai d’application aux Primitifs flamands’ in M. Meiss (ed.) 1961,
A slightly divergent scheme, apparently based on much the same
De Artibus Opuscula, XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, 76-81.
earlier literature, is R. W. Burnham, R. M. Haines, C. J. Bartleson
182 See the exemplary bibliography by M. Grossmann 1988, Colori
1963, Color: A Guide to Basic Facts and Concepts, 209-10. Some more
e lessico: Studi sulla struttura semantica degli aggettivi di colore in catalano,
recent tests, in which, for example, blue remains the preferred
castigliano, italiano, romano, latino ed ungherese, 320-9. Perhaps the
colour in most European countries, except Spain (and Peru), are most useful studies for the art historian are: D. G. Hays et al. 1972,
mentioned by Pastoureau, ‘Vers une Histoire sociale des couleurs’
‘Color Term Salience’, American Anthropologist, LX XIV, 1107ff; M.
(cit. n. § above), 13-14, but unfortunately he gives no references. Durbin 1972, “Basic Terms — Off Color?’, Semiotica, VI, 257-78;
See also I. C.McManus, A. L.Jones,J.Cottrell 1981, ‘The Aesthetic N. B. McNeil 1972, ‘Colour and Colour Terminology’, Journal
of Colour’, Perception, X, 651-66. of Linguistics, VIII, 21ff; H. C. Conklin, ‘Colour Categorization’,
170 For a Constructivist artist who has used the Liischer system American Anthropologist, LXXV, 931-42; H. Zollinger, ‘A Correla-
(as well as those of Aristotle, Goethe, and G. Wyszecki), see H. tion between the Linguistics of Colour-naming and Colour percep-
Stierlin (ed.) 1981, The Art of Karl Gerstner, which includes (1644) an tion’, Colour 73 (cit. n. 171 above), 38off, R. Kuschel and T. Monberg
appreciation by Liischer himself. 1974, ‘We don’t talk much about color here’. A Study of Colour
171 Heimedahl (op. cit. n. 43 above), 165ff; R. W. Pickford 1971, Semantics on Bellona Island’, Man, [X, 213-42; C. B. Merrin et al.
‘The Liischer Test’, Occupational Psychology, XLV, 151-4; and R. 1975, Development ofthe Structure of Color Categories’, Develop-
Lakowski and P. Melhuish 1973, “Objective Analysis ofthe Liischer mental Psychology, XI, 54-60; M. Sahlins 1976, ‘Colors and Cultures,’
Colour Test’ in International Colour Association, Colour 73, 486-9. Semiotica, XVI, 1ff; F. Ratliff 1976, ‘On the Psycho-Physiological
172 For example, C. E. Osgood, G. J. Suci, P. H. Tennenbaum Bases of Universal Color Terms’, Proceedings of the American Philo-
1957, The Measurement of Meaning, Ul, 292ff: and G. Cerbus and sophical Society, CXX, 311-30; B. Lloyd, “Culture and Colour
R. C. Nichols 1963, ‘Personality Variables and Response to Colour’, Coding’ in G. Vesey (ed.) 1977, Communication and Understanding
Psychology Bulletin, LX, 566-75. (Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures), 141ff H. Zollinger 1979,
173 For a short critical survey of these types of theory, see R. “Correlations between the Neurobiology of Colour Vision and
Arnheim 1974, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative the Psycholinguistics of Colour Naming’, Experientia, XXV_ 1-8;
Eye: The New Version, 346ft. Carl Loef has recently sought to recon- idem, ‘Farben-gesehen, erkannt und erlebt’ in Hering-Mitgau et al.
cile the value-based theory with the musical octave: ‘Die Bedeu- (op. cit. n. 139 above) 9-12; W. D. Wright 1984, ‘The Basic Con-
tung der Musik-Oktave im optischen-visuellen Bereich der Farbe’ cepts and Attributes of Colour Order Systems’, Color Research and
in Hering-Mitgau et al., 227-36. Application, IX, 229-3; U. Eco 1985, ‘How Culture Conditions the
174 V. K. Ball 1965, ‘The Aesthetic of Color: A Review of Fifty Colors We See’ in M. Blonsky, On Signs, 157-75.
Years’ Experimentation’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXII, 183 Several fundamental studies of colour-terminology relevant to
44rft. the history of Western art are now available: for Ancient Egypt, J.
175 I. W. A. Whitfield and P. E. Slatter 1978, ‘Colour Harmony: Baines 1985, ‘Color Terminology and Color Classification: Ancient
An Evaluation’, British Journal ofAesthetics, XVII, 1890ff. Egyptian Color Terminology and Polychromy’, American Anthropol-
176 See, for example, H. Zeishold 1944, “Philosophy of the Ostwald ogist, LXXXVII, 282-97; for Hebrew, A. Brenner 1982, Colour
Color System’, Journal of the Optical Society of America, XXXIV, Terms in the Old Testament; for Greek, C. Mugler 1964, Dictionnaire
355f& Hesselgren (op. cit. n. 94 above); and R. S. Berns and F. W. historique de la terminologie optique des Grecs; P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
Billmeyer,Jr (op. cit n. 128 above). 1981, ‘Studies in Greek Colour Terminology, I, Glaucos, II, Karopos,
177 See the extensive bibliography in F. Mahling 1926, “Das Mnemosyne, suppl. LXV; for Latin,J.André 1949, Etude sur les termes
Problem der “Audition Colorée’”’, Archiv fiir die gesamte Psychologie, de couleur dans la langue latine; for Coptic, W. C. Till 1959, ‘Die Far-
LVII, 165ff. For some effects on painterly research and practice, see benbezeichnungen im Koptischen’, Analecta biblica (Oriens antiquus),
below pp. 192, 247, 251, ch. 21. XII, 331-42; for Anglo-Saxon, N. Barley 1974, ‘Old English Colour
178 L. E. Marks, 1978, The Unity of the Senses; S. Baron-Cohen,J. Classification: Where Do Matters Stand?’ Anglo Saxon England, III,
E. Harison (eds) 1997, Synaesthesia; Classic and Contemporary Read- 15-28; IV, 1975, 145-54; for Old German, J. Konig 1927, “Die
ings; M. Dériberé 1978, ‘ The Relationship between Perfumes and Bezeichnung der Farben’, Archiv fiir die gesamte Psychologie, LX,
Colours’, Color Research and Application, WI, 115f; S. Baron-Cohen, 145ff; for Old French, A. G. Ott 1899, Etudes sur les couleurs en vieux
M. A. Wyke, C. Binnie 1987, ‘Hearing Words and Seeing Colours: frangais (repr.1977); for Slavic languages, G. Herne 1954, Die slavis-
An Experimental Investigation of aCase of Synaesthesia’, Perception, chen Farbenbenennungem (Publications de l'Institut Slave d’Upsal,
XVI, 761-7. This study examines the case of an elderly female IX), 24ff P. M. Hill 1972, Die Farbworter der russischen und bulgar-
painter. See also below ch. 21. ischen Schriftsprache der Gegenwart; for Catalan, Spanish, Italian,
179 G. T. Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik, 2nd ed. 1897-8, I, 176; U, Romanian and Hungarian, see Grossmann (op. cit. n. 182 above).
3 15 ff. 184 R. Byron 1985, First Russia, Then Tibet (1933), 99-100.
180 Kandinsky, Complete Writings (cit. n. 123 above), I, 193. For 185 For example, W. Voge 1891, Eine deutsche Malerschule um die
Kandinsky and Schoenberg, see J. Hahl-Koch (ed.) 1984, Arnold Wende des ersten Jahrtausends, 165, who found the information gath-
Schoenberg — Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents. The ered from his ‘systematisch geordneten Farbentafel’ too difficult
more or less close interest of many 20th-century artists in musical to convey in language; E. H. Zimmermann 1916, Vorkarolingische
aesthetics has been documented in a number of studies, notably Miniaturen, UX, used a commercial colour-maker’s chart; O. Graut-
Kunsthaus, Zurich, Stadtische Kunsthalle, Diisseldorf, Museum des off 1914, Nicholas Poussin: Sein Werk und sein Leben, included his
20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk: Europais- own table of 62 samples prepared by a painter.
che Utopien seit 1800, 1983; K. von Mauer (ed.) 1985, Vom Klang der 186 H. Fuerstein, ed., Fiirstlich Fiirstenbergische Sammlungen zu
Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Paul Klee has been Donaueschingen: Verzeichnis der Gemiilde, 3rd ed. 1921, XI, and, for
particularly well served by studies of his musical interests and activi- example, 15, no. 98. Ostwald’s system was applied only in a few
ties: R. Verdi 1968, ‘Musical Influences on the Art of Paul Klee’, instances; for a later recourse to it, see H. Chorus 1933, Gesetzmas-
Museum Studies (Chicago), UI, 81f& A. W. Kagan 1983, Paul Klee: sigkeit der Farbgebung in der ottonischen Buchmalerei, PhD diss.,
Art and Music; Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, Klee et la musique, Cologne, 8f, 54.
1985-86 (German ed. 1986). But none ofthese studies devotes much 187 M. Saltzman’s paper, ‘Color Terminology: Can We Talk with
attention to the question of
colour. Each Other?’ given at the 1980 Temple University conference,

281
NOTES TO THE TEXT

‘Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting’, and advocating frequently in the Swiss pharmaceutical journals CIBA Review and
the Munsell system, is mentioned by Hall (op. cit. n. 71 above) XXI. Palette. :
1961, Uber das Licht in der Malerei, espec. 5, 68.
One ofthe first scholars to use the Munsell Book of Color was proba- 2 Wolfgang Schéne
Schéne’s terms derive from the Eigenwert and Darstellungswert of
bly Joy Thornton (diss. cit. n. 86 above); for recent examples, see
1983, The Sculpture of Palenque, Princeton, I, xvul,
colour proposed by H. Jantzen in 1913 (‘Uber Prinzipien der
M. G. Robertson
97; 1985, Il, 69-72; 1985, II, 99-103; A. W. Epstein 1986, Tokali Farbengebung in der Malerei’, reprinted in Uber den gothischen
Kirchenraum, 1951, 61-7). His view ofthe irrelevance of contempo-
Kilise:. Tenth-Century Metropolitan Art in Byzantine Cappadocia,
Washington, DC, s8f. rary theory was contested by A. Neumayer 1955 in his review (Art
Bulletin, 37, 302-3), which also provides a useful English summary of
188 O. M. Lilien 1985, Jacob Christophe Le Blon, 1667-1741, Inventor
of Three and Four Colour Printing; also see the review by J. Gage 1986 a difficult book. Something like a development from Eigenlicht to
in Print Quarterly, II, 65-7. See alsoJ. Friedman 1978, Color Printing Beleuchtungslicht has indeed been traced in the medieval philosophy
in England, 1486-1870, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; of light between the 13th and the 15th centuries by G. F. Vescovini
S. Lambert 1987, The Image Multiplied: Five Centuries of Reproduction 1965, Studi sulla Prospettiva Medievale. For Koloritgeschichte, see above,
of Paintings and Drawings, 87-99; F. Rodin (ed.) 1996, Anatomie de Chapter 3.
la Couleur: l’Invention de l’Estampe en Couleurs. 3 B. Berlin and P. Kay 1969, Basic Color Terms, 2nd ed. 1991.
189 For example, the processes desribed by E. Robinson and K. 4 For critiques of Berlin and Kay, see especially the survey in M.
R. Thompson 1970, ‘Matthew Boulton’s Mechanical Paintings’, Grossmann 1988, Color e Lessico: Studi Sulla Struttura semantica degli
Burlington Magazine, CXII, 497¢f. aggettivi di color in Catalano, Castigliano, Italiano, Romano Latino ed
190 On the early lithographic facsimiles and their technical prob- ungherese, 16-17, and Chapter 2 above. E. Irwin 1974, Colour Terms
lems, see C. Nordenfalk 1976, Color of the Middle Ages, A Survey of in Greek Poetry, espec. 220ff. For Latin: J. André 1949, Etudes sur les
Book Illumination Based on Color Facsimiles of Medieval Manuscripts, Termes de Couleur dans la langue Latin; for Anglo-Saxon, N. F. Barley
Pittsburgh, University Art Gallery; also E. Spalletti 1979, ‘La docu- 1974, ‘Old English Colour Classification: where do matters stand?’,
mentazione figurativa dell’ opera d’arte, la critica e l’editoria nell’ Anglo-Saxon England, Il, espec. 17.
epoca moderna (1750-1930)’ in Storia dell’arte italiana, II, 415-484; 5 Although J.J. G. Alexander’s 1975 article ‘Some Aesthetic Princi-
and T. Fawcett 1986, ‘Graphic versus Photographic in the Nine- ples in the Use of Colour in Anglo-Saxon Art’, Anglo-Saxon
teenth-Century Reproduction’, Art History, LX, 195-200. England, IV, 145f§, was ostensibly linked to Barley’s linguistic study
191 B. Coe 1978, Colour Photography. The First Hundred Years. (cit. n. 4 above), it did not make use of these findings, but inter-
192 For Warburg’s use of a coloured ‘Lumiére-Lichtbild’ at the preted colour-usage chiefly in terms ofnaturalism.
1912 International Congress of Art History, see T. Fawcett 1983, 6 See espec. P. Toynbee 1902, Dante Studies, 307-14; also M. Mann
‘Visual Facts and the Nineteenth-Century Art Lecture’, Art History, 1923 in Romania, XLIX, 186ff and E. Hoepfiner in ibid. $92ff.
VI, 457. Berenson, who had, of course, pioneered the use of black- 7 The oth-century inventory of the monastery of S. Riquier refers
and-white photography in the 1890s, seems by 1921 to have consid- to persae sericae in a list of coloured vestments (J. Wickham Legg
ered coloured slides to be superior to black-and-white ones for 1882, ‘Notes on the History of the Liturgical Colours’, Transactions
lecturing (A. K. McComb (ed.) 1965, The Selected Letters of Bernard of the St Paul’s Ecclesiological Society, 1, iii, 99), and in the 11th-century
Berenson, 90). gift of Robert Guiscard to Monte Cassino was Tunicam unam de
193 Colour, Oct. 1920, 43. panno perso inaurato (O. Lehmann-Brockhaus 1938, Schriftquellen zur
194 E. Diez and O. Demus 1931, Byzantine Mosaics in Greece: Hosios Kunstgeschichte des 11 und 12 Jh.f.Deutschland, Lothringen und Italien,
Lukas and Daphni, VU-VII. I, no. 2844). For Persia as the chief intermediary of the silk trade,
195 H. Ruhemann (1951), ‘The Masters’ Methods and Colour O. von Falke, Kunstgeschichte der Seidenweberei 2nd ed. 1921, 2f.
Reproduction’, repr. in The Cleaning ofPaintings, 1968, 353. 8 H. Roosen-Runge 1967, Farbgebung und Technik Frithmittelalter-
196 For example, J. Widman 1958, “Die Colorphotographie im licher Buchmalerei, U1, 66f€.
Dienste der Kunstpflege und Forschung’, Festschrift Johannes Jahn, 9 H.B. Gottschalk 1964, ‘The De Coloribus and its Author’, Hermes,
223-4. XCII, 59, proposes Theophrastus as the author; E. Franceschini
197 R. Longhi 1952, ‘Pittura-Colore — Storia e una domanda’, 1955, ‘Sulle versioni latine medievali del mept YPM@LOTOV, in Autour
Paragone, XX XIII, 3-6. See also the editorial in the Burlington Maga- @’Aristote: Recueil d'études offerta M. A. Mansion, 451, reports more
zine, CV, 1963. 47f; R. Longhi 1964, ‘Il critico accanto al fotografo, than eighty codices of the Latin translation attributed to Bartolomeo
al fotocolorista e al documentarista’, Paragone, CLXIX, 29-38. See also da Messina (1258/66).
Kudielka, op. cit. n. 137 above. Now of course computers and videos to R. D’Avino 1958, “La Visione del Colore nella Terminologia
have changed the whole future picture of colour documentation. Greca’, Richerche Linguistiche, IV, espec. 101, 103ff, 108f: P. Zancani
198 P. C. Beam 1942-3, “The Color Slide Controversy’, College Art Montuoro, ‘Colore’, in Encyclopedia dell’Arte Antica, Classica, e Ori-
Journal, 11, 35-8;J.M. Carpenter, ‘The Limitations of Color Slides’, entale, Il, 1959, 770ff C. Mangio 1961, “Cenni sulle teorie cro-
ibid., 38-40. matiche dei Greci e loro applicazioni architettoniche’, Studi Classici
199 See E. Wind 1963, Art and Anarchy, 165f: ‘Since the ordinary e Orientali, X, espec. 214; Irwin (op. cit. n. 4 above), 213ff.
photographic plate is sensitive to a larger range of shades than can be 11 Johannes Philoponus 1959, In Aristotelis Meteorologicorum librum
recorded in colour, the best black-and-white reproduction of a primum commentarium, 47, 18. Urso of Salerno, De Coloribus, ed.
Titian, Veronese or Renoir is comparable to a conscientious piano Thorndyke, Ambix, VU, 15.
transcription of an orchestral score, whereas the colour print, with 12 The most comprehensive recent study is in Pauly-Wissowa,
some exceptions, 1s like a reduced orchestra with all the instruments Real-Enzyklopadie d. Klass. Altertumswissenschaft, Supp. Il, cols 461ff,
out of tune.’ sv ‘Farbung’.
200 For example, R. G. W. Hunt, ‘Problems in Colour Reproduc- 13 A.J. Hopkins 1934, Alchemy Child of Greek Philosophy, 117. For
tion’, Colour 73 (cit. n. 171 above), 53ff. the medieval developments, J. Read, Prelude to Chemistry, 2nd ed.
1939, 14sft.
14 Eraclius De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum, Ul, vii (13th century),
4 Colour in History — Relative and Absolute ed. C. G Romano 1996. For a modern account, M. G. Chesneau
1933, “Contribution a l’Etude de la technique des Vitraux du
1 S. Skard 1946, “The Use of Color in Literature: a Survey of Moyen-Age’, Bulletin Monumental, XCU.
Research’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, XC, 181. 15 F. Haeberlein 1932/3, ‘Zur Farbenikonographie des Mittelal-
Skard’s list could now be much expanded: see above Chapter 3. ters’, Annales Institutorum, V, 103-4, where it is claimed that a fixed
Essays on colour of special interest to historians of art have appeared canon of Farbvokabeln obtained until the period of High Scholasti-

282
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

cism; idem 1939, ‘Grundzuge einer Nachantiken Farbikonographie’,

ed. Hedfors, 1932, 60; Mappae Clavicula, ch. 128, ed. Smith and
Romisches Jahrbuch fiir Kunstgeschichte, Ul, 78f€ stresses the relative
Hawthorne 1974, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,
unimportance of precise hue in establishing colour iconography, and LXIV, 4, 46 (English trans.).
attributes hue-preferences to style rather than to language. The most 30 E. R. Caley 1927, ‘The Stockholm Papyrus’, Journal of Chemical
useful study on these lines, G. Haupt 1941, Die Farbensymbolik in der
Education TV, 993, no. 101, also nos 103 and 153, 999. The close
sakralen Kunst des abendlandischen Mittelalters, also points out (46ff) the association of purple with gold and with light goes back at least to
vagueness ofthe sense of hue among the writers discussed. Pindar (6th/sth century Bc), and the Golden Fleece was sometimes
16 M. Reeves and B. Hirsch-Reich 1972, The ‘Figurae’ ofJoachim of described as purple (J. Duchemin 1955, Pindare, Poéte et Prophete,
Fiore, 194. Other striking examples in Haupt (op. cit. n. 15 above) 196, 228).
8sf. For early disagreement on the subject of whether Christ’s eyes 31 ‘luceat claream color, et reddetur quasi purpura pretiossima’,
were blue or brown, and his beard black, blonde or the colour of D. V. Thompson 1932, “The “De Clarea” of the so-called “Anony-
wine, E. de Bruyne 1946, Etudes d’Esthétique Mediévale, 1, 286n. mus Bernensis”’, Technical Studies, 1, 71ff.
17 See W. Whiteley, ‘Color words and colour values: the evidence 32 Bede, loc. cit. n. 28 above. Classical uses of red and purple as
from Gusii’ in R. Horton and R. Finnigen (eds) 1973, Modes of heavenly colours have been gathered by K. Lehmann 1945, ‘The
Thought, 156-7, and the important observations on medieval Dome of Heaven’, Art Bulletin, XXVII, 11.
symbolism by F. Ohly 1958, ‘Vom geistigen Sinn des Wortes im 33 E.g. Cennino Cennini, The Crafisman’s Handbook, ch. \xii, trans.
fiirdeutsches Altertum, LXXXIX, espec. 6ff.
Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift with further references by D. V. Thompson 1933, 37 and n. Several
18 J. Braun, Die Liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient, 1907, of the sources for blue as a heavenly colour cited by Haupt (op. cit.
749ff. J. Wickham Legg 1917, discovered an earlier 12th-century n. 1§ above) goff are early, and ultramarine was characterized as
sequence from the Crusaders’ Church inJerusalem, which also laid the optimus color in the 12th century (J. von Schlosser 1896, Quellen-
the main emphasis on black, white and red vestments (Essays Liturgi- buch zur Kunstgeschichte des abendléndischen Mittelalters, 234), but at
cal and Historical, 1578). the same time, in his Ekphrasis of the Church of the Holy Apostles
19 Paul Hetherington 1974, The ‘Painter’s Manual’ of Dionysius of in Constantinople, Nikolaos Mesarites specifically contrasts the
Fourna, 35. Only the Romanian and Russian manuals (Podlinnik) humble blue of the robe of the Pantokrator with the luxurious
seem to have recorded the appropriate colours of drapery (V. Grecu colours of purple, scarlet and hyacinth (ed. Downey 1957, Transac-
1934, ‘Byzantinische Handbiicher der Kirchenmalerei’, Byzantion, tions of the American Philosophical Society, XLVU, 870). The earliest
IX, 694, 697f). Very few of the surviving medieval model-books reference to blue as the noblest of colours I have found is in a
show any indications of colour (R. W. Scheller, Exemplum: Model- 13th-century De Colorum Diversitate (L. Thorndyke 1960, ‘Other
Book Drawings and the Practice ofartistic Transmission in the Middle Ages texts on Colours’, Ambix, VII, 58).
(€4..900-Cad. 1470), 1995, NOS 2, 3, 4, 6,;°7, 83.9; II, 13, 15,20, 21, 22, 34 K. Badt 1965, ‘Blue’ in The Art of Cézanne, 58-72. The earliest
24, 26, 29, 30, 31, 43, 44, are the only instances I have traced). appraisal of blue as the most beautiful colour I have found is in
20 Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Hiezechihelem Prophetam, VII, a Stoic doctrine, recorded by Aétius, which held that dark blue
v. 29, ed. M. Adriaen 1971 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, (kuanodei) was more beautiful than purple both because it is darker
CXLII), 118-19. On the literary tradition, Haupt (op. cit. n. 15 and because it has more shine (stilbousan) (J. ab Arnim 1903, Stoico-
above), 56. rum veterum Fragmenta, Il, no. 1009). Two studies rich in documen-
21 H.B. Meyer 1961, ‘Zur Symbolik friimittelalterliche Majestas- tation, if unconvincing in their conclusions, are M. Pastoureau
bilder’, Das Munster, XIV, espec. 83. Some 12th-century examples (1983), “Et puis vint le blew’ in Figures et Couleurs: Etudes sur la
are in the Westminster Psalter (British Library Royal MS 2A. XXII, Symbolique et la Sensibilité Médievales, 1986, 15-22; idem 1996,-‘La
f. 14), and in the Ascension in a window at Le Champ (Isére) (M. promotion de la couleur bleue au XIII* siécle: le temoinage de
Aubert et al. 1958, Le Vitrail Frangais, pl. X1). Vhéraldique et de ’emblématique’, in Istituto Storico Lucchese, II
22 For some inconclusive remarks on this combination in terms of Colore nel Medioevo: Arte, Simbolo, Tecnica, 7-16.
light and dark, Haupt (op. cit. n. 15 above) 73, 82f. For a study 35 E. Kirschbaum 1940, “L’Angelo rosso e l’angelo purchino’,
of the colours of the costumes of St Peter and the other Apostles, Rivista di Archeologia Christiana, XVII, 209-48.
see now M. Lisner 1990, ‘Die Gewandfarben der Apostel in Giottos 36 J. Seznec 1953, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, 47. In some other
Arenafresken — Farbgebung und Farbikonographie — mit Notizen late Antique schemes, air was represented by white (Tertullian, De
zu alteren Aposteldarstellungen in Florenz, Assissi und Rom’, Spectaculis, ed. Castorina 1961, Ixxxiv f) and in the Peripatetic De
ZeitschriftfiirKunstgeschichte, 53, 309-75. Coloribus air, earth and water were all white, fire red, while black
23 C. Mango 1972, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 42. was the colour ofthe elements in the process oftransformation. For
24 Innocent: Migne, Patrologia Latina CCXVII, col. 802. William the earliest views,J.Beare 1906, Greek Theories of Elementary Cogni-
of Auvergne, cit. De Bruyne (op. cit. n. 16 above), III, 86. A century tion from Alcmaeon to Aristotle, 21-2.
earlier, Hugh of St Victor had also claimed that green was the most 37 J. Hess and T. B. Ashbury (eds) 1969, Light: from Aten to Laser
beautiful colour, but simply on the grounds that it was the colour of (Art News Annual, XX XV), 1ooff.
spring growth (Didascalicon, Bk VII, ch. xii: Migne, Patrologia Latina 38 M.-M. Gauthier 1972, Emaux du Moyen-Age Occidental, cata-
CLXXVI, col. 821). logue 24 and pl. 12 above.
25 Suidae Lexicon, ed. Alder 1935, IV, 709-10. 39 See the plates of the newly-cleaned mosaics in G. H. Forsyth
26 Aristotle, De Sensu, 442a; Meteor, 374b-375a; E. Wunderlich and K. Weitzmann 1965, The Monastery of St Catherine at Mount
1925, Die Bedeutung der roten Farbe im Kultus der Griechen und Romer. Sinai, espec. pls CIV, CSI, CXIV.
(Religiongeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, XX, i), 41; André 40 The more expected sequence from light at the centre is
(op. cit. n. 4 above) 138; Theophilus, De Diversis Artibus, ed. Dodwell described by Plotinus (Enneads, IV, 3.17) and represented in the
1961, 96. nimbed crosses at Poreé (Parenzo), Albenga, S. Sophia and the
27 G. M. Stratton 1917, Theophrastus and the Greck Physiological Church of the Archeiropoietos at Salonika, and in many Byzantine
Psychology before Aristotle, 136-7. illuminations (e.g. K. Weitzmann, Illustrations in Roll and Codex, 2n
28 Isidore, Etymologiae XVI, ix; Marbod of Rennes, PL CLXXI, ed. 1970, figs 84, 130, 164, 165, 192), as well as in the episodes of
col. 1774; Bede, PL XCIII, col. 202; cf. also Bede’s account of the Moses receiving the Law and the Burning Bush in St Catherine’s.
whelk used in the British Isles to make“purple, which stresses the The most recent study of the light-imagery at St Catherine’s has
redness ofthe dye (History ofthe English Church and People, 1, 1, trans. noted the form of the mandorla, without analysing it (J. Miziolek
Sherley-Price 1955, 37). For Pliny in the Middle Ages, from the 8th
1990, ‘Transfiguratio Domini in the Apse at Mount Sinai and the
to the r2th centuries, M. Manitius 1890 in Philologus, XLIX, 3 8off.
Symbolism of Light’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
29 ‘oxiporfiron to apo rodinis’, Compositiones ad tingenda musiva, LIII, 43).

283
NOTES TO THE TEXT

41 Mesarites (op. cit. n. 33 above) 872. Weitzmann (op. cit. n. 39 hauer 1969, Die Architektur der Pariser Oper, 168f), opposed this atti-
tude (C. Garnier 1869, A Travers les Arts, 179f), as, later, did scholars
above) 14-15 accounts for the absence of Mount Tabor in the St
like E. Didron 1875 (‘La Peinture en Mosaique’, Gazette des Beaux-
Catherine’s mosaic by referring to St John Crysostom’s Homily on
Arts, ser. I, vol. XI, 449f) and E. Gerspach 1880 (‘La Mosaique
the Metamorphosis, “not with a cloud over his head, but surrounded
Absidale de Saint-Jean de Lateran’, ibid., XXI, 141ff) who discussed
by Heaven’, but since no earlier version of the subject including
Tabor has come to light, the point does not seem to be a crucial one the rendering of Christ’s hair in terms of Chevreul’s law ofsimulta-
neous and successive contrast (146-7).
(see ‘Verklirung Christi’ in Lexikon der Christlichen Ikonographie, ed.
Kirschbaum 1972, IV). 55 F. Cachin 1971, Paul Signac, 85f, 88. It must, however, be said
42 The conception of God as darkness in the earlier Old Testament that he did acquire some reproductions of mosaics, and that most
tradition (until about the 6th century Bc) has been examined by of the important medieval mosaics in Constantinople were not
J. Hempel 1960, ‘Die Lichtsymbolik in Alten Testament’, Studium uncovered until after his visit.
“Generale, XIII, espec. 355-8, 367f. For the survival of some of these 56 Paul Adam, cit. Herbert (op. cit. n. 53 above) 16.
ideas in medieval Jewish mysticism, G. Scholem 1972, ‘Farben und 57 Homer (op. cit. n. 2 above) 288, n. 22.
ihre Symbolik in der judischen Uberlieferung und Mystik’, Eranos 58 Fora wide-ranging discussion ofthe scientific credentials of Neo-
Yearbook, XLI, espec. $, 23f. Impressionism, P. Smith 1997, Seurat and the Avant-Garde, ch. 2.
43 See espec. E. von Ivanka, ‘Dunkelheit, mystische’, in Reallexikon 59 The phenomenon was stressed in the first important account of
fiir Antike und Christentum. It is remarkable that in the versions ofthe Neo-Impressionism, by Felix Fénéon 1886, La Vogue, 13-20 June
‘episodes of Moses and the Burning Bush and Moses receiving the (Oeuvres plus que completes, ed. Halperin 1970, I, 36-7). In 1888 Seurat
Law later than the triumphal arch at Sinai, the first shows God’s called this article ‘the exposition of my ideas on painting’ (Homer,
hand emerging from a cloud of light, the second from a cloud of op. cit. n. 2 above, 290 n. 31).
darkness (H. Buchthal 1938, The Miniatures of the Paris Psalter, pl. X; 60 ‘Videntur autem sic propter distantiam aut velocitatem motio-
K. Weitzmann 1973, Illustrated Manuscripts at St Catherine’s Monastery nis, Cum visus in unoquoque istorum debilis fiat aspiciendi et intelli-
on Mount Sinai, pl. XXX). gendi singulas partes. Quoniam, si distantia rerum videndarum
44 Celestial Hierarchy, XV, §8, ed. Rocques 1958, 186ff, who notes quantitatem habuerit ita ut et angulus qui totam rem continet,
that there are no blue horses in the biblical accounts of the Horses of habeat ydoneam quantitatem, singuli autem anguli qui continent
the Apocalypse (Zechariah 1, 8; VI, 2-3; Revelations. VI, 3-7). On the diversos colores, fuerint insensibiles, apparebit ex comprehensione
shift in the Greek interpretation of kuaneos from ‘dark’ to ‘blue’, partium que non discernuntur, cum omnium sensibilitas congre-
Irwin (op. cit. n. 4 above) 108f. The place of darkness in Dionysian gabitur, quod color totius rei sit unus, alter quam singularum
thought has been discussed generally by H. C. Puech 1938, ‘La partium.
Ténébre mystique chez le Pseudo-Denys’, Etudes Carmelitaines, ‘Similiter etiam accidit ex motu vehementis celeritatis, ut moto
XXIII, i. troci plures colores habentis, quia non moratur unus et idem visibilis
45 The fullest account in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, U1, 1957, ¢. radius super unum et eundem colorem, quoniam recedit color ab
240ff. eo propter celeritatem volutionis. Et sic idem radius, cadens super
46 V.E. Gardthausen 1886, Catalogus codicum graecorum siniaticorum, omnes colores, non potest dividere iter primum et novissimum, nec
nos. 319-25. inter eos qui sunt per diversa loca. Apparent enim omnes colores per
47 Some of these ideas have been conveniently summarized by totum trocum in eodem tempore quasi unus et quod sit similis
E. Panofsky 1944, ‘Note on a Controversial Passage in Suger’s De coloris qui vere fieret ex commixtis coloribus...Si linee autem
Consecratione’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, LXXXVI. So far as I know, fuerint super trocum constitute et per axem transducte, apparebit in
the only modern discussion of the ‘negative aesthetic’ developed volutione tota superficies troci similem habere colorem...’ (A.
from Dionysius is De Bruyne (op. cit. n. 16 above), II, 21 sf, 247-8. Lejeune 1956, L’Optique de Claude Ptolémée, Il, 95, 59-61). This
48 E.g. Ignatius the Grammarian on the 9th-century mosaic of the sometimes difficult text survives only in an early 13th-century Latin
subject in the Church of the Virgin of the Pege at Constantinople translation from an Arabic version of the original Greek. Hints of
(The Greek Anthology, trans. Paton 1969, I, I, 112); J. Viellard, Le optical mixture through distance had been given tentatively by
Guide du Pelerin de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, 3rd ed. 1963, 104: Aristotle (De Sensu, 439b, 23ff, an especially interesting text, since
‘Est enim Dominus ibi in nube candida, facie splendens ut Sol, veste it suggests the optical derivation of all colours from mixtures of
refulgens ut nix’; Alexander of Villa Dei, Ecclesiale (ed. and trans. black and white) and through motion in the Peripatetic De Audi-
Lind 1958, 34, 85): ‘a shining cloud [lucida nubes] enveloped them’. bilibus (803b, 34ff). A 1oth-century refinement of the method ofdisc
49 Otto Demus 1948, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 38 and fig. 29. mixture seems to lie behind Seurat’s reference to ‘the duration
50 Idem 1949, The Mosaics ofNorman Sicily, 383. of a light-impression on the retina’ in a letter of 1890 (Homer, op.
51 First reported by C. Angrand to H. E. Cross about 1891 (R. Rey cit. n. §2 above, 140f).
1931, La Renaissance du Sentiment Classique, 95); with slightly differ- 61 Lejeune, loc. cit. n, 60 above, 17*.
ent wording, Angrand in G. Coquiot 1924, Seurat, 41. 62 R. Koldewey 1884, ‘Das Bad von Alexandria-Troas’, Athenische
52 Seurat himself acknowledged a debt to Blanc, Delacroix, Mitteilungen, IX, 39f. The tesserae found here were of both stone
Chevreul, Monet, Pissaro and Rood in a letter of 1890 (W. I. Homer and glass. Literary references in Pliny, Natural History, XXXV, 64;
1964, Seurat and the Science of Painting, 17, with an analysis of these Statius, Silvae, 1, 5, 42-3; Seneca, Epistolae, LXXVI, 6f.
sources). For Lehmann, A. Boime 1970, The Academy and French 63 The only example known to me is the coarse, pebble-like vault
Painting in the Nineteenth Century, 114ff colour-photography: L. of Criptoportico D in Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, published by
Moholy-Nagy 1947, Vision in Motion, 158-9; Japanese prints: H. G. Lugli 1928, Bulletino della Commissione Communale di Roma, LV,
Dorra 1970, ‘Seurat’s Dot and the Japanese Stippling Technique’, 1O8fE.
Art Quarterly, XXXII; colour-printing: N. Broude, ‘New Light on 64 One 2nd-century AD example is in the distant landscapes and
Seurat’s “Dot”: its Relation to Photomechanical Color Printing in water in the small inset floor mosaics from Hadrian’s Villa now
France in the 1880s’, Art Bulletin, LVI, 1974. in the Vatican (M. Wheeler 1964, Roman Art and Architecture, figs
53 R.L. Herbert 1968, Neo-Impressionism, New Y ork, Guggenheim 473-4).
Museum, 220f. 65 Colour plate: G. Kawerau and T. Wiegand 1930, Altertumer von
54 Chevreul himself surprisingly took the view that mosaic was Pergamon, V, i, pl. VIII. The ‘rainbow’ borders found frequently in
hardly more than an imitation of painting, although it should not early medieval manuscript illumination, in which each colour-band
be too refined to tell over a distance (The Principles of Harmony and has a serrated edge, like mosaic tesserae set at an angle of45 degrees
Contrast of Colours, trans. Martel 1854, 176); Garnier, who had to the line, clearly derive from mosaic practice such as the interlace
admired medieval mosaics in Sicily and Constantinople (M.-Stein- borders in the late-Antique vault of Sta Constanza in Rome (Comp.

284
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

X) (G. Matthiae 1967, Mosaici Medioevali delle Chiese di Roma, pls I, details Filarete gives (e.g. the five values of each hue, like the
II). The earliest MS example I have found is in a 6th-century Greek
6th/7th-century Byzantine mosaic palette of4 to 8 values recorded
Dioscurides, Materia Medica, (Vienna Nat. Bibl. Vindob. med. er. I,
by B. Rubin 1954, Byzantische Zeitschrift, XCVII, 439, and 4 or 5
f. 4r, repr. A. Grabar 1966, Byzantium from the Death of Theodosius to values used in the Kariye Djami, Underwood, op. cit. n. 65 above, I,
the Rise ofIslam, fig. 215). The almost contemporary mosaic of the 181), suggest the persistence of traditional methods. Five values
Virgin and Child at Lynthrankomi seems to have a similar arrange- were also the norm in wall painting (D. Winfield 1968, ‘Middle and
ment in its ‘rainbow’ mandorla (just visible to the far left in pl. II later Byzantine wall-painting methods’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers,
of A. Stylianou 1963, Cyprus: Byzantine Mosaics and Frescoes). The XXII, 136ff).
clearest example of the painter borrowing from mosaic convention 78 Lejeune (op. cit. n. 60 above), 27%.
in this context is in the 14th-century decoration of the Kariye Djami 79 Notably C. Mango 1963, ‘Antique Statuary and the Byzantine
in Istanbul (P. Underwood 1967, The Kariye Djami, Il, pl. 44, ILI, Beholder’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XVI, espec. 64ff; H. Maguire
pl. 411). 1974, “Truth and Convention in Byzantine Descriptions of Works
66 E.g. 4th-century Salonika, Hagios Georgios, head ofStGeorge of Art’, ibid., XXVIII, espec. 128ff D. S. Wallace-Hadrill 1968, The
(good pls in H. Torp, Mosaikkene i St Georg-rotunden, 1963); 11th- Greek Patristic View of Nature, 97£. Ekphrasis has now been studied in
century Daphni, Head of the Virgin in Crucifixion (pl. 78); 13th- relation to colour in L. James 1996, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art.
century Rome, formerly St Peter’s, Giotto’s Navicella (G. Matthiae, 80 There is a suggestion that flesh areas were sometimes left until
loc. cit., pl. LX VIII); 14th-century Istanbul, Kariye Djami (Under- last, presumably to be executed by the leading master (Underwood,
wood, loc. cit., II, pls 33, 34, 45, 69, 70, 263, 326). op. cit. n. 65 above, I, 1796).
67 E.g. sth-century Bitola (Heraclea Lyncestis) pavement (G. C. 81 A. Chastel and F. Minervino 1973, Tout l’Oeuvre Peint de Seurat,
Tomasevié 1973, Heraclea Lyncestis, Bitola figs 16-19); e7th-century pl. XLII.
Istanbul, Great Palace (Mosaic Museum) (Grabar, op. cit. n. 65 above, 82 D.C. Rich 1936, Seurat and the Evolution of ‘La Grande Jatte’, 34-5.
fig. 108 — not the best example from this pavement). 83 P. Bruneau 1972, Les Mosaiques de Delos, no. 214, Matthiae (op.
68 E.g. 8th-century Rome, Chapel of John VII (P. J. Nordhagen cit. n. 65 above), pls 91, 94. Matthiae argues (pp. 154ff) that these are
1965, ‘The Mosaics of John VII’, Acta Instituti Romani Norvegiae, II, all contemporary, and that the setter of the Apostles was in charge of
I§1). the whole scheme and probably had connections with Ravenna. He
69 E.g. sth-century Rome, Sta Maria Maggiore: Abraham visited by also identifies a third artist, responsible for S. Hyppolitus (pl. XX).
Angels (Grabar, op. cit. n. 65 above, fig.157); 12th-century Mon- 84 Fenéon (op. cit. n. 59 above) I, 74 (1887).
reale (Kitzinger, op. cit. n. 65 above, pls 2, 47); 13th-century Rome, 85 Vasari (1568), Le Vite, Milan 1965, VII, 332; Reynolds (1788),
Sta Prassede, Chapel ofS.Zeno, Tabernacle (Matthiae) (op. cit. n. Discourse XIV; Constable wrote of Count Forbin, the organizer of
65 above, pl. LXIII). For lustre, which occurs when the eye is unable the 1824 Salon: ‘He is no artist (I believe) and he thought “as the
to decide whether to distinguish or to fuse the dots, Fénéon (op. cit. colours were rough, they must be seen at a distance” — they found
n. 59 above). their mistake as they then acknowledged the richness ofthe texture
70 Some examples in Sta Maria Maggiore in Rome and S. Apol- —and the attention to the surface of objects in these pictures’ (Corre-
linare Nuovo in Ravenna are cited by G. Bovini, “Origine e tecnica spondence, ed. Beckett 1968, VI, 185).
del mosaico parietale paleocristiana’, Felix Ravenna, 2nd ser. 1954, 86 C. Mango (op. cit. n. 23 above), 197; also 205 (sermon of Leo
7. Instances in the 9th-century apse mosaic in Haghia Sophia in VI).
Istanbul have been noticed by C. Mango and E. J. Hawkins 196s, 87 Metamorphoses, I, 5. |have discussed the medieval interpretation
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, X1, 125. of this tag in Colour and Culture, 1993, 75-6.
71 E.g. the late-Antique heads of Dionysius and a Maenead, from 88 C. Mango 1958, The Homilies of Photius, 187.
Utica, in the British Museum (nos. 54 g, k). Striking medieval 89 For Empedocles, K. Freeman 1966, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic
examples are in S. Apollinare Nuovo (col. pls in G. Bovini 1958, Philosophers, Frags. 22-3. The same conception is repeated in the De
Mosaici di S. Apollinare Nuovo di Ravenna), and in the Chapel of Mundo attributed to Aristotle, but probably composed in the second
S. Zeno at Sta Prassede (e.g. W. Oakeshott 1967, The Mosaics of century AD (396b).
Rome, pl. V). 90 Freeman, loc. cit., 92-8.
72 For example by Demus (op. cit. n. 50 above), 135; Bovini (op. 91 De Mixtione, II, 214, 18, in M. C. Nahm, Selections from Early
cit. n. 70 above), 12. Greek Philosophy, 4th ed. 1964, 164. Mango (op. cit. n. 88 above)
73 S. Lauffer 1971, Diokletians Priesedikt, 118-19, 234-5. F. Deich- unaccountably cites Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b to illustrate Photius’s
mann 1974, Ravenna: Hauptstadt des Spatantiken Abendlandes, II, 189, point.
recognizes the irrelevance of this document, but proposes a single 92 Joannis Stobaei Eclogarum Physicarum et Ethicarum Libri Duo (Greek
designer and many executants, on grounds of style. and Latin), I, 1792, ch. XVII, 362ff. For Photius’s copy (cod. 167),
74 Kitzinger (op. cit. n. 65 above) 130, n. 106. R. Henry 1960, Photius: La Bibliotheque, I, 149ff.
75 F. Forlati 1949, ‘La Tecnica dei Primi Mosaici Marciani’, Arte 93 Theophrastus, in Stratton (op. cit. n. 27 above) 132ff. Galen and
Veneta, III, 86; Mango and Hawkins (op. cit. n. 70 above), and the Aétius in Nahm (op. cit. n. 91 above), 160, 176.
summary of research by S. H. Young 1976, ‘Relations between 94 The ‘primary’ palette is described by Angrand in Coquiot (op.
Byzantine Mosaic and Fresco Decoration’, Jahrbuch der osterreichis- cit. n. $1 above) 40, but Signac claimed that he had already intro-
chen Byzantinistik, XXXV. duced Seurat to the ‘prismatic’ arrangement in 1884 (Homer, op.
76 The text in B. Bischoff 1984, Anecdota Novissima: Texte des Vierten cit. n. 52 above, 151). Also W. I. Homer 1959, ‘Seurat’s Palette’,
bis Sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Quellen und Untersuchungen zur urlington Magazine, Cl, 192-3.
Lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters 7), 223. Since the rather 95 Moralia, Loeb (ed.) 1961, IX, 156-7, cf. also ibid., 247; 1962, IV,
scanty Carolingian revival of mosaic seems to have relied on spoils 47f, and especially V, 48of. Medieval usage: H. Silvestre 1954,
from Ravenna for cubes (H. E. del Medico 1943 in Monuments Piot, ‘Le MS Bruxellensis 10147-58 et son Compendium artis picturae’,
XXXIX, 85), it is not surprising that only setting is discussed here, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’ Histoire, CXTX, 138.
although there are recipes for making green, gold and silver cubes in 96 Mappae Clavicula, op. cit. n. 29 above, ch. ix, xi, 27-8. The best
the Lucca MS (op. cit. n. 29 above), 5-6, 86-90. survey ofthe literature is W. W. Bulatkin 1954, “The Spanish word
77 The treatise Sul Modo di tagliare ed applicare il musaico (2c. 1415), ‘Matiz’: Its Origin and Semantic Evolution’, Traditio, X. Roosen-
ed. Reali 1858, 12f, leaves it an open question ‘se tu sai desegnare’. Runge (op. cit. n. 8 above) and Winfield (op. cit. n. 77 above) have
It was written by a Venetian craftsman working outside S. Marco shown that these prescriptions were widely practised. Roosen-
(cf. p. 4), but Filarete in mid-century found similar practices there Runge, Vol. II for a catalogue ofthe colour-terms.
97 Mappae, loc. cit. n. 29 above. The MS of
the De Clarea unfortu-
(Treatise on Architecture, trans. Spencer 1965, 312). Some of the other

285
NOTES TO THE TEXT

5 Colour-words and Colour-patches

nately breaks off when it is about to discuss such mixtures: Puris, hoc
est non mixtis coloribus ut mirabiliter mixto strata inferius, superius unbrata
1 The De Nominibus Utensilium has now been fully edited in T.
colore pictura sit variata cum nimis . -- (Op. cit. n. 31 above, 81f). The
Hunt 1991: Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-century England,
only unpublished MSS to describe mixed colours (greens), listed by
Thompson 1935, date from the 15th century (“Trial Index to some I, 1888-9, for the chapter on the scriptorium. Although this vocabu-
lary was published by T. Wright in 1857 and by A. Scheler in 1867,
unpublished sources for the History of Mediaeval Craftsmanship’,
Speculum, X, 423). : 5 } was cited briefly by W. Wattenbach 1896, Das Schriftwesen im Mitte-
The Church of Haghia lalter, 3rd ed., 207, 275, 293, 345, and has been trans., not always
98 J. Plesters in D. Talbot Rice (ed.) 1968,
Sophia at Trebizond, 230f. Kartye Djami: R. J. Gettens and G. L. reliably, in U. T. Holmes 1952, Daily Living in the Twelfth Century,
Stout, ‘A Monument of Byzantine Wall-painting — the Method of based on the Observations of Alexander Neckham in London and Paris,
Construction’, Studies in Conservation, II, 3, 1958, 110.
69-70, it has so far as I know been used very rarely by historians of
99 A small selection of illustrations in V. W. Egbert 1967, The Medi- manuscript illumination.
aeval Artist at Work. The only palette shown here (Paris BN MS 2 R. E. Latham (ed.), Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British
Fr. 12420 f.101v; 1402) seems to be used simply for mixing a flesh- and Irish Sources, rev. ed. 1965. Wattenbach 1896, 275 cites the defi-
pink (colour plate in R. Behrends and K. M. Kober 1973, The Artist nition ofcavilla in the Serapeum vocabulary: ‘Cavilla, cavil, in propos-
and his Studio, 12). An earlier palette, illustrated in a French Bible ito est instrumentum quo posito super exemplari utitur scriptor, ut visus ejus
of c. 1300, has now been published by J. G. G. Alexander 1992, referatur certius et promptius ad exemplar, et dicitur a cavo, as, prout idem
Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work, 24, pl. 35, but it est quod perforo; as, quia perforatur est visu.” But Wattenbach also notes
shows only two colours (see below, 94 and pl. 34). that Nequam appears to identify the term with spectacles. He also
100 Good col. plates in A. K. Orlandos 1963, Paragoritissa tis Artis. gives instances in the later Middle Ages of the use of berillus and
ror P. Signac, De Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme, ed. Cachin 1964, spiegel (speculum) in the sense ofspectacles and in the singular (288-9).
‘IPD 3 See for example the Anglo-Norman gloss in a Cambridge MS
102 Many of the Latin tituli in E. Diehl 1925, Inscriptiones Latinae cited by Hunt (II, 79): ‘spectaculum: espectacle sive cavillam vel
Christianae Veteres, nos 1752-1979; some usefully translated in cavillam: spectacle’. Both the British Library MS used by Wright, A
Oakeshott (op. cit. n. 71 above). Some Byzantine examples in The Volume of Vocabularies, 1857, and the Bruges MS published by
Greek Anthology (op. cit. n. 48 above), I, 1-18, cf. also Mango and Scheler in 1867 identified cavilla with spectaculum. This may be the
Sevéenko1961, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, XIV, 243ff. For apses: reason why Holmes (70) has translated this term vaguely as “indica-
C. Ihm 1960, Die Programme der Christlichen Apsismalerei, espec.125. tor’, citingJ.Destrez, ‘L’outillage des copistes du XIII* et du XIV*
103 It must be stressed that the Neo-Impressionists also used much siécles’, in A. Lang,J.Lechner, M. Schmaus 1935, Aus der Geisteswelt
white. des Mittelalters: Studien und Texte Martin Grabmann zur Vollendung
104 The best account is still H. Bauer 1911, ‘Die Psychologie des 60 Lebensjahres von Freunden und Schulern gewidmet, 1, 19-34. But
Alhazens auf Grund von Alhazens Optik’, Beitraége zur Geschichte Destrez (33-4) was somewhat nonplussed by Wattenbach’s cavilla,
der Philosophie des Mittelalters, X, 5, 44ff. The Latin translator of and was unable to relate the term to the line-computing device
Alhazen’s Arabic clearly had difficulties in finding equivalents. For he had discovered. He was also unable to identify Wattenbach’s
Alhazen’s own colour-terms, The Optics of the Al-Haytham, trans. ‘Serapeum’ dictionary, the source of his definition; I have had no
and introd. A. I. Sabra 1989, II, 40-44, 57-9. For his influence: D. C. better success.
Lindberg 1967, ‘Alhazen’s Theory ofVision and its Reception in the 4 The fullest discussion of these optical developments is by A. C.
West’, Isis, LVIII. For the related questions of the vagueness of Crombie, “The mechanistic hypothesis and the scientific study of
Arabic colour-terms, W. Fischer 1965, Farb- und Formbezeichnungen vision: some optical ideas as a background to the invention of the
in der Sprache der Altararabischen Dichtung, espec. 233ff. A. Bouhdiba microscope’ in S. Bradbury and G. L. E. Turner 1967, Historical
1976, “Les Arabes et la Couleur’ in L’Autre et l’Ailleurs: Hommage a Aspects ofMicroscopy, espec. 46-7.
Roger Bastide, ed. J. Poirier and F. Raveau, 347-54. 5 The classic study is E. Rosen 1956, ‘The invention of eyeglasses’,
105 For raking, Forsyth and Weitzmann (op. cit. n. 39 above), Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, X1, 13-53, 183-
espec. pls CXXIV-CXXVIII; R. Cormack in Annual of the British 218.
School in Athens, LXIV, 1969, espec. 30; E. Hawkins 1968 in Dumb- 6 J. S. Neaman 1993, ‘The mystery of the Ghent bird and the
arton Oaks Papers, XXII, espec. 155 and fig. 11. Photographs can invention of spectacles’, Viator, XXIV, 189-214. Neaman has iden-
rarely give this sort of information: for an attempt to make them do tified spectacles in a drélerie in a Ghent Psalter of ¢. 1240, and also
so, H. Karpp 1966, Die Friichristlichen und Mittelalterlichen Mosaiken points to the French and English fashion for miniature Bibles from
in S. Maria Maggiore zu Rom, 20-1. about 1230.
106 K. M. Philips 1960, ‘Subject and Technique in Hellenistic- 7 Bruges, Bibl. Communale MS 536 in A. Scheler (ed.) 1867, Lexi-
Roman Mosaics: A Ganymede Mosaic from Sicily’, Art Bulletin, cographie latine du Xe et du XIle Siecle: Trois Traités de Jean de
XLII, 244. Garlande, Alexandre Neckam et Adam du Petit-Pont, 113: spectaculum
107 Homilies (cit. n. 88 above). This may be a reminiscence of the vel cavillum.
nervous excitement recorded by Procopius in his Ekphrasis of 8 R. Gibbs 1989, Tomaso da Modena: Painting in Emilia and the March
Haghia Sophia (Mango, op. cit. n. 23 above, 75), which appears, ofTreviso, 1340-1380, 83-4, 264-5 and pls 19, 27. Gibbs also notes the
too, to have been the inspiration ofa passage in Theophilus (op. cit. use of these two instruments in frescoes at Assisi by the Bolognese
n. 26 above, 63). painter Andrea de’ Bartoli, dated 1367/9.
108 For Seurat’s cramped studio, see Chapter 16 below , 9 J.J. G. Alexander 1992, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of
109 Fénéon (op. cit. n. 59 above), I, 55-6. Work, 32-4 and fig. 51.
110 Sul Modo di Tagliare...(loc. cit. n. 77 above). For illustrations 10 See espec. V. Illardi, ‘Eyeglasses and concave lenses in fifteenth-
of the mosaics and a discussion of their date, M. Muraro 1961, ‘The century Florence and Milan: New Documents’, Renaissance Quar-
Statutes of the Venetian Arti and the Mosaics of the Mascoli terly, 29, 1976, 341-60; and the excellent general survey: J. Dreyfus
Chapel’, Art Bulletin, XLII. (1988), “The invention of spectacles and the advent of printing’ in
111 L. B. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. Into Print: Selected Writings on Printing History, Typography and Book
Grayson 1972, 92-3. The Latin version is slightly fuller than the Production, 1994, 298-310.
Italian at this point. Elsewhere, however, Alberti recognizes that the 11 F. Brunello (ed.) 1975, De Arte Illuminandi e Altri Trattati sulla
effect of mosaic derives from the irregular reflections from the surface Tecnica della Miniatura Medievale, 201. See also the De Coloribus
(De Re Aedificatoria, ed. Orlandi and Portoghesi 1966, vi, x, 509). Faciendis of Peter of St Omer, now given to the 13th or 14th
century, §XXIII/172: L. van Acker (ed.) 1972, Petrus Pictoris Carmina

286
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

nec non Petri de Sancto Audemaro Librum de Coloribus Faciendis (Corpus

albedo enim incensa visum disgre[g]at et maxime nervum obsitum
Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis XXV), 185.
[1.e. opticum] i exsensum obtenebrat’. Hunt (op. cit n. 1 above)
12 Jehan Le Begue, Tabula de Vocabulis Sinonimis et Equivocis Colorum I, 89.
(1431) in M. Merrifield (1849), Original Treatises on the Arts of Paint-
39 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 61. Also Pliny, Natural History,
ing, 1967, I, 34, also 27, sv ‘Fenix’. ; XXXVI, xvi, 62-3.
13 For the glosses, Hunt (op. cit. n. 1 above) II, 80, 117. For the 40 Seymour (op. cit. n. 32 above) ch. XIX, 1290.
manufacture of vermilion, R. J. Gettens, R. L. Feller, W. T. Chase 41 Ibid. 1291.
1993, ‘Vermilion and Cinnabar’ in A. Roy (ed.), Artists’ Pigments, 42 Ibid. ch. VI, 1275; ch. XIV, 1287. This view ofthe central place
Il, 159-82. ‘ of red in the scale between white and black was shared by Bacon,
14 See his De naturis Rerum, ed. T. Wright 1863, espec. I, x1 §94 on who was thus unlikely to be the first to have perceived it, as
the colours of the peacock; and for his science, R. W. Hunt, The Parkhurst (op. cit. n. 37 above) 170 has suggested. It may be signifi-
Schools and the Cloister: the Life and Writings of Alexander Nequam cant that Bartholomaeus quotes extensively from Bacon’s teacher,
(1157-1217), ed. M. Gibson 1984, 67-83. Robert Grosseteste, on colour.
15 Ed. cit. (n. 11 above), YXXVIII/177, 186-7. 43 Seymour (op. cit. n. 32 above) ch. XIV, 1287.
16 Ibid. §XVIHI/167, 183. For perse see espec. H. Meier, ‘Ein
dunkles Farbwort’, in H. M. and H. Schommodau 1963, Wort und
Text: Festschrift
fiirFritz Schalk, 101-10. 6 Ghiberti and Light
17 C. H. Haskins 1960, ‘A list of text-books from the close of the
twelfth century’ in Studies in the History ofMedieval Science (1927), 58. 1 Cf. K. van Straelen 1938, Studien zur Florentiner Glasmalerei des
18 Alexander (op. cit. n. 9 above) 46, fig. 67. Trecento und Quattrocento, 72, 84f; A. Lane 1949, ‘Florentine painted
19 P. Stirnemann, “Nouvelles pratiques en matiére d’enluminure au glass and the practice of design’, Burlington Magazine, XCI, 48 on
temps de Philippe August’ in H. Bautier (ed.) 1982, La France de the unevenness and ‘mediocrity’ of the designs. R. Krautheimer
Philippe Auguste, 968-75, no. 6. 1956, Lorenzo Ghiberti,, 203n, dismissed the designs as contributing
20 Ed. cit. (n. 11 above) §§XXV-XXVI (174-5) 185-6; Gage 1993, nothing to the understanding of Ghiberti’s late style. For a more
Colour and Culture, 139. The fullest survey of the medieval connota- favourable view, G. Marchini 1957, Italian Stained Glass Windows,
tions of ‘red’ is in C. Maier and R. Suntrup 1987, ‘Zum Lexikon 43-51; G. von Habsburg 1970, ‘Les vitraux de Lorenzo Ghiberti’,
der Farbenbedeutungen im Mittelalter. Einfuhrung zu Gegenstand Comptes Rendues du ze Colloque du Corpus Vitrearum Medti Aevi,
und Methoden sowie Probeartikel aus dem Farbenbereich “Rot” 5) Florence, 24-6. M. Salmi 1956, ‘Lorenzo Ghiberti e la Pittura’,
Friimittelalterlichen Studien, XX1, 390-478. Scritti in Onore di Lionello Venturi, 1, 223ff, made an inconclusive
21 A. Petzold 1990, ‘Colour notes in English Romanesque manu- attempt to use the glass designs as a basis for constructing a painted
scripts’, British Library Journal, 16/1, 20. oeuvre. On Ghiberti’s Trecento background, espec. in glass and
22 Stirnemann (op. cit. n. 19 above) 964. goldsmith’s work, Krautheimer, op. cit., 54, 61-7; for his metal-
23 Ibid. 965, n. 14. work, L. Vayer 1962, ‘L’Imago Pietatis di Lorenzo Ghiberti’, Acta
24 Merrifield (op. cit. n. 12 above) I, 38; see also 37. Historiae Artium, VII, 45-51, T. Krautheimer-Hess 1964, ‘More
25 Petzold 1990, 21-3; M. Bateson (ed.), Records of the Borough of Ghibertiana’, Art Bulletin, XLVI, 311-20, A. Parronchi 1980, ‘La
Leicester, 1, 1899, 102 (1264). See also 84 (1259). croce d’argento dell’altare di San Giovanni’ in Lorenzo Ghiberti nel
26 Urso von Salerno, De Commixtionibus Elementoruam Libellus, cit. suo Tempo (Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, 1978), II,
Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 165. 195-218; G. Brunetti, ‘Ghiberti orafo’, ibid. 223-44, F. Gandolfo
27 Alexander (op. cit. n. 9 above) 24, fig. 35. On the history of 1982, ‘Firenze 1429: Adamo e le gemme’, Storia dell’ Arte, 45, 133-51.
palette arrangements, Gage (op. cit) ch. 10. z As has been done by e.g. O. Morisani in his edition of L.
28 Alexander (op. cit. n. 9 above) 17, fig. 25. Ghiberti, I Commentari, 1947, x, xvii. Krautheimer (op. cit. n. 1
29 British Library Royal 6E.VI, f. 329r. See L. F. Sandler 1996, above) 306-14, although he recognized that the text as we have it is
Omne Bonum: a fourteenth-century encyclopedia of universal knowledge. ‘by and large a hodge podge of reading notes gathered from ancient
British Library MSS Royal 6E. VI-6E. VII. and medieval writers’. K. Bloom 1969, ‘Lorenzo Ghiberti’s space-
30 British Library Royal 6E.VI, f. 331vff. My reading differs relief: method and theory’, Art Bulletin, LI, 164ff, has dealt with
somewhat from the list given in Alexander (op. cit. n. 9 above), 160, the treatise more sympathetically, while still regarding it as “some
n. 49. measure of Ghiberti’s failure as a theorist’ (167). But see now the
31 L. F. Sandler 1989, ‘Notes for the Illuminator: the case of the monumental edition of Klaus Bergdolt (1988), Der Dritte Kommentar
Omne Bonum’, Art Bulletin, 71, 551-64. Sandler shows (557, 559-60) Lorenzo Ghibertis: Naturwissenschaften und Medezin in der Kunsttheorie
that these later illuminators must have consulted the text to amplify der Fruhrenaissance, 18-19, XXxviii-xxxix, on the incomplete form of
their instructions. the MS.
32 M. Seymour (ed.) 1975, On the Properties of Things: John Trevisa’s 3 G. Ten Doesschate 1940, De Derde Commentaar van Lorenzo Ghib-
Translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus De Proprietatibus Rerum, M1, ch. erti in Verbaun met de Middeleeuesche Optick, 5; and the concordance
XI, 1285. of translated passages on 8-9, amplified and revised in Bergdolt
33 Ch. XII, 1285; ch. XV, 1287. (op. cit. n. 2 above, 570-3).
34 Merrifield (op. cit. n. 12 above) 34. 4 G. F. Vescovini has drawn attention to Ghiberti’s dissatisfaction
35 Seymour (op. cit. n. 32 above) chs XVII, XVIII, 1289; ch. XXV, with the translations available to him, and has shown how closely
1293. For siricum, Brunello (op. cit. n. 11 above) 235-6. dependent he was on the r4th-century Italian version of Alhazen
36 Seymour (op. cit. n. 32 above) ch. XVII, 1288. For kermes, (now Vatican MS 4595), at the same time as he modified it to suit
below p. III. his own purposes (‘Il problema delle fonti ottiche medievali del
37 Even the most rigorously argued and comprehensive of contem- Commentario Terzo di Lorenzo Ghiberti’ in Lorenzo Ghiberti nel suo
porary colour-systems, in Roger Bacon’s Liber de Sensu et Sensato, Tempo, cit. n. 1 above, II, 352, 354 n. 16, 366). Substantial extracts
probably written in the late 1240s, is difficult to make coherent: from this MS were first published by E. Narducci 1871, “Nota
see C. Parkhurst, ‘Roger Bacon on color: sources, theories and intorno a una traduzione Italiana fatta nel secolo decimoquarto del
influence’ in K. L. Selig and E. Sears (eds) 1990, The Verbal and the trattato di ottica del Alhazen’, Bulletino di Bibliografia di Storia delle
Visual: Essays in Honor of W. S. Heckscher, 151-201, espec. table on Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche, 1V, 1-40. Vescovini, like Bergdolt (op.
194-6. See also Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 165-6, which differs cit. n. 2 above), is chiefly concerned with Ghiberti’s physiology.
somewhat from Parkhurst in its conclusions. 5 Ghiberti’s more than superficial study of his sources has been
38 ‘Viridis enim color vel niger prebent solamina radiis oculorum. stressed by A. Castiglioni 1921, ‘Il trattato dell’Ottica di Lorenzo

287
NOTES'TO THE TEXT

Ghiberti’, Rivista di Storia Critica delle Scienze Medicale e Naturali, 1V, Ghiberti. His window in colour in Marchini (op. cit. n. 1 above)
62, although he has not taken the analysis of the contents very far. fig.54. Both Gaddi and Uccello are cited as pictori in the documents,
E. Panofsky 1955 noted that Ghiberti’s concept of proportionality, whereas Ghiberti is called sculptor (magister intagli).
24 Bergdolt (op. cit. n. 2 above) 178.
while drawing on Alhazen, altered Alhazen’s emphasis completely
25 The Opera di Prospettiva, which exists only in an early 16th-
(Meaning in the Visual Arts, 89-90 n.). For a discussion of Ghiberti’s
century MS (Florence Riccardiana 2110), but was attributed to
choice of sources, A. Parronchi, Studi su la Dolce Prospettiva, 1964,
3 18fF; cf. also 383f. f Alberti by A. Bonucci (Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti, IV, 1847),
6 Commentari, ed. Morisani (op. cit. n. 2 above), 41f.
includes a number of remarks on the persistence of vision and on
light as at once the condition and destruction of vision (ed. cit. 104,
7 L.B. Alberti, Della Pittura, ed. Mallé, 1950, $s.
8 Bergdolt (op. cit. n. 2 above) 6. 132) which reinforce the more recent attribution to a Ghibertian
9 Commentari, ed. Morisani, 44.
milieu (G. Nicco Fasola 1942-3, ‘Lo svolgimento del pensiero
10 E.g. where Alhazen describes (Bk I, ch. i) the after-image ofa prospettico nei trattati da Euclide a Pero della Francesca’, Le Arti, V,
brightly-lit white object viewed for some unspecified time, Ghiberti 66). Parronchi has republished this MS with an attribution, based
gives precisely ‘un terzo d’ora’. Bergdolt (14-16) follows Vescovini chiefly on language, to Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (Studi..., cit. n. 5
1965 (‘Contributo per la storia della fortuna di Alhazen in Italia: il above), 299.
volgarizzamento del MS Vat. 4595 e il “Commentario Terzo” del 26 As has been suggested, for example, Kris, loc. cit. (n. 12 above).
Ghiberti’, Rinascimento, ser. 2, V, 32) in pointing out that this Italian For Niccoli’s real concerns, Krautheimer (op. cit. n. 1 above) 301 f;
version specified ‘un ora’, which must have seemed a good deal too E. H. Gombrich, ‘From the revival ofletters to the reform of the
long to Ghiberti. Vescovini, in Lorenzo Ghiberti nel suo Tempo (cit. n. arts: Niccolé Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi’, Essays in the History
1 above, 369-73), cites parallel passages on the effect of light on ofArt presented to Rudolph Wittkower, 1967, espec. 78-81; P. Castelli
vision which also show Ghiberti’s freedom with his source. in the exhibition catalogue, Materia e Ragionamenti, Florence 1978,
11 Ghiberti’s version (Bergdolt, 22) may be roughly translated: 534-7.
27 Vespasiano da Bisticci, Renaissance Princes, Popes and Prelates, ed.
if the viewer looks at a polished body with carvings in low relief Gilmore 1963, 402; cf. 399 on the chalcedony.
on its surface, and if there be various colours in these carvings, as
28 J. von Schlosser 1910, ‘Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwiirdigkeiten’,
there are in cha [lcedonies], which are composed of several Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentral-Kommission, I-IV, 134.
colours, and if the viewer is in a moderately illuminated place 29 Ambrogio Traversari, Latinae Epistolae..., ed. Cannetus and
facing the light or some strongly-lit wall which reflects some
Mehus 1759 (repr. 1968), II, cols 411f; Krautheimer (op. cit. n. 1
light into his eyes...
above) 301. For Ghiberti and Traversari, Castelli (op. cit. n. 26
Bergdolt (23, n. 5) makes rather heavy weather of this passage and above) $31-4.
does not notice that, unlike Alhazen, Ghiberti is concerned with 30 Traversari’s letter has been usefully reprinted in M. Baxandall
parti-coloured stones. I have discussed another passage in Ghiberti’s 1971, Giotto and the Orators, 152-4, and on Traversari’s humanist
account oflooking at sculpture in Colour and Culture, 1993, 120. vocabulary, 13-14. In the shorter account of the Basilica Ursiana in
12 Bergdolt (32-6). This chalcedony passed from the Niccoli col- his book of travels (Hodeopoericon, 1681, 49) Traversari applied the
lection through that of Pope Paul II to the Medici, whose 1492 mirror image to that building rather than to S. Vitale. For a recon-
inventory described it as ‘in transparent intaglio with no foil’ (in struction ofthe basilica and illustrations of some surviving capitals in
chavo trasparente sanza fondo: E. Miintz, Les Collections des Medicis au the Museo Archivescovile at Ravenna, G. Bovini 1964, Storia e
XV Siécle, 1888, 69). As well as the version from the Medici collec- Architettura degli Edifici Paleocristiani di Culto di Ravenna, 101-25.
tion (pls 38, 39) there are many 1sth-century copies and variants 31 On the aesthetic oflight, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, ch. 3.
(E. Kris 1929, Meister und Meisterwerke der Steinschneidekunst in der 32 For Niccoli’s approval, Traversari to Niccoli, July 1433 in Latinae
Italienischen Renaissance, I, 2of, II, pl. s). Epistolae (cit. n. 25 above), col. 414; for Pope Nicholas V’s view that
13 B. Cellini, ‘Del’ Oreficeria’ in Opere, ed. Maier 1968, 625. ‘he understood it better in his simple text than in the others with
14 On this relationship,J. R. Johnson 1964, The Radiance ofChartres, the numerous comments and notes they contained’, Vespasiano da
57-66; R. Silva 1996, ‘Il colore dell’ inganno: gemme, perle, ambra e Bisticci (op. cit. n. 27 above) so. For the earlier translations, M. de
corallo secondo un manoscritto del XIII secolo’ in Il Colore nel Gandillac (ed.) 1943, Oeuvres Completes du Pseudo-Denys |’Aréopagite,
Medioevo: Arte, Simbolo, Tecnica, 27-39. 12f.
15 Except by G. Poggi 1909, Il Duomo di Firenze, XCI n. 2, and 33 Traversari began his translations in 1431 and had completed the
E. Giusto 1911, Le Vetrate di S. Francesco in Assisi, who suggested that task by 1437 (A. Dini-Traversari, Ambrogio Traversari e i suoi Tempi,
he was the glass-painter Antonio di Giomeo da Leccio, recorded n.d. 135 ff).
in Pisa in 1386-7 and 1407. 34 De Divinis Nominibus, ch. IV, lect. v. A useful English trans. and
16 See Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 119. S. Pezzella (ed.) 1976, Il commentary (based on the Latin of Johannes Saracenus) by A.
Trattato di Antonio da Pisa sulla Fabbricazione delle Vetrate Artistiche, Coomaraswamy, ‘Medieval Aesthetic: I. Dionysius the Pseudo-
24. Antonio shows how close the glass-painter still was to the Areopagite and Ulrich of Strasburg’, Art Bulletin, XVII, 1935, 3 1ff.
jeweler in his short section (49) on the best gemstones and crystals 35 For Suger and Pseudo-Dionysius, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture,
for cutting glass. ch. 4.
17 Van Straelen (op. cit. n. 1 above) 21, 27. 36 Krautheimer (op. cit. n. 1 above) 311f.
18 Pezzella (op. cit. n.16 above) 25; Marchini (op. cit. n. 1 above)
figs 42-6. For the date of St. Barnabas, Poggi (op. cit. n. 15 above)
docs 657, 677. 7 Color Colorado
19 Poggi (op. cit) doc. 622.
20 Pezzella (op. cit.) 25. C. Cennini, The Crafisman’s Handbook, trans. I See espec. the bibliography in M. Grossmann 1988, Colori e¢
Thompson 1933, 111f. H. Wentzel 1949, ‘“Glasmaler und Maler in Lessico: Studi sulla Struttura Semantica degli Aggettivi di Colore in
Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins fur Kunstwissenschaft, U1, Catalano, Castigliano, Italiano, Romeno, Latino e Ungherese; and L.
54f, notes many 1sth-century German examples of glass-painters Maffi, ‘A Bibliography of Color Categorization Research, 1970-
referred to in documents simply as ‘Maler’. 1990’ in B. Berlin and P, Kay, Basic Color Terms: their Universality and
21 Poggi (op. cit.) doc. 480. Evolution, 2nd ed. 1991.
22 Marchini (op. cit.) 248 n. 53. 2 See, for example, the discussion in B. A. C. Saunders andJ.van
23 Poggi (op. cit.) doc. 757. Cf.J.Pope-Hennessy 1950, Paolo Uccello, Brakel, ‘Re-evaluating Basic Color Terms’, Cultural Dynamics, 1, 3,
145; Krautheimer (op. cit. n. 1 above), 109, for Uccello’s time with 1988, 359-78.

288
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

3 Berlin and Kay, loc. cit., 6-7. In publications since 1969 Berlin
13 See D. Gonzales Holguin 1608, Vocabulario de la lengua general de
and Kay have modified some of these criteria: see, for example,
todo el Peru (repr. 1952), under allcca. In Vol. I, 11, of his dictionary,
B. Kay and C. K. McDaniel, ‘The linguistic significance of the Holguin also gives the term ficclla, which has survived as tijllaa
meaning of basic color terms’, Language, 54, 1978, 610-46. (‘bi-coloured’) in modern Quechua (J. Lara, Diccionario Qheshwa-
4 For azul, see R. M. Duncan 1968, “Adjetivos de color en el Castellano — Castellano-Qheshwa, 1971). For chequerboard designs in
Espanol medieval’, Anuario de Estudios medievales, V, 463, 466; also textiles see the Inca tunic in Munich (Levenson, loc. cit. n. 7 above),
the revisions in idem 1975, ‘Color words in medieval Spanish’, no. 449, and another at Dumbarton Oaks, no. 451. There was also a
Studies in Honor of L. A, Kasten, 62. For gris, a term for fur, i Quechua term for ‘chequerboard’ itself: golganpata (‘hill of terraces
Corominas andJ.A. Pascual, Diccionario Critico Etimologico Castellano with storehouses’), and the design seems to have had royal or mili-
e Hispanico, 1980- . The origin of anaranjado remains obscure: tary connotations.
whether, like so many medieval ‘colour’ terms (e.g. purpura, escar- 14 Hernan Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. and trans. A. Pagden -
lata) it referred primarily to a type of cloth, or whether it took its 1986, 104. It is notable that colours and dyes formed an jmportant
name from a fruit (English: orange) is still uncertain: see the discus- sector of the goods sold at the market of Coyocan ¢. 1550, in Mexico
sion of Naranje in J. Alfau de Solalinde 1969, Nomenclatura de los in the 1540s and 1550s, and at Tlaxcala from the mid-1540s to the
Tejidos Espaniles del Siglo XIII, 135-7. mid-1560s (J. Lockhart 1992, The Nahuas after the Conquest: a Social
5 Berln and Kay, loc. cit., 7. Daniéle Dehouve has found rather more and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, 16th through 18th
evidence of the influence of bilingualism in modern Nahuatl: see centuries, 187). It is equally striking that a document of 1610 records
‘Nombrar los colores en Nahuatl (Siglos XVI-XX)’, to be published the purchase specifically of caxtilla tlapalli, ‘Spanish colours’, as
in the papers of the 1994 El Color en el Arte Mexicano conference. opposed to local ones (ibid., 278). So far there have been few
6 Berlin and Kay, loc. cit., 12, 32. detailed studies of the pigments of Aztec painting, or indeed ofthat
7 See the Mixtec mask in Rome in J. A. Levenson (ed.) 1991, Circa of 16th-century Spain. The few tonalamtl which have been analysed
1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, no. 377; and the Aztec Tlaltoc vase technically have revealed the use of some nine hues, some of them
(c. 1470) from the Museo de Sitio del Templo Mayor in Mexico mixtures (K. Nowotny 1961, Codices Becker I/II, Introduction, 23;
City: ibid. no. 368. idem 1968, Codex Cospi: Calendario Messicano 4093, 14-16). The
8 Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, Florentine Codex: General History analysis of the painted sculpture at the Mayan site of Palenque has
ofthe Things of New Spain, ed. and trans. C. E. Dibble and A. J. O. yielded around a dozen nuances (E. Robertson 1983-91, The Sculp-
Anderson 1961, Bk X, ch. 16, 60. This passage is not in Sahagiin’s ture of Palenque, Appendices). See also L. Schele, ‘Color on Classic
own Spanish translation. Chalchiuhnamac relates to chalchiuitl, ‘emerald’ , Architecture and Monumental Sculpture of the Southern Maya
but, according to A. de Molina, Vocabulario en Lengua Castellana y Lowlands’ in E. H. Boone (ed.) 1986, Painted Architecture and Poly-
Mexicana, y Mexicana y Castellana, Mexico 1571 (repr. 1970), in the chrome Monumental Sculpture in Mesoamerica, 32-4. In the Iberian
form ofchalchiuhiximatqui (‘knowledge ofstones’) it has the conno- peninsula ofthe early 17th century around twenty painters’ colours
tation of any stone. It is notable that the earliest known reference have been listed: Z. Veliz 1986, Artists’ Techniques in Golden Age
to the colour of the turquoise in Europe, in the mid-13th-century Spain, 3, 26.
lapidary of Albertus Magnus, it is described as blavus (blue): Albertus 15 Sahagun (loc. cit. n. 8 above) 1961, Bk X, ch. 21, 77.
Magnus, The Book ofMinerals, trans. D. Wyckoff 1967, 123. See also 16 Ibid. 1952, Bk III, ch. 3, 14: chichiltic (chili-red); coztic (golden
A. Pagliaro, ‘Il nome della turchese’, Archivio glottologico italiano, 39, yellow); tlaztaleolaltic (flesh-pink); camopaltic (violet); xoxoctic (green);
1954, 142-65. Pagliaro’s 16th-century edition of Albertus Magnus, matlaltic (blue); quilpaltic (verdigris); viztecoltic (whitish, sometimes
interestingly, reads blavus as flavus (yellow). The Nahuatl term for interpreted as ‘orange’); camiltic (dark-brown); movitic coioichcatl
obsidian in this passage in Sahagtn is maztlalitzli, which is related to (coyote-coloured). For the Spanish version, Fray Bernardino de
the term for ‘fine blue’ and also ‘dark green’, matlalin. The more Sahagun, Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva Espana, ed. A. M.
usual term for blue is fexorli. See also Sahagun’s Bk XI, ch. 8, 1963, Garibay K. 1956 Mexico, I, 279: colorado, encarnado, amarillo, morado,
222-4, on the many green stones. blanquecino, verde, azul, prieto, pardo, naranjado, leonado. Note that the
9 Itzac (white object, from ‘salt’); yapalli (black); chichiltic (red object, Spanish has only one green, where the Nahuatl has two.
from ‘chili-pepper’); quilpalli (blue or green or ‘verdigris’); cuztic 17 Fora well-documented overview, F. Brunello 1968, L’Arte della
(yellow, gold); texotli (blue); quauhpachtli (brown); camopalli (purple); Tintura nella Storia dell’ Umanita, 77-87.
tlaztaleualli (Aesh-pink); xuchipalli (orange); nextic (grey, from ‘ashes’). 18 F. Boas, Primitive Art, 1955, 46-52.
These terms are taken from Molina (loc. cit. n. 8 above). For 19 L. N. O’Neale 1933, ‘A Peruvian multicolored patchwork’,
Sahagtin’s use of this source, R. J. Campbell and M. L. Clayton, American Anthropologist, New series 35, 86-94. The hues include
‘Bernardino de Sahagtin’s contribution to the lexicon of Classical blue, green-blue and turquoise. The textile is in the collection of the
Nahuatl’ in J. J. Klor de Alva, H. B. Nicholson, E. Q. Keber (eds) Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum ofAnthropology, Berkeley, CA.
1988, The Work of Bernardino de Sahagin, 297. For a general study of 20 C. A. Romero (ed.) 1923, ‘Razon y Forma en Theoria de los
some aspects of this colour-vocabulary,J.H. and K. C. Hill, ‘A note Tintes Reales de Quito...’ (1703) in Inca, I, 455-74. The Araucan
on Uto-Aztecan color terminologies’, Anthropological Linguistics, 12, Indians of Central Chile have used more than twenty vegetable
1970, 235. Molina and Sahagun list many other nuances besides dyestuffs, and describe their effects with some ten colour names
those given above. (Brunello, op. cit. n. 17 above, 84). See also the Chilean Aymara
10 Berlin and Kay (loc. cit. n.1 above) 13. colour-vocabulary for natural and dyed wools in V. Cereceda
11 For a discussion of the history of the idea of ‘primary colours’ 1978, ‘Sémiologie des tissus Andins: les Talegas d’Isluga’, Annales,
and their largely 19th-century interpretation as intrinsic to colour- Economiques, Sociales, Culturales 33, 1023.
science, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 34-6, 258-9. 21 For example the colour-terms used by horse-breeders (Gage
12 Georges Roque has drawn my attention to the reconstructed 1993, Colour and Culture, 79), and for the Andean region,J.A. Flores
headdress, largely of quetzal feathers, known as the Penacho de Ochoa 1978, ‘Classification et dénomination des camélides sud-
Moctezuma in the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. Américains’, Annales, ESC 33, toooff.
The colours veer from blue-green to green as the feathers move. 22 See, for example, C. B. Mervis and E. M. Roth, “The internal
The blue feathers at the base were originally from the Cotinga ama- structure of basic and non-basic color categories’, Language, $7,
bilis Gould, known to the Nahua as xiuhtototl (‘turquoise bird’): see TQ81, 384-405.
K. A. Nowotny 1960, Mexikanische Kostbarkeiten aus Kunstkammern 23 For the problems of symbolism, Gage, Colour and Culture, 1993,
der Renaissance im Museum fur Volkerkunde, Wien und in der National- chs:
24 cin for example, K. A. Nowotny 1961, Tlacuilolli: die Mexicanis-
bibliothek Wein, no. 3, 44. The much-damaged original is still in
Vienna. chen Bilderhandschriften: Stil und Inhalt, 254. Nowotny also (233) notes

289
NOTES TO THE TEXT

discrepancies in the colouring of the gods in the codices. Gil Riley; ed. 1902, 11, line 6. It is notable that in Spanish Renaissance usage
‘Color-direction symbolism. An example of Mexican-South Western the traditional stigmatization of Judas and the Jews in general for
their red hair (R. Mellinkoff 1983, ‘Judas’ Red Hair and the Jews’,
contacts’, America Indigena, 23, 1963, 49-60; K. A, Nowotny 1969/70,
Journal ofJewish Art, IX, 31-46) was extended to their ostensibly
‘Beitrage zur Geschichte des Weltbildes, Farben und Weltrichtun-
‘florid complexions: F. Gonzalez Olle, ‘Fisiognomia del color rojizo
gen’, Wiener Beitrige zur Kulturgeschichte und Linguistik, XVII, espec.
en la literatura espafiola del siglo de oro’, Revista de Literatura, 43,
215. E. T. Baird, ‘Naturalistic and symbolic color at Tula, Hidalgo’,
in Boone (op. cit. n. 14 above) 124-6; H. B. Nicholson, ‘Polychrome 1981, 153-63.
41 Sahagtin, Florentine Codex, Bk X1, ch. 11, 245. Dehouve, however,
on Aztec Sculpture’, ibid. 145-6. Baird notes the intimate relation-
proposes two independent etymologies for flapalli: ‘colouring’ and
ship between ‘direction’ and the appearance of the sun, rather than
with compass-points in the modern Western sense; but although the ‘red’, The Maya word chac, ‘red’, also had the connotation ‘great’
(Schele, loc. cit. n. 14 above, 37). It is striking, too, that the dye
colours of the sun are not standard (see above p. 23), this hardly
accounts for the wide divergences of view exposed by Riley. colorado, as described in the 1703 account ofdyeing at Quito (loc. cit.
25 Riley (loc. cit. n. 24 above) 54. n. 20 above, 469), a dye made not with cochineal but with Brasil
26 Inthe case of the rather pale colours of the world-diagram in the wood, should, like the ancient ‘purple’, have shown a particular
Codex Fejervary-Meyer in Liverpool (which may be unfinished), it lustre. For dyeing with Brasil wood, Brunello (loc. cit. n. 17 above)
is notable that Nowotny (op. cit. n. 24 above, 226 f) identifies south 360.
as green and west as blue, where the more recent commentary of 42 For the problems of identifying the colours of the rainbow,
M. Leon-Portilla has ‘bluish-green’ and ‘greenish-blue’ respectively Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, ch. 6.
(Levenson, loc. cit. n. 7 above), nos 356, 540. The codex has been
reproduced in facsimile: M. Leon-Portilla, Tonalamtl de los Pochetas:
Codice Fejervary-Meyer, 1985. 8 The Fool’s Paradise
27 Sahagtin 1963, Florentine Codex, Bk XI, ch. 8, 228.
28 Duncan 1968 (op. cit. n. 4 above), 463; 1975, 57- Rojo does not I C. Merrett in A. Neri 1662, The Art of Glass, 229.
appear in Antonio de Nebrija’s Spanish-Latin dictionary of 1516, 2 D.C. Lindberg, ‘Optics in sixteenth-century Italy’ in P. Galluzzi
although roxo (rutilus, flavus) does (A. de Nebrija, Vocabulario de Romance (ed.) 1983, Novita Celesti e Crisi del Sapere (Atti del Convegno
en Latin, 1516, ed. G. J.Macdonald 1973). Internazionale di Studi Galileiani), Annuali dell’Istituto e Museo di
29 N. M. Holmer, ‘Amerindian color semantics’, International Anthro- Storia della Scienza, Supp. 2, 148. See also T. Frangenberg 1991,
poligical and Linguistic Review, Il, 3-4, 1955-6, 162. For Antiquity, ‘Perspectivist Aristotelianism: three case studies of Cinquecento
Gage, Colour and Culture, 1993, 26-7. visual theory’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LIV,
30 For 16th-century Aymara, Ludovico Bertonio, Vocabulario de la 137-38.
Lengua Aymara, 1612 (repr. 1956). Holmer, op. cit. 163, has pointed 3 For the metaphysics of light, D. Bremer 1973, ‘Hinweise zum
out that chupica is also a soup of meat and red chili-peppers. griechischen Ursprung und zur europaischen Geschichte der Licht-
31 B. Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1653), Bk XIV, ch. xi, in metaphysik’, Archiv fiir Begriffsgeschichte, XVII; D. C. Lindberg 1986,
Obras, ed. F. Mateos 1956, II, 258. ‘The genesis of Kepler’s theory of light: light metaphysics from
32 Sahagin, ed. Garibay, III, 241. The Nahuatl version (Florentina Plotinus to Kepler’, Osiris, New series 2, 5-42.
Codex, Bk XI, ch. 11, 1963, 239) does not include this passage. For 4 C. B. Boyer 1959, The Rainbow, from Myth to Mathematics (repr.
the Spanish reception of cochineal, Brunello (loc. cit. n.17 above) 1970). For a more visually oriented discussion, Gage 1993, Colour
202-3. and Culture, ch. 6.
33 Brunello (loc. cit. n. 17 above) 85. In Peru the cinnabar face- 5 Roger Bacon, Opus Maius VI, u (ed. Bridges 1907, Il, 173);
paint called in Quechua ychima or llimpi was also used as tribute (G. Theodoric of Freiberg, De Iride et Radialibus Impressionibus, ed. 1914
Montell 1929, Dress and Ornament in Ancient Peru, 219 ft). J. Wiirschmidt (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mitte-
34 Alfau de Solalinde (loc. cit. n. 4 above) 95-9, and on grana, 112-13. lalters, XII), 48, 62 (hexagonal crystal), 49-so (spherical beryll). In
For the general history ofscarlet, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 80. his De Coloribus, which was probably written as an adjunct to De
35 A. Castro 1921, “Unos aranceles de aduana del siglo XIIT’, Revista Iride, Theodoric used the traditional term Iris for the hexagonal
de Filologia Espariola, VII, 348 f. stone (W. A. Wallace 1959, The Scientific Methodology of Theodoric of
36 Alonso Fernandez de Palencia; Universal Vocabulario en Latin y en Freiberg, 369).
Romance, 1490 (repr. 1967), f ccclxxxvii r, describes under purpurare 6 Pliny, Natural History, XXXVII, lii (Iris); Isidore of Seville,
the process of dying with purpura to achieve, at the third dipping, Etymologiae, XVI, xiii, 6; Marbode of Rennes, De Lapidibus, XLVII
‘perfecto color quermesi’. For the earlier interpretation of purpura (ed. Riddle 1977, 82); Arnoldus Saxo, De Virtute Universali, ch. VIU:
simply as a silk cloth of any colour, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, De Lapidibus, ed. V. Rose 1875, ‘Aristotelis de Lapidibus und
27. In what must be one of the earliest European references to the Arnoldus Saxo’, Zeitschrift
fiirdeutsches Altertum, 18, Neue Folge 6,
Mexican nochetzli, it is described as dyeing silk and wool purpuram 427, 439.
seu chermisinum (G. Cardano 1663, De Rerum Varietate, Bk 13, ch. 7 Solinus, Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium, XXXII, 22f ed. Mommsen,
Ixvi, in Opera, III, 266). and ed. 1958, 152; Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de Natura Rerum,
37 Pedro Pizarro (1571), Relacion del Descubrimento y conquista de los XIV, xli, ed. Boese 1973, 364; R. Bacon, Opus Maius, VI, ii (1907,
Reinos del Peru, ed. E. Morales 1944, 64. For a full account of this II, 173).
audience, J. Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, 2nd. ed. 1972, 8 Albertus Magnus, The Book of Minerals, Il, ii, ed. D. Wyckoff
33-6. Red was also an essential feature of other parts of the Inca’s 1967, OSf.
head-dress (Montell, op. cit. n. 33 above, 223). 9 Ibid. II, ii, 98f, I, ii, 30f.; Vannoccio Biringuccio, De la Pirotechnia,
38 For the adoption of Spanish colour-terms in Nahuatl docu- Venice 1540 (facs. ed. A. Carrugo 1977), IL, xiii, f 39v still calls
ments, F. Karttunen and J. Lockhart 1976, Nahuatl in the Middle crystal ‘di sustantia acquea’.
Years: Language Contact Phenomena in Texts of the Colonial Period 10 John Pecham and the Science of Optics: Perspectiva Communis, IIL, 20
(University of California Publications in Linguistics, 85) 27, 29, 67, ed. and trans. D. C. Lindberg 1970, 234-5.
71, 73- 11 Witelo, Optics, X, 83 in F. Risner, Opticae Thesaurus, 1572 (repr.
39 Molina (loc. cit. n. 8 above) I, 66v; Sahagin 1963, Florentine 1972 with intro. by D. C. Lindberg), 473-4: ‘Fit autem colorum
Codex, Bk XI, 224. distinctio a figura corporis: quoniam a qualibet alia crystallo vel
40 Duncan 1968 (loc. cit. n. 4 above) 467; see also Grossmann (loc. corpore pervio alterius figurae varii apparent, qui secundum situm
cit. n. 1 above) 170. For a Renaissance example of lips and finger- colorum iridis non sunt distincti.’ For the rainbow colours, ibid. xs
nails, Fernando de Rojas (1502), Tragicomedia de Calisto y Nemibea, 67, 400-1.

290
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

12 ‘Ibid. X, 84, 474. Boyer (op cit. n. 4 above) 106 suggests that Witelo
J. J. Verdonk 1966, Petrus Ramus en de Wiskunde, 72-3. Verdonk
might have known Bacon’s distinction between the colours of the
concludes that Ramée (Ramus) provided the general concept and
bow and those of the prismatic spectrum (Opus Maius, VI, vii; 1907, framework of the book, as well as the classical material, Reisner
II, 188).
the detailed references from Alhazen and Witelo (whose optical
13 Theodoric 1914 (op. cit. n. 5 above) II, 23, 106-7: ‘Magis autem works he edited, also with help from Ramée, and published in 1572)
apparet dictorum colorum intensio et claritas, si corpus diaphanum, and the editing itself. Ramée was murdered at Paris in the St
per quod fit radiatio, esset parvae quantitatis’. Bartholomew’s massacres of 1572; Reisner died in Germany in 1580
14 R. Grosseteste, De Iride seu de Iride et Speculo, ed. L. Bauer 1912 or 1581. For Ramée’s empiricism, R. Hooykaas 1958, Humanisme,
(Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, IX), 74-s. Science et Reforme: Pierre de la Ramée (1515-1572), 91-6.
See B. S. Eastwood, ‘Grosseteste’s ‘quantitative’ law of refraction:a 28 Opticae Libri Quattuor ex voto Petri Rami novissimo per Fridericum
chapter in the history of experimental science’, Journal of the History Risnerum eiusdem in mathematicis adjutorum olim conscripti, Kassel 1606,
ofIdeas, 28, 1967, 406. i 230-41.
15 P. Boehner has traced the formulation of ‘Ockham’s Razor’ to 29 M. Maylender 1929, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, IV, 26.
the late 13th-century Franciscan theologian Odo Rigaldus, but it is 30 V. A. Scarmilionius 1601, De Coloribus Libri Duo, Marburg, 3-4.
of course best known in Ockham and Duns Scotus after 1300 31 I have found Scarmigioni’s work mentioned only in a single
(William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, ed. P. Boehner 1957, place: Valerio Martini, Subtilitatum Proprietatum totius Substantiae
xx-xxi). See also K. Tachau 1988, Vision and Certitude in the Age of quae occultae, specificaeque sunt Patefacta, Venice 1638, I, iv, 7; xi, 20;
Ockham, 32, 132-3. For Fermat, A. I. Sabra 1967, Theories of Light XVi, 31; XVil, 32, 33, 34, 41; XXill, 43; XXvi, 46; xxxvi, 66; xxxvil,
from Descartes to Newton, ch. 5. ; 74-5, Venice 1638.
16 R. Grosseteste, Hexaemeron, ed. R. C. Dales and S. Gieben 1982, 32 Scarmilionius 1601, 112, 118-20, 166.
VIII, iv, 7, 222-3. Bacon did not link the Trinity with the rainbow 33 This medical context has been discussed briefly by A. Mugnaini
colours, which he believed to be five (Opus Maius, VI, xii; 1907, II, 1986, ‘Il colore, e il corpo nel panorama scientifico e quotidiano del
197). Cinquecento’, Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento,
17 Guillaume Digulleville, Le Pélerinage de l’Ame, ed. J. J. Sturzinger XII, 125-45.
1895, 349, II.10775, 10783; 350-1, II.10799-823. For ‘peacock stuffs’, 34 Phillipus Mocenicus 1581, Universales Institutiones ad’ Hominum
Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 60-1; R. G. Kuehni, ‘Cangianti: a Perfectionum, Venice, 307; Hieronymus Capivaccius 1603, Tractatus
fabric and a coloristic device in the art of the Renaissance’, Color de Urinis, in Opera Omnia, Frankfurt, 211; Giambattista della Porta
Research and Application, 21, 1996, 326-30. 1591, Phytognomica, Frankfurt, 147. All of these texts were used by
18 ‘Quoniam idem spatium numero et totum capit quilebet de Scarmiglioni.
angulis trianguli, ut patet ad sensum, et tamen veraciter sunt anguli 35 T. da C. Kaufmann 1988, The School of Prague: Painting at the
distincti quod est mirabile et creatura, nec alibi reperitur nisi in Court of Rudolph II, 165-6.
summa trinitate’ (Opus Maius, Pt IV; 1907, 219). 36 Scarmilionius 1601, 18, with a reference to an untraced Tractatus
19 See G. Stuhlfauth 1937, Das Dreieck: Die Geschichte eines Religidsen de Temperamentis.
Symbols. For the Manichean doctrine which, curiously, used the 37 Ibid. 16-18, 106ff.
image of sunlight passing through a triangular window, A. Adam 38 Ibid. 23f. It is conceivable that coerulea here means ‘yellow’ (cf.
1954, Texte zum Manichdismus, 64. For the Scutum Fidei, Gage 1993, above, n. 20, and Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 35).
Colour and Culture, 83. 39 Ibid. 21. Scarmiglioni did not share the Aristotelian view that
20 A. C. Crombie 1953, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experi- the rainbow colours could not be painted (112).
mental Science, 199-200 n. 4. Albertus also argued for the decisive effect 40 The classic account was Bacon’s De Multiplicatione Specierum: see
of the thickness of the crystal or glass through which the light had to D. C. Lindberg 1983, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical
pass: light red in the thinnest part, green in the thickest and yellow Edition with English Translation, Introduction and Notes of De Multipli-
(caeruleus) in the middle, although he does not appear to have had a catione Specierum and De Speculis Comburentibus, 3-7, and espec. liv-
clear idea ofthe role of refraction. lviii.
21 B. Boncompagni 1871, ‘Intorno a un manoscritto dell’ottica di 41 Scarmilionius (op. cit. n. 30 above) 19, 21.
Vitellione citato da Fra Luca Pacioli’, Bulletino di Bibliografia e di 42 Ibid. rit.
Storia delle Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche, 1V, 78-81. For Ghiberti, 43 Ibid. 25.
Bergdolt 1988 (cit. ch. 6 n. 2 above) xl, xli. For Leonardo, M. Kemp 44 Ibid. 105. The ‘lucid’ colours are candidus, flavus, puniceus, viridis
1981, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man, purpureus and coeruleus.
105, 330. 45 Ibid. 170. For Descartes on the identity of ‘real’ and ‘apparent’
22 H.S. Matsen 1974, Alessandro Achillini (1463-1572) and his doctrine colours, Sabra (op. cit. n. 15 above) 67n. For Newton on the iden-
of ‘Universals’ and ‘Transcendentals’: a Study in Renaissance Ockhamism. tity of ‘simple’ and ‘compound’ colours, A. E. Shapiro 1993, Fits,
23 J. Trutfetter 1517, Philosophie Naturalis Summa, Erfurt, IV, ii, ff Passions and Paroxysms, 10-11.
lvii verso-Ixi recto on colours; f lix recto on tonal contrast. His 46 Scarmilionius 1601 (op. cit. n. 30 above) 121; Mocenicus 1581
discussion does not seem to be related to the late scholastic treat- (op. cit. n. 34 above) 305.
ment of depth-perception through contrast studied by P. Marshall 47 Mocenicus (op. cit.) 316.
1981, ‘Two scholastic discussions of the perception of depth by 48 British Library Add. MS 6789, f 148. According to his Will of
shading’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XLIV, 170-5. 1621, Harriot apparently owned grinding and polishing apparatus
For earlier interest in Theodoric’s ideas, Wallace (op. cit. n. 5 above) (E. Rosen, ‘Harriot’s Science: the Intellectual Background’ in J. W.
249-54. Shirley (ed.) 1974, Thomas Harriot, Renaissance Scientist, 1).
24 Trutfetter (op. cit.) flix v. 49 S. Brugger-Koch 1985, “Venedig und Paris, die wichtigsten
25 Gregor Reisch 1504, Margarita Philosophica, Freiberg, [X, xxii on Zentren des hochmittelalterlichen Hartsteinschlifts’, Zeitschrift des
rainbows and haloes. For the complicated publishing history ofthis deutschen Vereins fiir Kunstwissenschaft, XX XIX, 18, 21-2. See also
encyclopaedia, R. von Sbrik, ‘Die Margarita Philosophica des Gregor H. R. Hahnloser and S. Brugger-Koch 1985, Corpus der Hartstein-
Reisch’, Akadademie der Wissenschaften in Wien (Matem.-Naturwiss. schliffe des 12-15 Jahrhunderts, nos 238, 243-4, 326 for multi-facetted
Klasse), Denkschriften, 104, 1941, 104-8. objects.
26 G. Cardano 1554, De Subtilitate Libri XXI, Leiden, 168; G. B. 50 Mocenicus 1581 (op. cit. n. 34 above) 313-14.
della Porta 1593, De Refractione Optices, Naples, espec.222f. 51 Biringuccio 1540 (op. cit n. 9 above) f 43v. For the chemistry
27 The precise role ofeach collaborator is uncertain, although they and optical quality of this glass, E. Turriére 1925, ‘Introduction a
seem to have joined forces about 1565. The fullest discussion is in Vhistoire de l’optique: le developpement de l'industrie verriére d’art

291
NOTES TO THE TEXT

depuis ’époque vénetienne jusqu’a la fondation des verreries been anticipated by Marcus Marci in 1648 (174); in one ofhis earli-
d’ optique’, Isis, VII, 77-104. ; f
est notes of 1666, Newton identified his prism as an equilateral one
52 Turriére (op. cit.) 99; K. Hettes 1963, ‘Venetian trends in, of 60 degrees (179).
Bohemian glassmaking in the 16th and 17th centuries’, Journal of
Glass Studies, V, 38-53; O. Drahtova, ‘Comments on Caspar
9 Newton and Painting
Lehmann, Central European glass and hardstone engraving’, ibid.
1981, XXIII, 34-45.
1 William Blake, Poetry and Prose, ed. G. Keynes 1956, 115. For
53 A.A. Mills, ‘Newton’s prisms and his experiments on the spec-
Blake and Newton, D. Ault 1974, Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response
trum’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 33, 1981, 13-36; and
espec. S. Schaffer, ‘Glass works: Newton’s prisms and the uses of to Newton, and Chapter 10 below.
2 M.H. Nicolson 1946, Newton demands the Muse; D. Greene 1953,
experiment’ in D. Gooding, T. Pinch, S. Schaffer 1989, The Uses of
Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, 67-104. . ‘Smart, Berkeley, the scientists and the poets’, Journal of the History of
54 For Harriot’s experiments, J. Lohne 1959, ‘Thomas Harriot Ideas, XIV, 327-52; R. T. Murdoch 1958, ‘Newton and the French
(1560-1621): the Tycho Brahe of optics’, Centaurus, VI, 119-21. muse’, ibid. XIX, 323-34; H. Guerlac, ‘An Augustan monument:
The first extensive precise experiments with the prism are thought the Opticks of Isaac Newton’ in P. Hughes and D. Willams 1971,
to have been those by Harriot’s friends Thomas Aylesbury and The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 131-63.
Walter Warner in 1627, but they remained unpublished (J. Lohne 3 G. Turnbull 1740, A Treatise on Ancient Painting, London, 133-4.
1963, ‘Zur Geschichte des Brechungsgesetzes’, Sudhoffs Archiv, 47, Turnbull’s notion oflandscape painting as a science was so close to
160f). Line’s experiments are described in [Kenelm Digby], Tivo Constable’s that the painter felt obliged to disclaim knowledge of
Treatises (1644), 2nd ed. London 1658, 329. For Line, C. Reilly, the book before he had delivered similar thoughts in his Royal Insti-
‘Francis Line, Peripatetic (1595-1675), Osiris, 14, 1962, 223-40. tution lectures of 1836 (C. R. Leslie (1843), Memoirs ofthe Life ofJohn
55 J. W. von Goethe 1791-2, Beitrage zur Optik (facs. 1964). Constable, ed.J.Mayne 1951, 323-4).
56 Arnoldus Saxo (op. cit. n. 6 above) 439. 4 A. Blunt 1966, The Paintings of Nicholas Poussin: A Critical Cata-
57 Albertus Magnus, Metereology II, iv, 19, in Crombie (op. cit. n. logue, no. 1. For Poussin’s access to the Zaccolini MSS see espec.
20 above), 199-200n. J. C. Bell 1988, ‘Cassiano dal Pozzo’s copy of the Zaccolini Manu-
58 Theodoric, De Iride, II, i, 1914, 60, on the colours in the bow scripts’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, LI, 102-25.
which, it has been argued (Wallace, op. cit. n. 5 above, 115ff.) were Recent cleaning of the self-portrait has shown that the lettering on
an intrinsic part of the contrarieties among the four elements (cf. the spine of the book was a later addition, based on the engraving by
De Iride, Il, ii, 1914, 81-3). For the isolation of red and blue in the Jean Pesne. For Zaccolini’s ideas,J.C. Bell 1993, “Zaccolini’s theory
prismatic experiments, De Iride, II, 23 (1914, 106). In his treatise on of color perspective’, Art Bulletin, LXXV, 91-112, espec. 91.
colour, however, Theodoric identified the four rainbow colours 5 B. Teyssédre, Roger de Piles et les Débats sur le Coloris au Siécle de
in the spectrum of the hexagonal stone (De Coloribus, V1; Wallace Louis XIV, 1957.
368f). For Della Porta’s rejection of Aristotle’s mixed yellow, which 6 Roger de Piles 1672, Dialogue surleColoris, Paris, 50-1.
was the result of his experiments with coloured glass filters, and of 7 C. Kutschera-Woborsky 1919, ‘Ein kunsttheoretisches Thesen-
the experience of painters (neque pictores unquam ex viridi & puniceo blatt Carlo Marattis und seine aesthetischen Anschauungen’, Mit-
flavum colorem efficiunt), De Refractione, 1593, 195. teilungen der Gesellschaft
fiirverveilfaltigende Kunst, 9-28.
59 G. Cardano 1663, De Gemmis et Coloribus (Opera, II, 558) on the 8 R. Boyle 1664, Experiments & Considerations touching Colours
“cristallina prismata’: purpura, amethystina, punicea, candida, coerulea; (repr. 1964), 219-21. For Boyle’s crucial influence on Newton, A.
but later (566) viridem, amethystinum, puniceum, purpureumque. Moceni- Shapiro 1993, Fits, Passions and Paroxysms: Physics, method, and
cus 1581 (n. 34 above) 314: hyacinthinus, viridis, rubeus; and 316 on Chemistry and Newton’s Theories of Colored Bodies and Fits of Easy
supernumerary colours. Scarmilionius 1601 (n. 30 above), 118-19: Reflection, 99-101.
yellow-red, green, yellow (caeruleus), red, blue-violet (amethystinus); 9 Isaac Newton, Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy, ed. 1. B.
but 121: red, green, blue (hyacinthinus /coeruleus): ‘Appellentur oculi: Cohen, 2nd ed. 1978, 47-59. See also R. S. Westfall 1962, ‘The
plane secundum nos pronunciabunt.’ development of Newton’s theory of color’, Isis, LIII, 339-58.
60 J. Lohne, Dictionary ofScientific Biography, V1, sv. “Harriot’, 125. 10 Isaac Newton, Correspondence, ed. H.W. Turnbull 1959, I, 112.
61 Della Porta 1593, 223-4; see also the red, white and blue ofthe 11 A. Shapiro 1980, “The evolving structure of Newton’s theory of
‘most pleasant and delightfull experiment we may perceive in a white light and color’, Isis, LXXI, 211-35, and Shapiro 1993 (op. cit.
three square Cristall prisme’, described by Henry Peacham 1634, n. 8 above) 98-9, 108-110 for Newton’s continuing interest in the
The Gentleman’s Exercise, 2nd ed. 139-40. complementarity of reflected and transmitted colours.
62 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 232, and Chapter 9 below. 12 Brook Taylor 1719, ‘A new theory for mixing of colours taken
63 The ‘prism or triangle of crystal’ illustrated in Descartes’ Les from Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks’ in New Principles of Linear Perspec-
Meteores (1637) is, however, a right-angled prism, using the thinnest tive, London, 67-70. Newton’s own interest in colour-mixing has
part by the smallest angle, of 30 or 40 degrees (R. Descartes, Discours been discussed by A. E. Shapiro 1994, ‘Artists’ colors and Newton’s
de la Methode, ed.J.R. Armogathe et al. 1987, 293-300). This prism, colors’, Isis, LXXXV, 600-30.
the bottom side of which was masked off, with only a small opening 13 J. Byam Shaw 1967, Paintings by Old Masters at Christ Church,
to admit the sun’s rays to a white paper placed at right-angles to it, Oxford, 21.
allowed Descartes to observe six hues: ‘all the colours of the 14 Ibid. 21-6; F. Rodari (ed.) 1996, L’Anatomie de la Couleur:
rainbow’: rouge, orange, jaune, verd, ‘bleu ou le violet’, which last was L’'Invention de L’Estampe en Couleurs. O. Lilien 1985, Jacob Christophe
also perhaps ‘couleur de pourpre’. Le Blon, 1667-1741: Inventor of Three- and Four-Colour Printing, 30ft.
64 J. Cardan, The Book of My Life, trans. J. Stoner 1930, ch. 44, Also review in Print Quarterly, II, 1986, 65-7.
espec. 216 on his simplification of algebra and his reduction of the 15 Coloritto (1725), facs. in Lilien, op cit., 6.
elements to three and the humours to two. Cardano’s father, Fazio, 16 L. Gerard-Marchant 1990, ‘Les indications chromatiques dans le
had been the editor of the first printed edition of Pecham’s Perspec- De Pictura et le Della Pittura d’Alberti’, Histoire de l’Art, XI, 23-36;
tive (Prospectiva communis d. Johannis archiepiscopi Cantariensis...ed. Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 118.
Facius Cardanus [Milan], Petrus de Cornero [?1482/3] Hain *9425), 17 G. Wildenstein 1960, ‘Jakob Christoffel Le Blon, ou le “secret
and although his work is mentioned by Gerolamo, he makes no ref- de Peindre en Gravant”’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, LVI, 92; J. M.
erence to the prism. Friedman 1978, Color Printing in England, 1486-1870, Yale Center for
65 J. Lohne 1968, ‘Experimentum Crucis’, Notes and Records of the British Art, no. 14.
Royal Society, 23, 169-99. Newton's manipulation of two prisms had 18 J. Gautier d’Agoty 1749, Chroagenesis, ou Generation des Couleurs,

292
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

contre le Systéme de Newton. The fullest account of Gautier d’Agoty’s 5 Charles de Tolnay 1945, Michelangelo, II, The Sistine Chapel, 89, has
version of Le Blon’s methods is in Rodari, op.cit. n. 14 above. characterized Abias, puzzlingly, as a ‘great and good king’.
19 H. W. Singer 1901, ‘Jacob Christoffel Le Blon’, Mitteilungen der 6 G. Schiff 1973, Johann Heinrich Fiissli (1741-1825). Text und Oeu-
Gesellschaft
ftir Vervielfaltigende Kunst, 5. G. Roque has emphasized vrekatalog, nos 471-8.
that Chevreul’s preference for the harmony of complementary 7 Cf. the characterization of E.Wind 1965, ‘Michelangelo’s Prophets
contrasts was confined to decorative art (G. Roque 1996, ‘Chevreul and Sybils’, Proceedings ofthe British Academy, li, 70f.
and Impressionism: a reappraisal’, Art Bulletin, LXX VIII, espec. 35). 8 This view seems to go back to G. Keynes 1956, The Pencil Draw-
20 F. Haskell, Patrons and Painters, 2nd ed. 1980, 319n. For Conti ings of William Blake, ii, at pl. 8; and has been restated by K. Raine
and Newton, P. Casini 1978, ‘Les débuts de Newtonianisme en 1968, Blake and Tradition, ii, 64, and A. T. Kostelanetz, ‘Blake’s 1795
Italie, 1700-1740’, Dix-Huitiéme Siecle, X, 88-90. Color Prints. An Interpretation’ in A. H. Rosenfeld (ed.) 1969, William
21 Newton, 1978, 192-3. This letter was not published until Thomas Blake, Essays forS. Foster Damon, 126. The watery appearance of some
Birch included it in The History of the Royal Society of London, 1757, of the plants is probably a result ofthe colour-printing process, and
Ill, 263. does not differ from similar features in the Nebuchadnezzar, Butlin
22 Shapiro 1993 (op. cit. n. 8 above) 91-2, 192-3. fig. 393. Blake’s convention for rendering figures under water, for
23 See Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 231-2. example in pl. 6 of Urizen, 1794 (facs. in G. Keynes 1965, William
24 T. Christensen 1993, Rameau and Musical Thought in the Enlight- Blake: Poet, Printer, Prophet, 73) is, pace Kostelanetz, quite unlike the
enment, 109-11, 142-50, 190-3. Newton.
25 L. B. Castel 1737, ‘J. C. Le Blon, Coloritto’, Mémoires de Trévoux, 9 ‘A cave, as we learn from Porphyry...is an apt symbol of the
August. material world: since it is agreeable at its first entrance on account
26 M. Franssen 1991, “The ocular harpsichord of Louis-Bertrand ofits first participation of form, but is involved in the deepest obscu-
Castel: the science and aesthetics of an 18th-century cause célebre’, rity to the intellectual eye, which endeavours to discern its dark
Tractrix, Yearbook
for the History of Science, Medicine, Technology and foundation. So that, like a cave, its exterior and superficial parts are
Mathematics, U1, 15-77. pleasant: but its interior parts are obscure, and its very bottom dark-
27 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 243-6. ness itself.’ (T. Taylor 1787, The Hymns of Orpheus, 131f, cit. G. M.
28 Shapiro 1993 (op. cit. n. 8 above) 52-5, 69. Harper 1961, The Neoplatonism of W. Blake, 157.)
29 R.W. Darwin (1786), ‘On the ocular spectra of light and colours’, 10 W. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Keynes 1956, 344. All
repr. in E. Darwin, Zoonomia, 1794-1796 (repr. 1974), I, 548. For the page reterences are to this edition.
history of ‘complementarity’ in the 19th century, G. Roque 1994, ‘Les 11 Repr. W. Blake, Vala, or the Four Zoas, ed. Bentley, 1963, pl.
Couleurs complémentaires: un nouveau paradigme’, Revue d’ Histoire 120; for the identification of the compasses,J.Beer, Blake’s Visionary
des Sciences, XLVIII, 405-33. Universe, 1969, 351.
30 See Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 172-3. 12 M. K. Nurmi, ‘Blake’s “Ancient of Days” and Motte’s Fron-
31 For Chevreul and Seurat, see Chapter 16 below. tispiece to Newton’s Principia’ in V. de Sola Pinto (ed.) 1957, The
32 For Kupka’s Discs, F. Kupka 1989, La Création dans les Arts Plas- Divine Vision, 205-16.
tiques, 156-7; M. Rowell, Frank Kupka: a Retrospective, New York, 13 The diagram to Bk 1, sect. i, Lemma ix (Sir I. Newton, Mathe-
Guggenheim Museum 1975, 67-76; V. Spate 1979, Orphism: the matical Principles ofNatural Philosophy, trans. Motte 1729, i, pl. ii), has
Evolution of Non-Figurative Painting in Paris, 1910-1914, 126-8, which something in common with Blake’s.
offers a different interpretation from that suggested here. 14 It is notable that other versions of the Newton design, e.g. the
33 For Goethe on Castel, Farbenlehre: Historischer Teil, ed. D. Kuhn pencil drawing in the Keynes collection (Butlin fig. 409) and the
(Leopoldina Ausgabe der Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, I, 6) 1957, ‘Newtonian Angel’ in an illustration to Young’s Night Thoughts
328-33; for Gautier d’Agoty, 335-42. (repr. de Sola Pinto, op. cit. n. 12 above, facing 200), show either no
mathematical figure or only a simple triangle. The chord or arc may
symbolize graphically the rainbow spectrum created by the prism.
10 Blake’s Newton 15 Raine (op. cit. n. 8 above, ii, 136f) has suggested that this cloth is
the ‘woof of Locke’, but in Jerusalem (i, 15) this is described specifi-
1 David Bindman, who has generously made many corrections and cally as black (¢. also The First Book of Urizen, v, 12). She has also
amplifications to the present study, proposes a date in the early 1770s claimed (i, 420f, n. 38; ii, 158f) Blake’s direct knowledge of Newton’s
for these copies. M. Butlin 1981, The Paintings and Drawings of Opticks, on the basis of some of his language and imagery.
William Blake, nos 167-70, suggests a date ofc.1785. Ghisi’s engrav- 16 Op. cit., i, 238, of: also 239, ‘there was no example ofany philo-
ings were re-issued as Pitture dipinte nella Volta della Capella Sistina sophical inquiry conducted with more circumspection [than the
nel Vaticano presso Carlo Losi l’anno 1773; and Benjamin Heath Opticks], or in which the aid of mathematics was applied with more
Malkin, in his memoir of 1806, has Blake buying and copying prints advantage or address’.
after Michelangelo from about 1767 (G. E. Bentley, Jr, 1969, Blake 17 Op. cit., ii, 669, 663£ M. K. Nurmi, ‘Negative Sources in Blake’
Records, 422). It is not known if the British Museum series is com- (Rosenfeld, op. cit. n. 8 above, 304), has stressed the purely optical
plete; if so, Blake’s choice of the Prophet Daniel, the youthful and connotations of ‘single vision’ for an 18th-century audience, but
energetic interpreter, Butlin fig. 205, was in the light of his subse- without quoting Priestley, who specifically uses the expression,
quent career a happy one. where Newton (Opticks, Bk III, pti, query 15) does not.
2 Butlin fig. 211. This free attitude has been held to be characteris 18 ‘Having opened the points of a pair of compases somewhat
tic of Blake throughout his career (J. Burke, “The Eidetic and the wider than the interval of his eyes, with his arm extended, he held
Borrowed Image: An Interpretation of Blake’s Theory and Practice the head orjoint in his hand, with the points outwards, and equidis-
of Art’, In Honour ofDaryl Lindsay: Essays and Studies, ed. Philipp and tant from his eyes, a little higher than the joint. Then fixing his eyes
Stewart 1964, espec. 120 f). on a remote object, lying in the line that bisected the intervals of
3 A. Blunt 1938, ‘Blake’s “Ancient of Days”’, Journal of the Warburg the points, he first perceived two pairs of compasses, each leg being
and Courtauld Institutes, IL, 61, no. 6; expanded in idem 1959, The Art doubled, with their inner legs crossing each other. But, by com-
of William Blake, 35, pl. 30 a.b. The musculature and lighting of pressing the legs with his hand, the two inner points came nearer to
Blake’s copy is closer to the Abias in the large engraving by Giorgio each other, and when they united, the two inner legs also entirely
Ghisi than to the detail version by Adamo; but the genius behind coincided, and bisected the angle under the outward ones; and
him is closer to the latter source. they appeared more vivid, thicker, and longer, so as to reach from
4 Lecture II, 1800, cit. E.C. Mason 1951, The Mind of Henry Fuseli, his hand to the remotest object in view, even in the horizen itself...’
247f. (ii, 670).

293
NOTES TO THE TEXT

19 139; for Priestley and Newton, 137. Priestley, History and Present 8 above, Pencil Drawings, pl. 34) is contested by David Bindman and
State, op. cit., 11, 7o8tf. v Martin Butlin. :
20 652; Priestley, op. cit., 1, 716f. 32 Raine (op. cit. n. 8 above) i, 412, n. 37 records a rainbow in a
21 Op. cit., 11, 5901. if
version of Blake’s Ugolino and his Sons which I have not been able
22 J. Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, cit. Raine (op. cit. n. 8 above) ul, to trace. It is not recorded in the list of Ugolino designs given by
A. S. Roe 1953, Blake’s Illustrations to Dante, 132 However, the
412, n. 37, where, and at i, 6, Raine has followed Yeats in supposing
connotations given to the Ugolino design in The Gates of Paradise
that Blake’s scheme is identical, which is clearly not the case.
23 The Works ofJames Barry, 1809, 1, 525f. would support the conclusions on the materialism of the rainbow
24 Dante’s accounts are in Purgatorio XXIX, 77-8 and Paradiso
XII, discussed above. The auras and sky-modulations in the Beatrice
10-12. Neither was published in English until after 1800; but Blake’s watercolours are not strictly rainbows, although Dante refers to
later associate William Hayley was familiar with the whole Divine them as such (Purgatorio, XXIX), and Blake’s colours are in the
Comedy by 1782 (H. A. Beers 1901, A History of English Romanticism Newtonian sequence. Blake’s view of Beatrice as Rahab, the fallen
in the Nineteenth Century, 95f). His first connection with Blake, state of Vala (Roe, op. cit., 164-71), again reinforces the interpreta-
through Flaxman, seems to date from 1784 (Bentley, op. cit. n. 1 tion set out in this study.
above, 27). Both Fuseli and Flaxman knew Dante in the original by
the 1770s; but Flaxman’s rainbow in his illustration prefacing the
Paradiso, 1793, has five, not seven colour-divisions. 11 Magilphs and Mysteries
25 (a) Title-page to Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 1793; colour
reproduction of A copy (British Museum, cf. Sir G. Keynes and 1 James Barry to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 17 May 1769 (The Works of
E. Wolf 1953, William Blake’s Illuminated Books, 28) with note by James Barry, 1, 1809, 106 (the context suggests the date should be
J. Middleton Murry, 1932; C copy (Lord Cunliffe: Keynes and Wolf 1768); cf. also Barry to Burke, 30 Sept. 1768, ibid. 120. The Italian
29), facs. by Trianon Press, 1959. Copy O (British Museum: Keynes quotation, ‘good drawing and muddy colouring’, is taken from the
and Wolf 32), which was printed and illuminated after 1815, has the life of Annibale Carracci in C. Malvasia (1678), Felsina Pittrice, 1841,
same order on the title-page, which may depend upon a common I, 2. For the 18th- and 19th-century English liking for the unstable
model, but the new motif
of the rainbow-nimbus round the kneel- oil medium ‘megilp’, L. Carlyle and A. Southall, ‘No short mechanic
ing figure on p. 3 has the colours in reverse. road to fame’ in R. Hamlyn 1993, Robert Vernon’s Gift, London,
(b) Watercolour illustrating Night viii of Young’s Night Thoughts, Tate Gallery, 23-5.
c. 1797: British Museum 1929-7-13-178, Butlin no. 330/335 (our 2 W. Sandby 1862, The History of the Royal Academy ofArts, I, 386-7.
pl. 48). 3 Field’s work has been examined in J. Gage 1989, George Field
(c) Death of the Virgin, 1803: Butlin no. $72. and his Circle, from Romanticism to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
(d) Death of
Joseph, 1803 (reproduced in colour in L. Binyon 1922, Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum.
The Drawings and Engravings of William Blake, 49). 4 N. Pevsner 1940, Academies ofArt, 168, 232. In 1770 the Incorpo-
26 (a) The Four and Twenty Elders, c. 1804-5: Tate Gallery, Butlin rated Society of Artists made a brief experiment with lectures on
no. §75. chemistry, apparently at the invitation of the chemist, Dr Awsiter,
(b) Noah's Sacrifice, 1805: Harvard University, Houghton Library, himself (Walpole Society, XXXII, 1946-8, 23).
repoduced in colour Butlin fig. 577. I am indebted to Miss Carol 5 For Reynolds’s secretiveness about techniques, J. Northcote,
D. Goodman for examining and reporting the colours ofthis water- Memorials of an Eighteenth-Century Painter, ed. S. Gwynn 1898, 49,
colour. 225; C. L. Eastlake 1847, Materials fora History of Oil Painting (repr.
(c) Jerusalem, pl. 14. Copy E, coloured after 1820, reproduced in 1960),
facs. by the Trianon Press, 1951. I, 539. James Ward was obliged to copy out Thomas Bardwell’s
(d) Beatrice on the Car: Matilda and Dante, c. 1825: British Museum, Treatise on Oil Painting for his own instruction (E. Fletcher, ed.,
Butlin no. 812/8, reproduced in colour Binyon (op. cit.) pl. 103. 1901, Conversations ofJames Northcote with James Ward, 100).
(e) Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car, c. 1825: Tate Gallery, 6 T. Bardwell 1756, The Practice of Painting. ..made Easy, 2.
Butlin no, 812/88, reproduced in colour fig. 973. 7 See, for example, Ozias Humphry’s notebooks of technical
27 The painting is now in the Chamberlayne-Macdonald Coll. gossip, British Library Add MS 22949-s50, and William Buchanan’s
See London, Kenwood, George Romney, 1961, no. 38. I was able to letter to Julius Caesar Ibbetson asking for his ‘gumption’ recipe and
study the spectrum colours at this exhibition. P. Fagot has also closing, ‘In writing I beg you will also communicate the grand
noticed this change in the Newtonian order of Blake’s rainbows (P. secret of varnish you mentioned... which shall be kept. .. with invi-
Fagot, “Temoignages synoptiques de William Blake et d’Emmanuel olate secrecy.’ (1801): R. M. Clay 1948, Julius Caesar Ibbetson, 85.
Swedenborg sur l’arc-en-ciel’ in P. Junod and M. Pastoureau 1904, 8 Reynolds’s curiosity is seen most strikingly in his dissection of
Couleur: regards croisés sur la couleur du Moyen Age au XX* Siecle, several Venetian pictures, ruining them (J. Northcote 1813, Memoirs
90, 93.) of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 227); for Barry, loc. cit.; for West,J.Galt 1820,
28 Bryant (op. cit) ii, 1775, 346ff, from Hesiod, Theogony, 65. Life and Studies... of Benjamin West, 1, 130-1, Il, 136-7; for Turner,
Bryant, however, in this chapter relates the etymology of Iris and A.J. Finberg 1909, Inventory of Tumer Drawings, 1, 180-91; for Haydon,
Eros, and is anxious to follow the traditional view in interpreting Diary, ed. Pope 1960, II, 430-4, and Autobiography, ed. Penrose
the bow as a symbol of Divine Love. 1927, I, 167. It does not seem possible to find this taste reflected in
29 Butlin no. 474, fig. 958. Venetian picture-prices during the period: G. Reitlinger 1961, The
30 e.g. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793: ‘Jesus Christ did not Economics ofTaste, 26 and tables.
wish to unite, but to separate them [the Prolific and the Devourer], 9 The Diary ofJoseph Farington, ed. K. Garlick, A. Macintyre, K. Cave,
as in the Parable of Sheep and goats...’, 188; Blake’s key text is 1978-84, 17 January 1797 (henceforth ‘Farington’).
Luke 12:51: ‘Suppose ye that | am come to give peace on the earth? 10 Farington, 11 January. W. T. Whitley 1928, Artists and their
I tell you, nay, but rather division.’ For a discussion of Blake’s treat- Friends in England, II, 209, gives the grandfather’s name as ‘Captain
ment of the Neo-Platonic idea of division and separation in the Morley’.
Material, see Harper (op. cit. n. 9 above) 228ff. Blunt’s interpreta- ir Ann Jemima Provis had exhibited miniatures at the Royal
tion of the compasses and set-square in terms of Redemption (art. Academy Exhibition of 1787. John Opie reported (Lectures on Paint-
cit. n. 3 above, 60) seems unlikely in view ofthese attributes of Jesus ing, 1809, 145) that Miss Provis was ‘scarce in her teens’ when she
in Blake’s mythology. offered the Secret, but his information is inaccurate in other respects,
31 Blunt, loc. cit. n. 3 above. Blake’s authorship of an apparently and cannot be credited.
related drawing formerly in the Lowinsky collection (Keynes, cit. n. 12 Farington, 13 February 1797. Dr Monro was the King’s physi-

294
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

cian, and Miss Provis may have been introduced to him through
40 Whitley, Artists (cit. n. 10 above) II, 213. M. B. Amory 1882,
her father, a member of the Royal Household (Whitley, loc. cit. n.
The Domestic and Artistic Life ofJohn Singleton Copley, 230 £ For
10 above). Solomon Williams’s British School exhibit, Gage, Field (cit. n. 3
13 Royal Academy, 5172, 25A, 4. I am indebted to the Royal above) 28, and for his vehicle, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 213.
Academy for permission to cite this MS. Two further versions of 41 Transactions, XXIV, 1806, 85-9.
the ‘Secret’ are known: one, in the collection of Dr Jon Whiteley,
42 1821 ed. 1. The identification of the ‘Lady’ of the pamphlet with
is entitled, The Venetian manner ofPainting particularly laid down, relat- Miss Cleaver depends on a pencilled note to the Courtauld Insti-
ing to the Practice. by A. J. P., and does not yet include the ‘Titian tute’s copy of the 2nd edition, on Constable’s reference to her as
Shade’, so it may be earlier than the RA version. The copy sold to daughter of the late Bishop of Bangor and on the Brighton address
J. F. Rigaud was summarized by his son in a memoir (1854) pub- he gives (R. B. Beckett, ed., 1964, Jolin Constable’s Correspondence, IL,
lished by W. Pressly 1984, Walpole Society, L, 99-103. 347-8).
14 Farington, 1 February 1797. 43 1821 ed. 9.
15 Royal Academy MS, n. p. (notes transcribed in Farington’s hand). 44 1815 ed. 39.
16 Ibid. 8. 45 Beckett (op. cit n. 42 above) 348 (30 June and 1 July). The version
17 Pressly (op. cit. n. 13 above) 100. Cf. the watercolour manuals of in C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life ofJohn Constable, ed. J. Mayne
Ibbetson (1794) andJ.Laporte (c. 1802) in P. Bicknell andJ.Munro 19§1, 126, omits much ofthis detail.
1988, Gilpin to Ruskin: Drawing Masters and their Manuals, 1800-1860, 46 1821 ed. 20.
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, nos 28, 30. 47 St James’s Chronicle in Whitley, Artists and their Friends in England
18 Farington, 18 January 1797, and notes in his hand in Royal (cit n. 10 above) 213
Academy MS (cit. n. 13 above).
19 Royal Academy MS 6, 9, and landscape section, 1.
20 Whitley (op. cit. n. 10 above) 213. Antwerp Blue appears to I2 Turner as a Colourist
have been a weaker version ofPrussian Blue, which had been devel-
oped around 1704-7 (R. D. Harley, Artists’ Pigments, c. 1600-1836, I Huysmans’ description reads in the French:
2nd ed. 1982, 70-5). “Turner... vous stupéfie, au premier abord. On se trouve en face
21 Farington, 11 January 1797; H. von Erffa and A. Staley 1986, dun brouillis absolu de rose et de terre de Sienne brilée, de bleu et
The Paintings of Benjamin West, no. 133. Other ‘Venetian Secret’ de blanc,.frottés avec un chiffon, tant6t en tournant en rond, tantdt
pictures are probably no. 22, Cicero discovering the Tomb ofArchimedes en filant en droite ligne ou en bifurquant en de longs zig-zags. On
(ll. in col. 120); no. $43: Raphael West and Benjamin WestJr. (ill. in dirait une estampe balayée avec de la mie de pain ou d’un amas de
col. 134), and possibly The Cruxifixion (no. 356). couleurs tendres étendues a l’eau dans une feuille de papier qu’on
22 Farington, 5, 6 January 1797. referme, puis qu’on rabote, 4 tour de bras, avec une brosse; cela
23 Farington, 5, 18 January. seme de jeux de nuances étonnantes, surtout si lon eparpille, avant
24 Farington, 18 January. de refermer la feuille, quelques points de blanc de gouache.
25 Farington, 13 February. A copy of the agreement is bound with ‘C’est cela, vu de trés prés, et, 4 distance, ... tout s’équilibre. Devant
the Royal Academy MS. les yeux dissuadés, surgit un merveilleux paysage, un site féerique,
26 Monthly Magazine in British Museum Print Room, Whitley Papers, un fleuve irradié coulant sous un soleil dont les rayons s’irisent. Un
XIII, 1608. pale firmament fuit a perte de vue, se noie dans un horizon de nacre,
27 Whitley, Artists and their Friends (loc. cit. n. 10 above). se revérbére et marche dans une eau qui chatoie, comme savon-
28 Farington, 3, 9 March 1797; W. Sandby, Thomas and Paul Sandby, neuse, avec la couleur du spectre coloré des bulles. Ou, dans quel
1892, 91-3. The MS of the poem is now in the Pierpont Morgan pays, dans quel Eldorado, dans quel Eden, flambent ces folie de
Library, New York. clarté, ces torrents de jour réfractés par des nuages laiteux, tachés de
29 Farington, 21 May 1797. Field’s comment on Grandi is in a note rouge feu et sillés de violet, tels que des fonds précieux d’opale? Et
to his copy ofC. L. Eastlake’s Materials, cit. 78, now 1n the Canadian ces sites sont réels pourtant; ce sont des paysages d’automne, des bois
Conservation Institute. I owe a transcript ofthese notes to the kind- rouillés, des eaux courantes, des futaies qui se déchevélent, mais ce
ness of Dr Leslie Carlyle. sont aussi des paysages volatilises, des aubes de plein ciel; ce sont les
30 Transactions of the Society of Arts, XVI, 1798, 279-99. It is clear fetes célestes et fluviales d’une nature sublimée, décortiquée, rendue
from the MS Minutes of the Committee of Polite Arts, 22 Nov. 1797, complétement fluide, par un grand poéte.’ Huysmans’ approach to
97, that Sheldrake’s communication was submitted in May 1797. colour in painting, at the same time sensual and technical, has been
A letter from Charles Smith (ibid.) assured the Society that the studied by J. Dupont, ‘La couleur dans (presque) tous ses états’, in
method, although advertised as ‘similar to that practised in the A. Guyaux, C. Heck, R. Kopp (eds) 1987, Huysmans: Une Esthétique
ancient Venetian School’, had nothing to do with the Provis process. de la Decadence, 155-66, esp. 164 for Turner. For the Louvre paint-
It did, however, stress dark absorbent grounds. I am grateful to Dr ing, M. Butlin and E. Joll, The Paintings ofJ.M. W. Turner, 2nd ed.
D. G. C. Allen for showing me the Minute Books. 1984, no. 509.
31 The Works of SirJoshua Reynolds, 1797, 1, xxxi-xxxiii n. 2 E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal, 12 Aug. 1891; R. Gimpel 1963,
32 The True Briton, 12 April. The True Briton was one of the many Journal d’un Collectionneur, 88.
newspapers supporting the Secret whose names decorate the wings 3 Turner en France, 1981, 395, no. 87 (TB CCLIX-109; W.965).
ofPegasus in Gillray’s satire. 4 Butlin and Joll (op. cit. n. 1 above) no. 390.
33. Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 30 April; Observer, 7 May (Whitley Papers, 5 G.P. Boyce, Diary, 20 June 1857 in Butlin and Joll, no, 291.
cit. n. 26 above, 1609). 6 W. Hall 1881, David Cox, Artist, 199. For the painting, Butlin and
34 Farington, 6 June, 17 July, 26 August 1797. Joll, no. 427. In the first (1977) edition oftheir catalogue, Butlin and
35 British Museum, Catalogue of Personal and Political Satires, ed. M. Joll did not refer to Cox’s story or to the vegetables.
D. George 1942, VII, no. 9085. 7 C. Tardieu 1873 in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, VII, 401; etching by
36 Farington, 9 March 1797; F. Owen and D. B. Brown 1988, G. Greux in R. Ménard 1875, Entretiens sur la Peinture, facing 156.
Collector ofGenius: a Life of Sir George Beaumont, 94-5, 101. 8 Cit. A. J. Finberg 1961, The Life ofJ.M. W. Turner R. A., 2nd
37 For Fuseli and the Secret, Farington, 29 April 1797; for Turner, ed., 200 and R. de la Sizeranne 1897, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1
Monthly MirrorinWhitley Papers (cit. n. 26 above) XII, 1513. March, 179.
38 The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1798, I, lvi-lvii n. 9 Cat. 160a, 167. For the colour-beginnings see E. Shanes 1997,
39 Courtauld Institute of Art, Newspaper Cuttings on the Fine Arts, Turner’s Watercolour Explorations, 1810-1842, Tate Gallery.
I, 182. 10 J. Gage 1969, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth, 206.

295
NOTES TO THE TEXT

ir Ibid., 210. ) 9 Runge to Perthes, 14 July 1810, cited from the original version in
Matile 1979 (op. cit. n. 2 above), 223.
12 Butlin and Joll (op. cit n. 1 above) nos 404-5. There isa hidden
were stolen in 1994 from 10 ‘575. Theory. How yellow pigment changes in the process of
irony in the fact that the paintings
being ground from morning to evening — not to be explained by the
a Goethe Exhibition in Frankfurt. The most extensive iconographi-
colour induced in the eye [i.e. by successive contrast], but by the
cal interpretation of these paintings is in G. Finley 1991, ‘Pigment
spreading out [Raum] [over the slab].’ From a letter from Daniel
into light: Turner and Goethe’s Theory of Colours’, European
Romantic Review 2, 44-60, although Finley is more inclined to credit
Runge to Goethe, 13 Oct. 1811 (Hinterlassene Schriften von Philipp
Otto Runge, II, 1841, 434; hereafter ‘HS’). The observation has only
Turner’s interest in symbolic and associative systems of colour than
the most tenuous connection with Goethe’s §575 in the ‘Didactic
Iam (46; cf. Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 204). For Turner’s inter-
pretation of Goethe’s ideas, Gage (op. cit. n. 10 above) ch. 1 Gage Part’ of the Farbenlehre.
Ir Goethe to Steffens, 9 Oct. 1809 (C. Schiiddekopf and O. Walzel
1984, ‘Turner’s annotated books: Goethe’s Theory of Colours’, Turner
Studies, IV, 34-52. 1898, Goethe und die Romantik, Schriften der Goethe- Gesellschaft, 13,
13 Butlin and Joll (op. cit n. 1 above) nos 47, 334. II, 286-7). Cf. also Goethe to Zelter, 15 Aug. 1806 ((Briefwechsel
14 Gage (op. cit. n. 10 above) 169. zwischen Goethe und Zelter, 1, ed. Riemer, 1833, 241) and Goethe to
15 G. Adams, Lectures on Natural and Experimental Philosophy, 2nd Runge, 18 Oct. 1809 (von Maltzahn, 99).
ed. 1799, 424f; C. O’Brien 1795, The British Manufacturer’s Compan- 12 Matile 1979, 140, following von Maltzahn (cit n. 4 above) 36,
ion and Calico Printer’s Assistant, “General Reflections’. Turner knew suggests that colour might have been a topic on this occasion, but
both books. Goethe’s words read: ‘This agreement from a living person, who
16 J. Mitford, Notebooks, XV, British Library Add. MS 32573, f. 349. knew nothing of me and my efforts until now, gives me a new desire
17 T.S. Cooper 1890, My Life, II, 2-3. to take them further...’. Goethe had been in touch with Runge
18 ‘R’ in L’Artiste, XII, 1836, repr. in G. Finley 1979, “Turner, the since 1801.
Apocalypse and History: the “Angel” and “Undine”’, Burlington 13. Von Maltzahn 83; Matile 1979, 224.
Magazine, CXX1, 696. 14 In his autobiography, Was ich Erlebte, IV, 1841, 101, Steffens
19 Gage (op. cit. n. 10 above) 168. recalled that he already knew the Beitrage zur Optik by the tme he
20 R.S. Owen 1894, The Life ofRichard Owen, 1, 263. met Goethe for the first time in 1799.
21 For Monet, I. C. Perry 1927, ‘Reminiscences of Claude Monet 15 HSI, 504.
from 1889-1909’, American Magazine of Art, XVIII, 120. In 1900 16 For Runge’s first idea of his colour-system as a Globus, to Goethe,
Monet claimed that ‘ninety percent of the theory of Impressionism Nov. 1807, von Maltzahn 71, and for the letter of 19 April 1808 in
isin The Elements ofDrawing‘ (W. Dewhurst 1911, “What is Impres- which he referred to his connection with Steffens, ‘which could not
sionism?’, Contemporary Review 99, 296). J. Ruskin (1857), The Ele- have happened at a better time for me’, ibid. 84-5.
ments of Drawing, 1971, 27n. For the translation by Cross and Signac, 17 See Matile 1977 (cit n. 2 above).
P. Signac, De Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme, ed. Francoise Cachin 18 See especially Steffens to Goethe, 3 Oct. 1809 (Schiiddekopf
1964, 116. and Walzel 1898, 284-6) and Runge to Goethe, 1 Feb. 1810 (von
Maltzahn 100).
19 H. Steffens, ‘Uber die Bedeutung der Farben in der Natur’ in
P. O. Runge 1810, Farben-Kugel, 35.
13 ‘Iwo Different Worlds’ — Runge, Goethe and 20 E.g. F. Schmid 1948, The Practice of Painting, 109. Schifter-
the Sphere of Colour miiller’s book has now been fully discussed by T. Lersch 1984, “Von
der Entomologie zur Kunst-theorie’, De Arte et Libris: Festschrift
1 See the brief modern bibliography Chapter 3, n. 96 above. For Erasmus, 301-16.
handbooks, see for exampleJ. Albers 1963, Interaction of Color; and 21 ‘Colours of two species which are so close on the circle that only
for philosophical studies,J.Westphal, Colour: a Philosophical Introduc- one other lies between them, are to be tolerated neither in a dress
tion, 2nd ed. 1991. nor in a painting... Blue and grass-green, olive and orange, red and
2 The fullest modern edition is the facsimile reprint with an violet are examples of such colours... When two other species lie
introduction by H. Matile, Mittenwald, 1977. Matile’s study, Die between them, they are usually adequately contrasted. Colours sep-
Farbenlehre Philipp Otto Runges, 2nd ed. 1979, is the fullest modern arated by three others are described by painters as “rather strident”,
analysis of the book; but there is also a very substantial discussion of and those separated by four are “strong and violent”, but, then,
Runge’s colour-ideas inJ.Traeger 1975, Philipp Otto Runge und sein many like the colourful...
But when, finally, the two colours are
Werk: Monographie und kritischer Katalog, 54-61 and passim. separated on each side by five other species, so that they lie opposite
3 J. W. von Goethe, Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft: Leopoldina each other on the circle, then their juxtaposition can generally
Ausgabe, ed. Matthaei, Troll, Wolf 1955, 1/4, 257. please those who are used to being touched only by very powerful
4 Goethe wrote to Runge on 18 Oct. 1809 that the Farben-Kugel objects... These last colours can be seen in the country on wooden
*...includes nothing that could not be appended to mine, which arm-chairs, spinning wheels and other household objects which
does not engage in one way or another with what I have intro- are painted en masse: experienced artists call such juxtapositions in
duced. Since I find my work supplemented here and there by yours, paintings poisonous and merely box-painting.’ (I. Schiffermiiller
we shall be able to start a lively correspondence.’ (Philipp Otto Runges 1771, Versuch eines Farbensystems, 15-17).
Briefwechsel mit Goethe, ed. von Maltzahn 1940, Schriften der Goethe- 22 Ibid., 12.
Gesellschaft, 51, 99; hereafter ‘von Maltzahn’). 23 J. G. Sulzer 1792, Allgemeine Theorie der Schénen Kunste, 214. Matile
5 Matile 1979 (cit. n. 2 above) 231 and n. 364 (hereafter ‘Matile’). 1979, 128 has noted Runge’s derivation of some of his early termi-
For Runge’s circle with red at the top, von Maltzahn 42; and for his nology from Sulzer, and the painter’s conception of allegory may
other painted circles, Traeger (op. cit. n. 2 above) nos 510-18. also owe something to him (see Sulzer, I, rooff).
6 Von Maltzahn (op. cit. n. 4 above) 49-51. 24 For Runge’s experiments with disc-mixture, see especially his
7 Traeger (op. cit. n. 2 above) 56, 172, 210, n.146, $01, 507. letter to Goethe of 19 April 1808 (von Maltzahn 82). Schiffermiiller’s
8 See the rainbow in the upper margin of Der Tag (Traeger no. experiments are described in Versuch (cit n. 21 above) 1-3 n. The
282b) and the diagram of ‘Monotone Wirkung’ in the Farben-Kugel problem had been taken up in Runge’s own day by M. A. F. Liidicke,
(Traeger 1975, 56 pl. 9), with its preparatory study in Hamburg who also divided his circle into twelve parts and experimented with
(Traeger no. 521). F. Burwick 1986, The Damnation of Newton, 49, harmonious juxtapositions, concluding, like Runge, that those
has reached similar conclusions about the relationship of Runge to colours which mix to a near-white (i.e. the complementaries) are
Newton’s theory. harmonious. Unlike Runge and Goethe, however, Liidicke inclined

296
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

towards the newer additive primary triad of red, green and violet,
14 Mood Indigo
which had been proposed in 1792 by Wiinsch (M. A. F. Liidicke
1800, ‘Beschreibung eines kleinen Schwungrades, die Verwandlung
I K. Schwitters, Das Literarische Werk, ed. F. Lach, I (1973), 150.
der Regenbogen-Farben in Weiss darzustellen...’, Gilberts Annalen The first German version (Die Blume Anna in Der Sturm, XII/2
der Physik, V, 272£€; cf. also his ‘Versuche tiber die Mischung prisma- March 1922, 176), in ibid. (I, 292) runs:
tischer Farben’, ibid. 1810, XXXIV, 8f). ss
25 Matile 1979, 234-7. For Goethe on colour-harmony to Meadials ... Preisfrage:
Meyer in 1798, Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft (cit. n. 3 above), 1/3, ed. 1. Anna Blume hat ein Vogel.
ie) . Anna Blume ist rot.
R. Matthaei 1951, 386.
26 Steffens (op. cit. n. 19 above) 35. 3. Welche Farbe hat der Vogel?
27 Moses Harris (?1776), The Natural System of Colours, facs, with Blau ist die Farbe seines gelben Haares.
an introduction by F. Birren, 1963. On 5, Harris states that the 20 Rot ist das Girren deines griinen Vogels.
gradations of each hue run from saturation at the circumference to Du schlichtes Madchen im Alltagskleid, du
near-white at the centre of his circle. For the date of the treatise, liebes griines Tier, ich liebe dir...
J. Gage 1969, Colour in Turner: Poetry and Truth, 222, n. 13. The 2 I have traced some of the French developments in Colour and
Swedish mathematician Sigfrid Forsius had designed an eccentric Culture, 1993, 191-201, 209-12, 222; for Goethe’s immediate sup-
colour-sphere along Aristotelian lines about 1611, but it remained porters, 202-3. It is conceivable that Schwitters, who was much con-
unpublished (Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 166). For a contempo- cerned with fundamentals, and composed a sound-poem entitled
rary criticism that Runge’s Kugel was really a two-dimensional Ur-Sonate (1922-32; Schwitters I, 1973, 214-42), was echoing Goethe’s
system, H. Nagele 1972 in Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts, Ur-Farben, yellow and blue, in his poem on Anna Blume/Blossom:
espec. 286. seeJ.W. von Goethe (1810), Farbenlehre, Didaktischer Teil (Didactic
28 Steffens to Goethe, 3 Oct. 1809 (Schtiddekopf
and Walzel 1808, Part), §7os.
284). 3 Novalis, Schrifien, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel 1960, I, 195-
29 Von Maltzahn 97. 7. Subsequent references in the text and notes are to this edition.
30 Only the beginning of this attack has been included in the 4 W. Wackenroder, ‘Die Farben’ in Phantasien uber die Kunst, ed.
reprint of the review in Traeger 1975, 501. See also Sartorius to L. Tieck 1799, repr. W. H. Wackenroder, Werke und Briefe, ed. F.
Goethe on the poor reception of the Farben-Kugel in Gottingen von der Leyen 1967, 195f.
(von Maltzahn, 115). 5 H. Steffens, ‘Uber die Bedeutung der Farben in der Natur’ in
31 Steffens (op. cit. n. 19 above) 59. P. O. Runge 1810, Farben-Kugel, repr. 1977, 59. C. K. Sprengel, Das
32 Steffens 47: *...although red and blue are seen as a lively opposi- entdeckte Geheimniss der Natur, ed. P. Knuth 1894, I: 9 (Myosotis): 89
tion, yellow is very far from being perceived as a mere difference (Iris).
between these two’. See also ibid. 48, 52. The concept seems to 6 J. W. von Goethe 1810, Farbenlehre, Didaktischer Teil (Didactic
have especially attracted Jens Baggesen in his critique of the Farben- Part), §626.
Kugel (Nagele, op. cit.n. 27 above, 289). 7 A. Leslie Willson, “The Blaue Blume: a new dimension’, Germanic
33 Runge to Daniel Runge, 7 Nov. 1802 (HS I, 17). By the end Review, 34 (1959), 57. Willson’s article reviews the earlier identifica-
of January 1803 Runge had come to see red as representative of tions of the blue flower. For a well-illustrated historical study of
morning and evening, and blue as characteristic of day (HSI, 32). In indigo, see the catalogue ofthe exhibition Sublime Indigo, Musée de
a slightly later scheme devised by the nature-philosopher Lorenz Marseille, 1987.
Oken, red stood for fire, love and the Father; blue for air, truth and 8 Novalis (op. cit. n. 3 above) HI, 7676.
belief and the Son; green for water, formative power, hope and the 9 Novalis refers to Werner’s system of classification in a note of
Holy Ghost — and yellow for Satan (L. Oken 1810, Physiophilosophy, 1799/1800 (op. cit. n. 3 above) II, 259. The Wernerian terminology
Engl. trans. 1847, 78, §378). was introduced in Von den dusserlichen Kennzeichen der Fossilien (1774;
34 Runge to Goethe, 19 April 1808 (von Maltzahn 80). This English trans. Dublin 1805), 36-72. Werner noted that flowers were
emphasis is close to Steffens’s interpretation by experiment: see his a good example of standard colours, and the majority of his blues,
conversation with Wilhelm Grimm in April 1809 (Briefwechsel zwis- the rarest colour among minerals, had pigment- or flower-names
chen Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit, ed. Grimm and (1805, 49ff). Novalis’s notes on colour from Werner are op. cit. IIT:
Hinrichs 1963, 86-7). A striking example of Runge’s increasing 147-56.
‘abstraction’ is the abandonment of the sea as a background to the 10 Novalis (op. cit. n. 3 above) III, 295.
Large Morning (Traeger nos 473, 478, 492, 497), which robs the 11 Goethe’s unpublished essay on coloured shadows had been
female figure of much of her identity as Venus (in the letter to composed in 1793 (Leopoldina Ausgabe der Schriften zur Naturwis-
Goethe cited above she is simply called ‘female form’ (weibliche senschaft, |Abt. 3, ed. R. Matthaei 1951, 66). A reference to Goethe’s
Gestalt), although the sea is still introduced at this stage). If this is optical work in a letter from Caroline and A. W. Schlegel to Novalis
indeed an important iconographical change, the lost oil study of of Feb. 1799, in Schriften, 1V (1975), 523, suggests that the young
a calm sea and sky (Traeger no. 494) is unlikely to have been writer was familiar with these researches.
connected with the last versions of Morning. U. Bichel has pointed 12 For Novalis’s scheme ofopposites, III, 150, and for another note
to the narrative significance of the colour of the sea in Runge’s on colour-polarity, III, 148.
fairy-tale The Fisherman and his Wife, 1805 (‘P. O. Runges Marchen 13 Jean-Paul Richter 1793, The Secret Society (Die unsichtbare Loge),
1982, “Von dem Fischer un syner Fru”, sein Aufbau und seine I. Theil, 20 Sektor, in Sdmtliche Werke, ed. E. Berend, I/2 (1927),
Farbssymbolik’, Niederdeutsches Jahrbuch 105, 983-5); and transparency 165-6. Novalis had read the novel by the end of 1795 (IV, 406).
was of course one of the keystones of his colour-theory (see espec. 14 Goethe (op. cit. n. 6 above), Didactic Part $781.
Traeger, op. cit n. 2 above, 440f and no. 435; H. Hohl in the exhibi- 15 Steffens (op. cit. n. 5 above) 48f. For Steffens and Runge,
tion catalogue Runge in seiner Zeit, Hamburg, Kunsthalle, 1977, Chapter 13 above.
220ff: S. Rehfus-Déchene 1982, Farbengebung und Farbenlehre in der 16 Goethe (op. cit. n. 3 above), Didactic Part §696.
deutschen Malerei um 1800, 1 16ff). 17 J. G. Herder (1800), Kalligone, ed. H. Begenau 1955, 32.
35 HS, U, 372. 18 F. H. Lehr 1924, Die Bliitezeit romantischer Bildkunst: Franz Pforr,
36 HS, I, 157-8. der meister des Lukasbundes, 275-7. See also the discussion in B. Rehfus-
Dechéne 1982, Farbengebung und Farbenlehre in der deutschen Maleret
um 1800, 108. For the red hair of the Jews, R. Mellinkoff 1983,
‘Judas’ Red Hair and the Jews’, Journal ofJewish Art, IX, 31-46. The

297
NOTES TO THE TEXT

For his colour-equivalents, A. Reinle andJ. Gantner 1962, Kunst-

relationship between hair and skin colour, body-build and tempera-
geschichte der Schweiz, 1, 217.
ment was still interesting to German scientists at this time: see D. G.
die chemischen und physiologischen Wirkungen 34 Voss (op. cit. n. 32 above) 59.
Landgrebe 1834, Ueber
35 F. Naumann 1906, ‘Experimentelle Malerei’, Hilfe, 12, in Werke,
des Lichtes, Marburg, 386f, which continued to categorize in the
traditional terms of the four humours: dark for choleric and melan- ed. H. Ladendorf, 1969, VI, 57.
36 J. Cohn 1894, ‘Experimentelle Untersuchungen liber die
cholic, fair for the sanguine and phlegmatic.
Gefuhlsbetonung der Farbhelligkeiten und ihrer Combinationen’,
19 Col. plate in K. Andrews 1964, The Nazarenes, pl. 2,
20 Andrews (op. cit.), pl. 3. The letter is published in A. Kuhn 1921, Philosophische Studien, X, 601.
37 F. Stefinescu-Goangi 1912, ‘Experimentelle Untersuchungen
Peter Cornelius und die geistigen Stromungen seiner Zeit, 98-99.
21 Goethe (op. cit. n. 6 above) §836. For Goethe and the Nazarenes, zur Gefuhlsbetonung der Farben’, Psychologische Studien, VII, 287.
C. Lenz 1977, ‘Goethe und die Nazarener’ in Frankfurt, Stadel, Die 38 Stefanescu-Goangi 309. For association as a secondary colour
Nazarener, 295-315. effect, ibid. and 332.
22 For the description, Lehr (op. cit. n. 18 above), 286-92. Lehr points 39 K. Scheffler, ‘Notizen tiber die Farbe’, Dekorative Kunst, IV, II
out the changes of mind. Heft (r901), 190. On chromotherapy and audition colorée, 187, Scheffler
23 Goethe (op. cit. n. 6 above) §840. saw Bocklin as the greatest modern colourist. Kandinsky mentioned
24 See now P. F. H. Lauxtermann, ‘Hegel and Schopenhauer as his article in a note to ch. VI of On the Spiritual in Art (1912). For his
partisans of Goethe’s Theory of Color’, Journal ofthe History of Ideas interest in chromotherapy, synaesthesia and the non-associative
effects of colour, ibid., ch. V. One of the most outspoken arguments
(1990), SI.
25 A. Cornill 1864, Johann David Passavant, 1, 56; O. Dammann for the idea that the affects of colour, even in chromotherapy, were
1930, ‘Goethe und C. F. Schlosser’, Jahrbuch der Goethe- Gesellschaft largely associative came from an art historian turned psychologist:
16, s4f. For Schlosser’s close contact with Overbeck and Pforr in R. Miiller-Freienfels 1907, ‘Zur Theorie der Geftihlstone der Far-
Rome, M. Howitt 1886, Friedrich Overbeck: Sein Leben und Schaffen, benempfindungen’, ZeitschriftfurPsychologie 46, 241-74.
I, repr. 1971, 189-90, 219, 228-9. 40 W. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. K. C. Lindsay and
26 W. Schadow, ‘Meine Gedanken iiber eine folgerichtige Ausbil- P. Vergo 1982, I, 181-2.
dung des Malers’, Berliner Kunstblatt, 1 (1828), 266, 270. 1am much 41 A. Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forns, 6th repr. 1961,
indebted to Robin Middleton and W. O’Malley for access to this Re
rare periodical. For Schadow’s career, K. Gallwitz (ed.) 1981, Die 42 See references gathered in Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 298 n.89.
Nazarener in Rom: ein deutschen Kiinstlerbund der Romantik, 220-6. For 43 Kandinsky (op. cit. n. 40 above), II, 747; see also W. Kandinsky
the unteachability of colour,J.Gage 1969, Colourin Turner: Poetry and and F. Mare (eds) 1979, Der Blaue Reiter (Dokumentarische Neuaus-
Truth,, 11-12, and for Goethe’s own reluctance to include colour in gabe von K. Lankheit), 263.
art-school teaching, Gage (op cit. n. 2 above) 202-3. 44 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 207. Marc may have been stimu-
27 J. K. Bahr, Der dynamische Kreis,1860, 6f, 228. Bahr, who had lated by Runge, although of course his gender scheme 1s opposite to
been in touch with the Nazarenes in Rome in the 1820s, and was Runge’s, since the Romantic artist had been included in the 1906
now teaching at the Dresden Academy, also published Vortrage tiber Deutsche Jahrhundert-Ausstellung in Berlin and his approach to colour,
Newton und Goethes Farbenlehre, 1863. He tells us that Karl Beck- at once mystical and scientific, had been celebrated in the catalogue
mann, Professor of Architecture and Perspective at the Berlin by Hugo von Tschudi, who became close to the Blue Rider group
Academy, was an enthusiastic follower of Goethe and that other in Munich, and to whom they dedicated the almanac. See Austellung
artists welcomed the most substantial new attempt to vindicate his deutscher Kunst aus der Zeit von 1775-1875, 1906, I, xix, repr. in H. von
ideas: F. Gravell, Goethe im Recht gegen Newton, 1857. Tschudi, Gesammelte Schriften zur neueren Kunst, ed. E. Schwedeler-
28 Schadow (op. cit. n. 26 above) 271. The abstractness of the Meyer 1912, 191.
pictorial surface around 1800 was noted by T. Hetzer and by W. 45 Stefanescu-Goangai (op. cit. n. 37 above) 320.
Schéne: W. Schéne, Uber das Licht in der Malerei, 3rd ed. 1979, 214 46 D. Schmidt 1964, Manifeste Manifeste, 1905-33, 1, 82.
n. 391. 47 For Brass, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 207. For Kirchner, see
29 M. Bunge 1990, Max Liebermann als Kunstler der Farbe, 52-5. espec. Groninger Museum, Goethe, Kirchner, Wiegers. De Invloed van
Impasto outdoor painting goes back of course in Germany to Georg Goethe’s Kleurenleer, 2nd printing 198s.
von Dillis, J. C. C. Dahl and Adolf Menzel among others in the 48 Goethe (op. cit. n. 6 above), Didactic Part §7s.
early part of the century. 49 F. Marc, letter of 14 February 1911 in W. Macke (ed.) 1964,
30 H. G. Miiller, “Kiinstlerfarbenmanufakturen im 19 Jahrhundert’ August Macke-Franz Marc Briefechsel. Marc’s painting, Liegender Hund
in H. Alth6fer (ed.) 1987, Das 19. Jahrhundert in der Restaurierung, im Schnee, now in the Stadelsches Kunsinstitut in Frankfurt, is in
231-2. For Bécklin, H. Kiihn, ‘Technische Studien zur Malerei K. Lankheit 1970, Franz Marc: Katalog der Werke, no. 133, our col.
Bocklins’ in R. Andrée 1977, Arnold Bocklin: Die Gemiilde, 106-27. pl. 86.
31 For simultaneous and complementary contrasts, Kiihn (op. cit. 50 S. Friedlander 1916, ‘Nochmals Polaritat’, Der Sturm, VI, 88:
n. 30 above) 108; H. Rebsamen, ‘Farben im Sinnbild: Arnold ‘Das Prisma und Goethes Farbenlehre’, Der Sturm (1917-18), VIL,
Bocklins “Heimkehr” 1887’ in M. Hering-Mitgau et al. (eds) 1980, 141-2. :
Von Farbe und Farben: Albert Knoepfli zum 70. Geburtstag, 360; H. 51 A. Segal, ‘Das Lichtproblem in der Malerei’ in A. Segal and N.
Althofer, ‘Arnold Bécklin — Maltechniker und Kolorist’ in Althéfer Braun (Berlin, 1925), Lichtprobleme der bildenden Kunst, n. p. The essay
(op. cit. n. 30 above) 196-7. W. von Bezold 1874, Die Farbenlehre im is dedicated to Friedlinder-Mynona, who also contributed an article,
Hinblick auf Kunst und Kunstgewerbe; American edition 1876, The ‘Goethes Farbenlehre und die moderne Malerei’ to the catalogue
Theory ofColor in its relation to Art and Art-Industry, espec. ch. IV. for Sammlung Gabrielson Gétheborg, 1922-3, which included two works
gold frames, Althéfer (op. cit.); Bezold 1876 (op. cit.) 43. Bécklin’s by Segal. For Segal see W. Herzogenrath and P. Lika (eds) 1987,
contact with Bezold is documented by E. Berger (ed.), Bocklins Arthur Segal, 1875-1944. Lika discusses the Prismatische Malerei of
Technik (1906), Sammlung Maltechnischer Schriften I, 103f. 1922/3 (40ff), and see espec. the recollections of Mordechai Ardon
32 For Stuck on the spatial effect of ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colours, of Segal’s interest in Goethe's theory (126). Segal’s account of his
J. Albers in H. Voss 1973, Franz von Stuck 1863-1928: Werkkatalog der own theory is reprinted on 276. Iowe my knowledge ofthis exhibi-
Gemalde mit einer Einfuhrung in seinen Symbolismus, 66, 89 n. 288. Cf. tion catalogue to the kindness of Prof. Norbert Lynton.
Bezold (op. cit. n. 31 above) 113, 197-8, 231. Albers gives a brief 52 Goethe (op. cit. n. 6 above), Didactic Part §5 17-23.
account of the ‘Bezold-effect’ in Interaction of Color, paperback ed. 53 W. Kandinsky, Cours du Bauhaus, ed. P. Sers 1984, 46-7, from
1979, XIII. Goethe §765-94; cf. also 65. These notes have still to be published in
33 For Bocklin and the Farbenlehre, Rebsamen, op. cit. n. 31 above. their original German and in an annotated edition. For Yellow-Red-

298
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

Blue, P. Derouet and J. Boissel 1984, Oeuvres de Vassily Kandinsky

13 H. Delaborde 1984, Notes et Pensées deJ.A. D. Ingres (extracted
(1866-1944), no. 351. See also C. V. Poling 1982, Kandinsky Unter-
from Ingres: Sa Vie, Ses Travaux, Sa Doctrine, 1870), 133. The paint-
richt am Bauhaus, 58f (English ed. 1987). ing in question is Oedipus and the Sphynx (1808, Louvre). See also
54 Kandinsky (op. cit. n. 53 above) 53, and for ‘Luna’, 6s. 152. On another occasion, however (137), Ingres appealed to Titian,
55 For Runge’s great reputation as a colour-theorist at the Bauhaus, ‘le plus grand coloriste de tous’ for the supreme importance of
J. Traeger 1975, Philipp Otto Runge und sein Werk, 195-7; H. Matile, haison between the various parts of a composition, which Ingres
Die Farbenlehre Philipp Otto Runges, 2nd ed. 1977, 28 1-99. For Ostwald himself achieved by a very exact sense of tone. The version of the
at the Bauhaus, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 259-62. quoted passage given in Boyer d’Agen 1909, Ingres d’Aprés une
Correspondance inédite, 942, includes some variations, and inserts a
nonsensical negative into the first sentence.
15 Chevreul between Classicism and Romanticism 14 Clerget (op. cit. n. 5 above) 29-36 etc.;J.C. Ziegler 1850, Etudes
Céramiques, 234; see also his Traité de la Couleur et de la Lumiere, 1852,
I J. Rewald, Post-Impressionism
from Van Gogh to Gauguin, revised 11-12. A discussion of Chevreul’s ideas had already appeared in
ed. 1978, 76. This account comes from the reminiscences of England: H. Twining 1849, The Philosophy ofPainting, 236-40.
Angrand, but on one occasion at least, Signac claimed that Seurat 15 Blanc 1876 (op. cit. n. 11 above) 68ff. For the triangle and notes
had accompanied him to see Chevreul. The evidence has been by Delacroix, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 173. Lee Johnson has
assessed in R. L. Herbert et al.1991, Seurat, 390, and seems to estab- kindly pointed out to me that they are on a loose sheet of paper and
lish firmly only a visit by Signac to the chemist’s demonstrator, probably date from 1834.
Emile David, in 1885. 16 Musée du Louvre, Cabinet de Dessins, MSS Anonymes I.d.80,
2 M. Schapiro in I. Meyerson (ed.) 1957, Problémes de la Couleur, nh, p.; notes from a lecture of 13 Jan. 1848.
288¢f. 17 For Delacroix’s decorative schemes, L. Johnson 1989, The Paint-
3 ‘Mémoire sur linfluence que deux couleurs peuvent avoir l’une ings of Eugene Delacroix: A Critical Catalogue, V (The Public Decora-
sur l'autre quand on les voit simultanément’, Mémoires de l’Académie tions and Their Sketches), nos 507-26, 540-61, 569-74, 578.
des Sciences, X1, 1828, 518. 18 Berthelot (op. cit. n. 7 above) 406, 426.
4 His son M.-H. Chevreul, in the posthumous edition of his book 19 F. Bracquemond (op. cit. n. 10 above) 241f.
(1889, u), states that the lecture-series began in 1830. 20 See now G. Roque 1997, Art et Science de la Couleur: Chevreul et
5 La Vie Artistique au Temps de Baudelaire, Paris 1942, 63, referring to les Peintres de Delacroix al’ Abstraction.
the Salon of 1842. The lectures were delivered three times a week.
Le Magasin Pittoresque, Il, 1834, 63, 90f, 98f. See also “Cours sur le
contraste des couleurs par M. Chevreul’, L’ Artiste, 3° ser., I, 1842, 16 The Technique of Seurat — A Reappraisal
148, 162; C. E. Clerget 1844, “Lettres sur la Théorie des Couleurs’,
Bulletin de ’ Ami des Arts, 11, 29-36, 54-62, 81-91, 113-21, 175-85, I ‘Lesprit et le corps de l'art’: Seurat to Fénéon, 24 June 1890 in
393-404. Clerget’s articles, which were specifically designed to F. Fenéon, Oeuvres plus que completes, ed. J. Halperin 1970, I, 510.
popularize Chevreul’s ideas for artists, arose from the lectures of 2 First reported by Seurat’s friend the painter Charles Angrand to
1840 and 1842. H. E. Cross in 1891 (R. Rey 1931, La renaissance du sentiment classique,
6 For Hersent, G. Reynes 1981, ‘Chevreul interviewé par Nadar, 95). Also see G. Coquiot 1924, Seurat, 41.
1886’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XCVII, 177 (visit in 1840); for 3 The reservations expressed by J. R. Hodkinson in his 1966 review
Daguerre, M.-E. Chevreul 1866, ‘Des Arts qui parlent aux yeux’, (Journal of the Optical Society ofAmerica, LVI, 262); by R. L. Herbert
Journal des Savants, 576. Daguerre was working on dioramas in Paris 1968, Neo-Impressionism, New York, 1off; by the ophthalmologist
between 1822 and 1839. R. A. Weale 1972, “The Tragedy of Pointillism’, Palette, XL, 16ff.;
7 Reynes 1981, 176; M. Berthelot 1904, ‘Notice historique sur and by Alan Lee 1987, “Seurat and Science’, Art History, X, 203-26
M. Chevreul’, Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences, XLVII, 426, on have apparently not been widely publicized. The limits of Seurat’s
Chevreul and the Vernet family. Reynes mentions a visit of 1844. scientism had already been discussed briefly by Meyer Schapiro in
Vernet may have come across Chevreul’s ideas through his friend I. Meyerson (ed.) 1957, Problémes de la Couleur, 248ff. The political
Lagrenée, who was a designer oftextiles for Aubusson and for facto- dimension of Neo-Impressionist technique has been explored by
ries in Lyon (A. Durande 1863, Joseph, Carle et Horace Vernet, 348). R. S. Roslak 1991, “The politics of aesthetic harmony: Neo-Impres-
8 Le Magasin Pittoresque (cit. n. 5 above) 99 already mentions the sionism, science and Anarchism’, Art Bulletin, LX-XIII, 381-90.
economic advantages attributed by Chevreul to contrasting uni- 4 W.1. Homer 1964, Seurat and the Science ofPainting, 163-4.
forms; see also Chevreul 1839, De la Loi du Contraste Simultané des 5 M. Schapiro 1958, ‘Seurat’, in Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries:
Couleurs, §§657-74. Both French editions (1839, 1889) included a Selected Papers, 1978, 10.
critical appendix to this chapter on the French army uniforms of 6 Letter to Signac, 2 July 1887, in H. Dorra and J. Rewald 1959,
1838, but this was not included in the English translations. Seurat, LX.
9 Chevreul in Mémoires de l’Académie des Sciences, XLI, 1879, 241f. 7 See Seurat’s letter of26Aug. 1888 to Signac, printed by J. Rewald
He was responding, on a visit to London in 1851 as amember ofthe in N. Broude (ed.) 1978, Seurat in Perspective, 105 (French original in
Jury of the Great Exhibition, to a question from the later English J. Rewald 1948, Seurat, 115).
translator of his book, Thomas Delf (‘Charles Martel’), about any 8 Broude 37 (French original in Fénéon, 35f, n. 1).
changes he might wantto make. There were to be no changes of 9 Broude 19 (French original in facs. in Rey, op. cit. n. 2 above,
principle, and Delf claimed in a popular handbook of 1855 that opp. 132).
Chevreul’s laws ‘do not admit of any question or dispute’ (Charles 10 Seurat writes to Fénéon that his ‘attention was drawn to Rood’
Martel 1855, The Principles of Colour in Painting, 1v). (‘Rood m’ayant été signalé’) by an ‘article’ by Philippe Gille in Le
to T. Silvestre (1856), Les Artistes Frangais, 1926, I, 70-1; Durande Figaro. Gille’s briefest of notices in Le Figaro, 26 Jan. 1881, 6, men-
(op. cit. n. 7 above) 333. See also a Vernet aphorism reported by tioned simply that Rood was ‘un éminent professer de physique’,
Félix Bracquemond: “Tous les ciels sont bleues; tous les arbres sont an American, and ‘en méme temps un peintre amateur distingué’.
verts, tous les pantalons sont rouges’ (F. Bracquemond 1885, Du Seurat’s reference is in marked distinction to his statement in the
Dessin et de la Couleur, 41). same letter that he had ‘read’ Charles Blanc. His several notes
11 C. Blanc 1867, Grammaire des Arts du Dessin, 613; Les Artistes de from Rood (see below) are no necessary indication that he read him
mon Temps, 2nd ed. 1876, 68ff. For Blanc’s idealized analysis of the systematically.
painting, L. Johnson 1963, Delacroix, 69. 11 Lee (op. cit. n. 3 above) citing O. Rood 1879, Modern Chromatics,
12 G. Sand, Impressions et Souvenirs, 2nd ed. 1896, 77ff. 212, 140fF.

299
NOTES TO THE TEXT

12 Broude 16. Charles Blanc’s ‘Eugéne Delacroix’ was published Vibert, who claimed to have been teaching at the Ecole for thirty
sff, o7ff, and reprinted years, introduced this palette chiefly as a key to harmony.
1864 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XVI,
1876 in his Les artistes de mon temps. | have used the later version here. 29 Rood 179-80.
30 Herbert in Sutter (op. cit. n.15 above) 26.
13 Blanc 23f. For van Gogh, see E. van Uitert 1966-7, ‘De toon van
over Kleur en zijn Hollandse 31 Letter to Fénéon, 1889, in C. de Hauke 1962, Seurat et son oeuvre,
Vincent van Gogh: Opvattingen
periode’, Simiolus, II, Lott. ; I, XX.
pl. Dy and of Le 32 Gustave Kahn 1891, in Broude 22.
14 See the detail of La Grande Jatte in Homer,
Chahut (1889-90) in A. Callen 1982, Techniques of the Impressionists, 33 Homer 171ff.
149. 34 Ibid. 294, 103.
: : 35. P. Signac, Journal, 22 Nov. 1894, inJ. Rewald (ed.) 1949, “Extraits
15 See espec. Figure and Trees on the Banks of the Seine, New York,
Marie Coll. (Dorra and Rewald 108) and Figure on the Bank of the du journal inédit de Paul Signac’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XXXVI,
Seine, with Sailing Boat, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, 108. It is an irony that from this date Signac’s brushstrokes become
Mellon-Bruce Coll. (Dorra and Rewald 109). increasingly larger, so that by the end of the 1890s fusion can no
16 C. Blanc 1867, Grammaire des arts du dessin, 608. Seurat told longer be in question.
Fénéon that he had read this book ‘at school’ (Broude 16). A. Piron 36 Ibid. 114 (29 Dec. 1894). Also see the letter of 1887 to Pissarro,
186s, Delacroix: Sa vie et ses oeuvres, 416ff. For Seurat’s notes from cited by D. Thompson 1985, Seurat, 112, and Signac to Seurat on
this source, see R. L. Herbert, ‘Seurat’s Theories’ in J. Sutter (ed.) the Grande Jatte in Brussels in 1887: Dorra and Rewald 1959, 381-s.
1970, The Neo-Impressionists, 24. 37 See, for example, the contours of the figures in the excellent
17 Rood 14 (but see 41 for ‘white sunlight’). The most detailed dis- detail in J. Russell 1965, Seurat, 164.
cussion of the colour of sunlight available to Seurat was probably 38 J. Carson Webster 1944, ‘The Techniques of Impressionism: A
that in Ernst Briicke’s Physiologie der Farben, 1866, 32, 46ff (French Reappraisal’, in Broude 99; Lee (op. cit. n. 3 above) 207-8.
trans. Des couleurs au point de vue physique, physiologique, artistique et 39 Signac 1894 (op. cit. n. 35 above). The fullest technical study of
industriel, 1866), but Briicke’s conclusion was that its yellowish or this painting is in J. Leighton and R. Thompson 1997, Seurat and the
reddish cast was essentially subjective, and could be disregarded by Bathers, espec. 76-83.
the painter. Seurat may have known the French translation of 40 The fullest study is still L. Schmeckebier 1932, ‘Die Erschein-
Briicke’s handbook, Principes scientifiques des beaux-arts, Paris, 1878, ungsweisen kleinflachiger Farben’, Archiv fiir die gesamte Psychologie,
since, as Homer 289 has suggested, a note by the painter of the Ixxxv, espec. 25-7. Schmeckebier (33) stresses the need for variable
name of Hermann von Helmholtz in the Signac Archive probably viewing distances in the case of ‘Impressionist’ pictures.
refers to that scientist’s essay, ‘On the relation ofoptics to painting’, 41 M. Schapiro in Meyerson (op. cit. n. 3 above) 25. But see now
which was published as an appendix to this edition of Briicke’s P. Smith 1990, ‘Seurat: the natural scientist?’, Apollo, CXXXIIL,
work. 381-5.
18 L. Nochlin (ed.) 1966, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874- 42 Fénéon 175.
1904 (Sources and Documents in the History ofArt), 127. 43 Nochlin (op. cit. n. 18 above) 116 (French original in De
19 Fénéon 1886 in Broude, 38. Hauke, op. cit. n. 30 above, I, xxiv, n. 27).
20 See R. L. Herbert et al. 1991, Georges Seurat 1859-1891, App. K, 44 Rey (op. cit. n. 2 above) 130f, 21.
390-1. 45 D.C. Rich 1969, Seurat and the Evolution of ‘La Grande Jatte’, 19.
21 Homer 4of; Fénéon, whose reading of Rood has been noticed, 46 Signac (op. cit. n. 24 above) 108.
made his complementaries only approximately those of this writer 47 Following Helmholtz (op. cit. n. 17 above), a number of French
in his review of 1886, but by the time ofhis article on Signac in Les theorists ofthe period argued that the relative feebleness ofthe artists’
hommes d’aujourd’hui in 1890, they had become much closer to materials meant that they must paint the effects of nature’s contrasts
Rood’s (Fénéon 174f). themselves: see G. Guéroult 1882, ‘Formes, couleurs, mouvements’,
22 R. L. Herbert 1981, ‘Parade du Cirque de Seurat et lésthetique Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XXV, and J.-G. Vibert (op. cit. n. 27 above)
scientifique de Charles Henry’, Revue de l'art, no. 50, 18, fig. 12. 47, n. 24. Seurat’s strategies in this instance serve to undermineJ. A.
Herbert ef al. (op. cit. n. 20 above), App. L, 392. Seurat’s circle Richardson’s interesting characterization of his style as aiming to
probably derives from his reading of Charles Henry, whose construct ‘a phenomenal image first hand, an image that would
summary of Chevreul in Introduction a une ésthetique scientifique, 1885, possess all the brilliance and variability of the world of light itself
is reprinted by Herbert 22. For Henry’s circle, see Homer 195. because it was constructed with regard to the laws governing the
23 It is worth noting that Blanc, Grammaire, 597ff, n. 1, character- visual mechanics of that world (J. A. Richardson 1971, Modern Art
ized his “Rose chromatique’ as ‘une image mnemonique indispens- and Scientific Thought, 67, a reference | owe to the kindness of Prof.
able’, and yet printed two slightly differing arrangements of it in his Herbert).
plate and text. 48 See, for example, the well-informed popularizations ofA.Guillemin
24 See Herbert (op. cit. n. 3 above) n. 80 (Dorra and Rewald 177). 1874, La lumieére et les couleurs (Petite encyclopaedie populaire des sciences
25 Broude 18. The statement, which Christophe used in his article et de leurs applications), espec. 258f& E. Véron 1878, L’esthétique,
on Seurat in Les hommes d’aujourd'hui, was reprinted by Signac in Paris (English ed. London 1879), chap. iv; Guéroult (op. cit. n. 47
De Delacroix au Néo-Impressionisme, ed. F. Cachin 1964, 107. Homer above), espec. 174ff, n. 43, which cite Helmholtz’s complementaries.
135 claimed that Seurat indeed used Rood’s complementaries in Guillemin’s book was in the library of Duranty (M. Marcussen
La Grande Jatte, but this seems to be a mistake, and, in any case, the 1979, ‘Duranty et les Impressionistes’, Hafnia, V1, 29), who also
well-known alteration of the pigments in this picture make a purely owned the French trans. of Briicke and Helmholtz; and Huysmans
optical analysis hazardous, to say the least. See I. Fiedler 1984, used Véron’s work in his critique ofImpressionism (O. Reutersvard
‘Materials used in Seurat’s La Grande Jatte, including color changes 1950, ‘The Violettomania of the Impressionists’, Journal of Aesthetics
and notes on the evolution ofthe artist’s palette’, American Institute and Art Criticism, IX, 108-9).
of Conservation, Preprints, May, 43-51; idem 1989, ‘A technical 49 Fenéon 72, 174; A. Thorold (ed.) 1980, Artists, Writers, Politics:
evaluation of La Grande Jatte’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Camille Pissarro and His Friends, 38, no. 94. Pissarro did have reserva-
XIV/2, 173-9, 244-5. tions about Fénéon’s account ofreflections and solar orange.
26 W. 1. Homer 1959, ‘Notes on Seurat’s Palette’ in Broude 1 16ff. 50 Fénéon, xv, 174, n. 1. Signac warned Fénéon not to take too
27 For Signac’s notes, see Homer 151f, n. 4; also see Callen (op. cit. much notice of Henry’s views, as he was too obsessed with comple-
n. 14 above) 134, 146. Seurat had fewer yellows, blues and greens mentary contrast, an obsession very likely to commend him to
than Signac, but more reds and oranges. Seurat.
28 J.-G. Vibert (1891), The Science of Painting, 8th ed. 1892, 35-6. 51 M.-E. Chevreul (1839), The Principles ofHarmony and Contrast of

300
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

Colours, trans. C. Martel, 3rd ed. 1860, 237. But for the restriction of 14 J. Christophe 1890, ‘Dubois-Pillet’, Les Hommes d’Aujourd’hui, 8,
this principle to painting in ‘flat tints’, see above Chapter 15, and no. 370, repr. in Bazalgette (op. cit. n. 14 above), 95f. For an English
G. Roque 1996, ‘Chevreul and Impressionism: a reappraisal’, Art translation of the whole passage, J. Rewald, Post-Impressionism from
Bulletin, LXXVIII, 35. Van Gogh to Gauguin, rev. ed. 1978, 109, 116. The remarks on the
52 Rood ch. xvi. application to painting are not in Rood.
53 For Seurat’s distortion of the record, see Thompson (op. cit. n. 15 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, 30 Nov. 1886, in J. Bailly-Herzberg
36 above) 97f. (ed.) 1986, Correspondence de Camille Pissarro, 11, 77.
16 G. Dulon and C. Duvivier 1991, Louis Hayet 1864-1940, Peintre et
Théoricien du Néo-Impressionisme, 61.
17 Seurat’s Silence 17 Ibid., 166-74.
18 Ibid., 62, 185, and also 148 for Hayet’s objection to Seurat’s
I For the music in Le Chahut, W. 1. Homer 1964, Seurat and the ‘system’.
Science of Painting, 296-7. 19 Ibid. 188-9. This autobiographical note was written in 1923,
2 P. Smith 1997, Seurat and the Avant-garde, 107-55. about the same time as Malevich was proposing a similar plan in
3 Seurat to Signac, 26 August 1888, in H. Dorra and R. Rewald Light and Colour: see the French edition, K. Malevich, La Lumiere et
1959, Seurat, LXV. See also M. Zimmerman 1991, Les Mondes de la Couleur, ed.J.Marcadé 1981, 87.
Seurat: Son oeuvre et le Débat artistique de son Temps, 213f. For a con- 20 Camille to Lucien Pissarro, 10 Jan. 1892 (Bailly-Herzberg, op.
trary view, that Seurat, ‘from all reports, talked obsessively about cit. n. 16 above, III, 1988, 185): A. Thorold (ed.) 1993, The Letters of
his artistic theories’, M. Ward, ‘The rhetoric of independence and Lucien to Camille Pissarro, 1883-1903, 276.
innovation’ in C. S. Moffett et al. 1986, The New Painting: Impres- 21 Pissarro to Fénéon, 21 Feb. 1889: J. U. Halperin, Félix Fénéon,
sionism 1874-1886, 436. These reports include those of Gustave Kahn Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siecle Paris, 1988, 105 (not in Bailly-
(N. Broude 1978, Seurat in Perspective, 21), Emile Verhaeren (ibid. Herzberg). See also Fénéon to Pissarro, 18 February 1889 (Bailly-
28, 30) and Charles Angrand (ibid. 35), who also says, however, that Herzberg II, 266), Pissarro to Fénéon, ?Oct. 1886 (BH II, 73),
Seurat “was usually silent and embarrassed’. Pissarro to Signac, April 1887 (BH I, 153-4).
4 See P. Smith 1992, ““Parbleu”: Pissarro and the political colour of 22 J.-G. Vibert (1891), La Science de la Peinture, 1902 (repr. 1981),
an original vision’, Art History, XV, 225. ch. IV and 80.
5 H. von Helmholtz 1852, ‘Ueber die Theorie der zuasammengeset- 23 G. Kahn 1891, ‘Seurat’, in Broude (op. cit. n. 3 above) 22.
zten Farben’, Poggendorffs Annalen der Physik und Chemie, LXXXVII, 24 R. L. Herbert 1962, Seurat’s Drawings. For Fantin, Gage 1993,
45-66; 1852-3, ‘Sur la Théorie des couleurs composées’, Cosmos, II, Colour and Culture, 185.
112-20. I am grateful to Carol Coe for alerting me to this article. 25 See G. Roque 1992, ‘Les Symbolistes et la Couleur’, Revue de
The French version may be by Jean-Bernard Léon Foucault, since it l’Art 96, 70-6.
adds a note that he was about to produce a ‘plus rationnel et plus 26 Seurat to Signac, 25 June 1886 in Dorra and Rewald (op. cit. n. 3
simple’ method of experiment, on which he had been working above) L-LI.
for several years. This was published as ‘Sur la recomposition des 27 Vibert (op. cit. n. 22 above) 72; Bracquemond (op. cit. n. 11
couleurs du spectre en teintes plates’ (ibid. 232-3). It was a method above) 55. Blanc’s Grammaire, 1867, 612 had spoken of Delacroix’s
which had first been taught by Pouillet at the Sorbonne in 1849. technique of optical mixture in The Women of Algiers as having
6 A. Laugel 1869, L’Optique et les Arts, 150; E. Véron (1878), Aes- produced ‘un troisiéme ton indéfinissable qu’on ne peut nommer
thetics, 1879, 229. Véron, however, pointed out that the scheme avec précision...’.
“does not furnish accurate information for painters’. 28 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 190, 206.
7 Laugel (op. cit.) 151-2. 29 “Even when applied in the same way, one and the same stimulus
8 E. Briicke 1878, Principles Scientifiques des Beaux-Arts. Essais et may be perceived as stronger or weaker by one subject or organ than
Fragments de Théorie... Suivis de L’Optique et la Peinture de H. by another, or by the same subject or organ at one time as stronger
Helmholtz, 7. For Henry and Leonardo,J. A. Argiielles 1972, Charles or weaker than at another. Conversely, stimuli of different magni-
Henry and the Formation ofaPsycho-Physical Aesthetic, 45, 78-9. tudes may be perceived as equally strong under certain circum-
9 Helmholtz in Briicke (op. cit.) 207, here quoted from the English stances.’ (G. T. Fechner (1860), Elements of Psychophysics trans. H. E.
version, ‘On the relation of optics to painting’, Popular Lectures on Adler 1966, 38).
Scientific Subjects, trans. E. Atkinson 1goo, II, 118. The lectures were 30 Seurat to Fénéon, 20 June 1890, in Broude (op. cit. n. 23 above)
originally published as ‘Optisches tiber Malerei’, Populdre wis- 16.
senschaftliche Vortrage, 1876.
10 Helmholtz (op. cit. n. 5 above) 207-9, 1900, II, 119-21. D.
Sutter 1880, ‘Les phenomenes de la vision’, L’Art, XX, 216. 18 Matisse’s Black Light
Ir See the version of Seurat’s Esthétique (1890) in Herbert et al.
1991, Seurat 1859-1891, 381. Homer has surveyed the evidence for 1 Verve, IV, 13, 1945. In Jeune Fille devant la Fenétre: Robe Blanche et
Seurat’s knowledge of Helmholtz without reaching a conclusion Ceinture Noire (1942) the scarlet lake, light ultramarine blue and
(op. cit. n. 1 above, 288-90). One channel may have been through cobalt violet are attributed to Lefranc, and the pot-plant in Michaella
Pissarro’s friend Bracquemond, who referred to the Young- (1943) was painted with ‘Vert comp. N° 2 Lefranc’. Matisse had
Helmholtz theory of the primaries somewhat slightingly in Du been using some ofLefranc’s materials at least since the early 1920s,
Dessin et de la Couleur, 1885, 245. Pissarro, however, did not include but at that time his colours were supplied largely by the Belgian firm
Helmholtz with Chevreul and Maxwell in the important letter on of Blockx (see C. Moreau-Vauthier 1923, Comment on peint aujour-
theory to Durand-Ruel in November 1886 (A. Thorold 1980, d’hui, 30, 84, and Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 222, 296 nn. $4,
Artists, Writers, Politics: Camille Pissarro and his Friends, Oxford, Ash- 83). The first scholar to draw attention to these ‘palettes’ was proba-
molean Museum, 2). bly Alfred Barr Jr, who reproduced that for Danseuse, Fond Noir,
12 O. Rood 1879, Modern Chromatics, 190-1 on Helmholtz’s pri- Fauteuil Rocaille, together with a black and white reproduction of the
maries, complementaries and colour-mixing. painting, in Matisse: His Art and his Public, 1951, 488.
13 Rood (op. cit) 113. Young’s work is discussed in P. D. Sherman, 2. See the long note on the painting of the red check tablecloth in
Colour Vision in the Nineteenth Century: The Young-Helmholtz-Maxwell Citrons et Saxifrages (1943), which uses the past tense: Verve, loc. cit.,
Theory, 1981. Dubois-Pillet owned a copy of Rood, which he was 49, col. ill. so.
3 H. Matisse, Ecrits et Propos sur l’Art, ed. D. Fourcade 1972, 197.
lending to Fénéon in Sept. 1887 (L. Bazalgette 1976, Dubois-Pillet, sa
Vie et son Oeuvre (1846-90), 107). Fourcade gives this text the title De la Couleur, but in Verve it was not

301
NOTES TO THE TEXT

directly associated with Matisse’s title-page, but was printed on 9- concerned to show that scientific hypotheses were no more com—
10, andJ. Flam, in his anthology of Matisse’s writings, gives it the pelling than poetic metaphors, argued that the second tendency of
more neutral title, Observations on Painting (J. D. Flam 1973, Matisse modern science was precisely the opposite, ‘towards diversity and
on Art, 101). : complication’, but that only the first made science possible: ‘the true
4 Matisse, op. cit. 202-3. Flam, op. cit 106-7, also points out that
and only aim is unity’ (177).
27 This account ofLe Bon’s work draws largely on M. J. Nye 1974,
these thoughts were recorded at the time of an exhibition, Le Noir
‘Gustave Le Bon’s Black Light: a study in physics and philosophy
est une Couleur, at the Maeght Gallery in December 1946. Matisse
told André Masson in the early 1930s that Renoir, who admired
in France in the turn of the century’, Historical Studies in the Physical
Matisse’s use of black in the first painting he showed the older Sciences, 1V, 163-95.
painter, had also demonstrated ‘par sa franchise et son honneté’ that 28 G. Le Bon (1907), The Evolution ofForces, trans. F. Legge 1908,
279. The whole of Bk IV of this work, which ran into at least three
black was a light as well as a colour (A. Masson 1974, ‘Conversations
avec Matisse’, Critique, XXX, 324, 394-5). I owe this reference to editions before 1918, is devoted to Black Light.
the kindness of Nicholas Watkins. 29 A. Dastre 1901, ‘Les nouvelles radiations: rayons cathodiques et
5 E. de Goncourt 1895, ‘Hokusai: les albums traitant de la peinture rayons rontgen’, Revue des Deux Mondes, LXXI, s* per. VI, 696. Le
et du dessin avec ses préfaces’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XXXVI (3° Bon was happy to quote this passage in his Evolution of Matter (1905),
per. XIV), 442. The translation here is based on A. Reinhardt 3rd. ed., trans. Legge 1907, 29.
(1967), ‘Black as Symbol and Concept’ in B, Rose (ed.) 1975, Art as 30 Le Bon (op. cit. n. 28 above) 202.
Art: the Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, 86. Hokusai’s book is the 31 Ibid. 284-s.
Yehon Saishiki Tsu (An Illustrated Book on the proper use of Colours), 32 Ibid. 290-291.
published in two volumes in 1848. 33 Flam (op. cit. n. 7 above) 392. The author, Xavier Pelletier,
6 Durand-Ruel had the Astruc between 1895 (or 1899) and c. 1908, seems to have been thinking of the “N-rays’ mooted in 1903-4 as
and the Breakfast between 1894 and 1898 (see Paris, Grand Palais/ emanating from animal and plant tissue, but the experiments were
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manet, 1832-1883, 1983, soon discredited (Nye, op. cit. n. 27 above, 180). For a detailed
nos 94, 109, for the fullest accounts of these paintings). Matisse will study of the ‘N-ray’ scandal, M. J. Nye 1980,’N-rays: an episode in
also have had the opportunity of studying the Breakfast at Bernheim- the history and psychology ofscience’, Historical Studies in the Physi-
Jeune’s Gallery in 1910. cal Sciences 11, 125-56, espec. 133. Carol Coe kindly directed me to
7 J. Flam 1986, Matisse: the Man and his Art, 1869-1918, 78. this article.
8 Flam (op. cit) 114. 34 Nye (op. cit. n. 27 above) 190-1.
9 Flam (op. cit) $1. 35 They include Reader on a Black Background, 1939 (Paris, Musée
10 For The Balcony, Manet, 1983, no. 115. National d’Art Moderne) and Dancer and Rocaille Armchair on a Black
11 Flam (op. cit) 394; I. Monod-Fontaine, ‘A Black Light: Matisse Background, (1942).
(1914-1918) in C. Turner and R. Benjamin (eds.) 1995, Matisse, 36 For the series of black chasubles,J.Cowart,J.Flam, D. Fourcade
Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery/ Canberra, National Gallery of 1977,J.H. Neff, Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-Outs, nos 148-55, espec.
Australia/ Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, 87. no. ISS.
12 Flam (op. cit) 394.
13 On this series, see espec. Monod-Fontaine 1995, 87-8.
14 J. Eldertield 1978, Matisse in the Collection of theMuseum ofModern 19 Colour as Language in Early Abstract Painting
Art, T12:
15 D. Giraudy 1971, ‘Correspondance Henri Matisse-Charles Camoin’, 1 ‘Reminiscences’ (1913) in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art,
Revue de l’Art, 12, 17-18. ed. Lindsay and Vergo 1982, I, 370.
16 See R. L. Herbert ef al. 1991, Georges Seurat, 1859-1891, New 2 C. Lévi-Strauss (1964), The Raw and the Cooked, trans. Weight-
York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, nos 69, 71, 146. Other Seurat man 1970, 19f, 25. E.H. Gombrich 1963, ‘The Vogue for Abstract
drawings of this type which may have been known to Matisse Art’, Meditations on a hobby-horse.
include The Housepainter (1883-4; Herbert no. 46), which belonged 3 S. Bann 1980, ‘Abstract Art — a Language?’ in London, Tate
to Pissarro, and Scaffolding (1886-7: Herbert no. 174), which belonged Gallery, Towards a New Art: Essays on the Background to Abstract Art,
to Signac. 1910-20, 144.
17 For example, Flam (op. cit.) 405. 4 A. Besant and C. W. Leadbeater (1901), Thought-Forms, Madras
18 Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 118; van Gogh to Bernard, June 1961, 20.
1888 in Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 1958, I, 490. 5 Kandinsky (op. cit. n. 1 above) 183.
19 I assume that this is the underlying rationale of Malevich’s 6 W. Wundt (1874), Grundztige der physiologischen Psychologie, sth
remark in 1920, ‘I consider white and black to be deduced from the ed. 1902, II, 145.
colour spectra’ (K. S. Malevich, Essays on Art, ed. T. Andersen 1969, 7 Kandinsky (op. cit. n. 1 above) 182; Wundt (op. cit.) 352 n. 1; G.
I, 126-7). T. Fechner (1877), Vorschule der Aesthetik, 1, 1898, 216.
20 N. Watkins 1984, Matisse, 139. 8 Levi-Strauss, loc. cit., n. 2.
21 Flam (op. cit.) 133 (1951). 9 See M. Foucault 1966, Les mots et les choses, ch. 1V. The fullest
22 Matisse (op. cit. n. 3 above), 94. account of the work of Schiftermiiller and Harris is now T. Lersch
23 Flam (op. cit.) 38. For Matisse’s ‘scientific’ bias in the Fauve 1984, ‘Von der Entomologie zur Kunsttheorie’ in De Arte et Libris:
period, 1904-5, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 211. Festschrift Erasmus, 30 1f.
24 Barr (op. cit. n. 1 above) 185; Flam (op. cit.) 21, 243-4, 388-9. 10 | am thinking especially of G. Field 1850, Rudiments of the
M. Antliff 1993, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian painter’s art; or a Granunar of Colouring; E. Guichard 1882, Grammar of
Avant-Garde, 198-9, has questioned Matisse’s direct knowledge of Colour.
Bergson before 1909. 1X Rood 1879, Modern Chromatics, 250; W. I. Homer, ‘Notes on
25 R. Escholier 1960, Matisse from the Life, 98. Poincaré does not Seurat’s Palette’ in N. Broude 1978, Seurat in Perspective, 116ff.
speak in so many words of the ‘destruction of Matter’ in Science and 12 V. Huszar 1917, ‘lets over die Farbenfibel van W. Ostwald’, De
Hypothesis, although the argument, so exciting to Matisse, is implicit Stijl, 1, 1134.
in several places, especially ch, X. Matisse was probably reporting his 13 E. A. Carmean Jr 1979, Mondrian: The Diamond Compositions,
discussion of the book with the librarian Galanis who, according to Washington, National Gallery of Art, 79-83. Rood (op. cit. n. 11
Matisse, had ‘found the origin of cubism’ in this text. above) 136, had found that spectral red could be matched in pig-
26 Poincaré (op. cit. n. 25 above) 1905, 173. Poincaré, who was ments by a glaze of carmine over vermilion.

302
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

14 For Mondrian, see espec. Composition XIII, 1920 (Bartos Coll.,

1992, The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West, 1910-1930,
Seuphor 457), reproduced in colour in Cologne, Galerie Gmurzyn- 196-240.
ska, Mondrian und De Stijl, 1979, 181. He does not, however, seem
32 The most impressively comprehensive programme for the
to use yellow and green in the same work and his yellows at this experimental study of colour in the Soviet State Art Workshops was
period are sometimes very greenish, For a fuller discussion of Mon- drawn up about 1924 by N. T. Fedorov, and has been published in
drian and green, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 258. an Italian translation: Casabella, n. 435, April 1978, sof. See also
15 See van Doesburg’s texts in J. Baljeu 1974, Theo van Doesburg, C. Lodder 1983, Russian Constructivism, 125 and n. 160.
espec. 160, 178. 33 I. Klyun (1919), ‘The Art of Colour’ in J. E. Bowlt (ed. and
16 B. van der Leck 1917, ‘De Plaats van het moderne schilderen en trans.) 1976, Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory and Criticism,
de architectuur’, De Stijl, 1, i, in English in P. Hefting and A. Van 1902-1934, 142f. Cf. also Vantongerloo (op. cit. n. 18 above) 22f.
der Woud 1976, Bart van der Leck, 1876-1958. The Latvian critic V. Matvejs had already argued in 1910 that colour
17 ‘Inzicht’ (1928), trans. T. M. Brown, The Work of G. Rietveld, should, on the analogy with music, free itself from slavery to nature:
Architect, 1958, 160. ’ ‘The world of colour must be another world. When colour frees
18 G. Vantongerloo 1924, L’Art et son Avenir, espec. 28ff. itself from its slave duties, it opens up new worlds with new poetics
19 For Mondrian, see E. Hoek in C. Blotkamp et al. 1986, De Stijl: and new secrets.’ (J. Howard 1992, The Union of Youth: An Artists’
The Formative Years, 69 and cf. P. Mondrian (1917), ‘The New Society of the Russian Avant-Garde, 64).
Plastic in Painting’ in H. Holtzman and M. S. James (eds) 1987, The
New Art — The New Life: the Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, 36.
20 R. Bolton 1978, ‘Black, white and red all over: the riddle of 20 A Psychological Background for
color term salience’, Ethnology, 17/3, 287-311; A. Jacobson-Widding Early Modern Colour
1979, Red-White-Black as a Mode of Thought (Acta Universitatis
Upsaliensis). 1 H.G. Keller and
J. J.R. MacLeod 1913, “The Application ofthe
21 The fullest study of this triad in modern European languages is Physiology of Color Vision in Modern Art’, Popular Science Monthly,
J. de Vries (1942), ‘Rood-wit-zwart’, Kleine Schriften,1965, 3 sf. LXXXIII, 45f%
22 K. Malevich, Suprematism, 34 drawings (1920) in Essays on Art, ed. 2 J. Cohn 1894, ‘Experimentelle Untersuchungen iiber die Geftihls-
T. Andersen 1969, I, 123-7. betong der Farbenhelligkeiten und ihre Combinationen’, Philosophis-
23 Ibid. 126. See also Suprematism as pure knowledge (1922) in K. che Studien, X, 562ff. For the later controversy. over this work, A.
Malevich, Suprematismus: die gegenstandlose Welt, ed. W. Haftman 1962, Minor 1909, Zeitschrift
fiirPsychologie, 50, 43ff. F. Stefanescu-Goanga
164, and Essays on Art, trans T. Andersen 1971, II, 126. Malevich 1912, “Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Gefiihlsbetonung der
was probably thinking of white light as the sum of the spectral Farben’, Psychologische Studien, VII, 284ff.
colours and ofthe black interference (Fraunhofer) lines dividing the 3 E. Harms 1963, “My Association with Kandinsky’, American Artist,
spectrum into bands. XXVII, 36ff. The edition of Goethe’s Farbenlehre which Harms says
24 For the icon revival in general, M. Betz 1977, ‘The Icon and Kandinsky was studying was that in Kiirschners Deutsche National-
Russian Modernism’, Artforum, Summer, 38ff and espec. 42-3. A. C. Literatur: Goethes Werke, XXV, Naturwissenschafliche Schriften III (1891),
Birnholz, in the fullest discussion of Malevich’s white paintings, with an introduction and notes by Steiner. In his introduction
refers in passing to the white-grounded icons: ‘On the meaning Steiner used the term ‘inner necessity’, which became a key concept
of Kasimir Malevich’s “White on White”’, Art International, XXI. in On the Spiritual in Art. Steiner may himself have found the term,
1977, 14f. A further colouristic dimension to Malevich’s interest in and a variant ‘innerer Nothigung’, in P. O. Runge 1841, Hinter-
icons is suggested by his hanging of his Black Square (on a white lassene Schriften, 11, 354, 386, 405, 467, to which Heinz Matile has
ground) at the ‘o-10’ exhibition in Petrograd in 1915 high up across drawn attention in the context of Kandinsky (H. Matile, Die Farben-
the ‘red’ corner of the room, so exhibiting his favourite triad of lehve Philipp Otto Runges, 2nd ed. 1979, 370).
colours (pl. 126). 4 Fora Delaunay study of 1912 from the glass at Laon (Bern, Kunst-
25 K. Malevich, ‘Non-objective creation and Suprematism’ (1919) museum), S. Buckberrough 1979, “The Simultaneous Content of
in Essays (cit. n. I]above) 121-2. Robert Delaunay’s Windows’, Arts Magazine, Sept., 110, fig. 10. At
26 For Belyisee A. Steinberg, ‘Andrei Bely1’s experimental poetry’ exactly the same time the Italian Divisionist painter Angelo Mor-
in A. McMillin, ed. 1992, Symbolism and After, espec. 67. J. Peters belli was addressing the problem oftransparency, and saw the tech-
1981, Farbe- und Licht-Symbolik bei Aleksandr Blok, 51, 92, 300f. nique ofglazing as the key to luminosity, referring as an example to
27 For an English translation of the opera, Drama Review, XV (4), medieval stained glass (T. Fiori, ed. 1968, Archivi del Divisionismo,
1971, 107ff. 142ff). The theorist of Divisionism G. Previati also gave a good deal
28 For audition colorée, see below Chapter 21. Rimbaud’s poem was of attention to transparency and glazing in 1906 (Principi scientifici
well-known in Russia: it was cited by the abstract poet Nikolai del Divisionismo, 2nd ed. 1929, 77, 142ff) and his account of alumi-
Burliuk in an essay of 1914 (P. Railing 1989, From Science to Systems of nous landscape seen through a window (154ff) may have been the
Art: on Russian Abstract Art and Language, 1910/20, 106), and formed starting-point for Giacomo Balla’s late Divisionist work Window in
the starting-point for Belyi’s 1917 poem Urtro (Steinberg in McMillin, Diisseldorf, 1912 (M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Futur Balla, 1970, pl. xiii).
op. cit. n. 26 above, 63f). Previati’s book was discussed by Milesi 1907 in Les Tendances Nou-
29 For Jakobson’s friendship with Malevich, S. Barron and M. velles, no. 29, 537-9, and was published in French in 1910. For Kupka’s
Tuchman, eds., The Avant Garde in Russia, 1910-1930, New Perspectives parallel studies of stained-glass windows about 1910, V. Spate 1979,
(Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum, 1980), 18. R. Jakobson Orphism, 126.
and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language, 2nd ed. 1975, 4 n; R. Jakob- 5 F. Gilles de la Tourette 1950, Robert Delaunay, 50. A French psy-
son 1968, Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals, 82-4. chologist had recently treated the night sky towards its zenith as
30 V. Chlebnikov, Werke, trans. Urban 1972 II, 311-15. For the the exemplar of depth: it seemed to be a gelatinous or glass sub-
universality of Khlebnikov’s language, R. Cooke 1987, Velimir stance. (E. Claparéde 1906, Archive de Psychologie, V, 128, cit. Katz.
Khlebnikov: a Critical Study, 73-85. IO11, 67N.).
31 W. Kandinsky, Ecrits, ed., Sers. Ill, 1975, 381; and cf. his pro- 6 For the textiles, M. Hoog, Inventaire des Collections Publiques
gramme for the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (1920), in op. Francaises: Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne: Robert and Sonia
cit. n. 1 above, 460. For a comparison of the programmes of the Delaunay, 1967, no. 71; for the book-bindings, Paris, Bibliotheque
Russian and German post-war art schools, R. Wick 1982, Bauhaus Nationale. Sonia and Robert Delaunay, 1977, no. 354ff. Spate (op. cit
Péidagogik, 59-63, and espec. C. Lodder, ‘The VkhUTEMAS and n. 4 above) 357 n. $4, dates the earliest collages of Sonia Delaunay to
the Bauhaus’ in G. Harrison Roman and V. Hagelstein Marquardt 1913.

303
NOTES TO THE TEXT

7 P. Francastel (ed.) 1957, Du Cubisme a V’Art Abstrait, 184. The und Sinnesverkniipfungen: Studien und Materialien zur Vorgeschichte der
most detailed technical analysis of the Disc is in H. J. Albrecht 1974, Syniisthesie; T. Tornitore 1988, Scambi di Sensi: Preistorie delle Sineste-
sie. See also S. Baron-Cohen andJ. E. Harrison (eds.) 1996, Synaes-
Farbe als Sprache, 30ff. The Disc (private collection) is reproduced in
colour in Albrecht (pl. 1). thesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings.
9 J. Miiller, Elements of Physiology, trans. W. Baly (1833-8). For a
8 V. Huszar 1917, ‘Iets over die Farbenfibel van W. Ostwald’, De
aT useful summary of Miiller’s work and its influence, E. G. Boring
Stijl, 1, 113 ff.
1942, Sensation and Perception in the History ofExperimental Psychology,
9 See Composition VII: The Cow, 1917, and Composition in Discords,
1918 (Mrs M. Arp-Hagenbach), in J. Baljeu 1974, Theo van Does-
68-78; and for its effect on 19th-century concepts of representation,
burg, 33, 36. In his Principles of Neo-Plastic Art (1925), 1969, 15 and
J. Crary 1990, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the
fig. 1, Van Doesburg opted for the three primaries, red, yellow and Nineteenth Century, ch. 3. For Elliot’s Philosophical Observations on the
blue, but it is not certain whether this represents his views in 1915
Senses (1780), J. D. Mollon 1987, ‘John Elliot MD, 1747-1787’,
and 1917, when the MS was said to have been completed. Green is Nature 329, 19-20.
not among the colours discussed in the first published version of 10 G. T. Fechner (1876), Vorschule der Aesthetik, 1, 1897, 176ff; idem
his theory: T. van Doesburg (1919), Grondbegrippen van de nieuwe (1877), Ul, 1898, 315-19.
beeldende Kunst, ed. S. V. Barbieri, C. Boekrad,J. Leering 1983, 22. 11 The fullest study of the early history of audition colorée, a term which
For a fuller discussion of Mondrian and Ostwald, Gage 1993, Colour seems to have been a French translation of the English ‘coloured
and Culture, 257-9. hearing’, but was usually cited in French, is F. Mahling 1926, “Das
to R. P. Welsh andJ. M. Joosten1969, Two Mondrian Sketchbooks, Problem der Audition colorée’, Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie, LV,
1912-14, 21. Mondrian’s reading of Kandinsky is suggested by his 165-257. For more recent work,J.Davidoff 1991, Cognition through
phrase ‘an inner feeling of necessity’ (44). But see also n. 3 above. Color, 111-13; P. Junod 1994, ‘De Vaudition colorée ou du bon
11 See R. P. Welsh, ‘Mondrian and Theosophy’, Piet Mondrian: usage d’un mythe’ in P. Junod and M. Pastoureau, Couleur: Regards
Centennial Exhibition, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1971, croisés sur la couleur du Moyen Age au XX° Siecle, 63-81. J. Harrison and
35ff. Thought-Forms had been translated into Dutch in 1905. S. Baron-Cohen 1994, ‘Synaesthesia: an account of coloured
12 For Mondrian’s complex relationship with Huszar, Gage 1993, hearing’, Leonardo, 27/4, 343-6. For the long history of colour-
Colour and Culture, 257-8. music analogies, Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, ch. 13.
13 De Stijl, 1, 3, 1918, 30, in H. Holtzman and M. James (eds.) 1987, 12 For Newton’s colour-musical concerns, see above Chapter 9,
The New Art— The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, and espec. D. Topper 1990, ‘Newton on the number of colours in
36. Shoenmaekers’ doctrines had been published in The New Image the spectrum’, Studies on the History and Philosophy of Science, 21/2,
of the World (Het nieuwe Wereldbeeld), 1915, and Principles of Plastic 269-79.
Mathematics (Beginselen der beeldende Wiskunde), 1916. For Kandin- 13 See, for example, L. E. Marks 1975, ‘On colored-hearing
sky’s reputation in Holland, W. Kandinsky, Regards sur le Passé, ed. synaesthesia’, Psychological Bulletin, LXXXII, 303-31; S. Baron-
Bouillon 1974, 237. For Van Doesburg’s interest in Kandinsky, Cohen, M. A. Wyke, C. Binnie 1987, ‘Hearing words and seeing
Baljeu (op. cit. n. 9 above) 16, 21-4. colours: an experimental investigation of a case of synaesthesia’,
14 For Mondrian’s use of yellow-green, above Chapter 19, n. 14, Perception, XVI, 761-7.
and Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 258 and pl. 201. 14 A. de Rochas 1885, “L’Audition colorée’, La Nature, Il, 275,
15 Holtzman and James (op cit. n. 13 above) 36. where the poem is attributed to Verlaine, who had published it
16 See R. P. Welsh 1966, Piet Mondrian, espec. no. 84, 89; and Piet for the first time in Lutéce in 1883 and again in Les Poétes Maudits in
Mondrian: Centienniel Exhibition, New York, Guggenheim Museum, 1884 (A. Rimbaud, Oeuvres Completes, ed. A.Adam 1972, 898). For
1971, nos 69, 73, 75-7, 81, 89. See also Van Doesburg’s Composition Rimbaud’s disclaimer, Un Saison en Enfer (1873) in W. Fowle (ed.
XI, 1918, and Rhythms of aRussian Dance, 1918. and trans.) 1966, Rimbaud: Complete Works, 192. It is particularly
notable that in the course of the poem Rimbaud’s rouge becomes
elided with pourpre, and his bleu with violet:: he seems to be more
21 Making Sense of Colour — the Synaesthetic concerned with the resonance of colour-ideas than with colour-
Dimension perceptions.
15 A. Binet 1892, ‘Le probléme de l’audition colorée’, Revue des
1 The mosaics have been discussed briefly by G. Delfini Filippi, ‘La Deux Mondes, CXIII, 586, 607. Rimbaud’s poem is cited as the most
Basilica dal Seicento all’Ottocento’ in C. Pietrangeli (ed.) 1989, La famous instance of the phenomenon on 609. The Symbolist theorist
Basilica di S. Pietro, 156-62; see also F. di Federico 1983, The Mosaics of language René Ghil was much concerned with audition colorée in
of St Peter’s decorating the New Basilica. the early versions of his Traité du Verbe (1885), adducing Rimbaud’s
2 J. D. Forbes 1849, ‘Hints towards a classification of colours’, poem, but attacking his rendering of the ‘simple’ vowel U with the
Philosophical Magazine, 3rd ser., XXXIV, 177-8. ‘compound’ colour green and proposing yellow instead (R. Ghil,
3 K. Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 1914-30, Traité du Verbe, Etats Successifs 1885, 1886, 1887, 1888, 1891, 1904, ed.
Il, 224f. T. Goruppi 1978, 60, 82, 108). Ewald Hering had of course already
4 H. Conklin 1955, ‘Hanundo color categories’, South Western Journal shown in 1874 that green is, phenomenologically, a ‘pure’ colour
of Anthropology, Il, 340, quotes estimates of perceptible nuances — (E. Hering 1878, Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne, 107-21).
hues with variations of brightness and saturation — of between 7.5 16 Lind’s typescript of 1900, The Music of Color and the Number
and 10 million; see also R. W. Brown and E. H. Lenneberg 1954, Seven, formerly British Museum 1752 a.8, was destroyed during the
‘A study of language and cognition’, Journal of Abnormal Social Psy- 1939-45 war; an earlier version, Music of Color (1894) is in the
chology, XLIX, 457. A. Chapanis 1965, ‘Color names for color George Peabody Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and
space’, American Scientist, LIM, 344 suggests that there are some 50 has been published in facs. by the library. Here I have used the
usable colour-names for the whole of colour-space. extracts from the British Museum version given by A. B. Klein
5 See above Chapter 3 and G. Roque 1991, ‘Portrait de la couleur 1937, Coloured Light, an Art Medium, 14-16.
en femme fatale’, Art & Fact (Revue des historiens de l’art, des 17 R. Redgrave (1853), A Manual of Colour, with a Catechism, 1884,
archaeologues, des musicologues et des orientalistes de l’Université ii; G. Field, Chromatography (1835), 2nd ed. 1841, 15, 191; D. R.
de Liege), X, 4-11. Hay, The Laws of Harmonious Colouring adapted to Interior Decoration,
6 See above Chapter 2 and B. J. Kouwer 1949, Colours and their Manufactures and other Useful Purposes, sth ed. 1844. Hay’s diagram is
Character: a Psychological Study, 526. close to several which had been published by Field since the 1st ed.
7 Kouwer, op. cit., is still the most extensive study. of his Chromatics in 1817, the 2nd ed. of which (1845) has a very
8 For the early history of synaesthetic ideas, L. Schrader 1969, Sinne extended discussion of the topic. For Redgrave’s work at the School

304
 NOTES TO THE TEXT

of Design (but without reference to the colour-manual), A. Burton, 28 C. Scott (¢. 1916), The Philosophy ofModernism (and its Connection
‘Redgrave as art educator, museum official and design theorist’ in S. with Music), 111, 115. lam grateful to David Chadd for this reference.
Casteras and R. Parkinson (eds) 1988, Richard Redgrave, R.A., 1804- 29 A. Besant, “Thought-Forms’, Lucifer, a Theosophical Monthly, XIX,
1888, 48-70. Sept. 1896-Feb. 1897, 67f. For Scriabin’s synaesthesia, K. Peacock
18 F. Galton (1883), Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1985, ‘Synaesthetic perception: Alexander Scriabin’s color hearing’,
1907, 107. Galton’s principal source-book was the earliest substantial Music Perception, 1, 483-506. Peacock does not refer to Scriabin’s
gathering ofcase-histories, E. Bleuler and K. Lehmann, Zwangsinés- links with Theosophy, for which see Gage 1993, Colour and Culture,
sige Lichtempfindungen durch Schall und verwandte Erscheinungen auf dem 299 n.122. For Belyi, A. Steinberg, ‘Andrei Belyi’s experimental
Gebiete der anderen Sinnesempfindungen, 1879 (2nd ed. 1881). poetry’ in A. McMillin (ed.) 1992, Symbolism and After, 61-9. Prof.
19 Klein (op. cit. n. 16 above) 14. Robin Milner-Guilland kindly introduced me to this article. For
20 Pearson (op. cit. n. 3 above) II, 214. Cf. the discussion of the use Kandinsky and Theosophy, espec. S. Ringbom, “Transcending the
of coloured lights to treat hysterics in C. Féré 1887, Sensation et Mou- visible: the generation of the abstract pioneers’ in M. Tuchman et al.
vement, 43-6. 1986, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, 131-53.
21 E.A. Fletcher 1910, The Law
of theRhythmic Breath, 284-5. |have 30 Baron-Cohen et al. (op. cit, n. 24 above) 422.
been unable to trace a report of this case in Lombroso’s published 31 G. A. Reichard, R. Jackobson, E. Werth 1949, ‘Language and
work. Synaesthesia’, Word, V, 232-3.
22 See D. G. Landgrebe 1834, Ueber die Chemischen und Physiologis- 32 Cytowic (op. cit. n. 24 above) 59.
chen Wirkungen des Lichts (largely on plants and animals); R. Hunt 33 E. Downey 1929, Creative Imagination: Studies in the Psychology of
1844, Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations (on plants). Literature, 95.
23 See also The Lancet, March 29 1919, 519-22. For Germany, see 34 R. Cooke 1987, Velimir Khlebnikov, a Critical Study, 84-5;J.Padrta,
the work of the Bauhaus-trained designer Lou Scheper at the Uni- ‘Malevitch et Khlebnikov’ in J. C. Marcadé (ed.) 1979, Malevitch:
versity Clinic in Minster in 1924 (E. Neumann 1971, Bauhaus und Actes du Colloque International, 3 1-41; and see above Chapter 19
Bauhdusler, 94). For a positive evaluation of the treatment, M. Ander- 35 Gerome-Maisse (Alexis Mérodack-Jeaneau), “L’Audition colorée’,
son 1979, Colour Healing: Chromotherapy and How It Works; and for a Les Tendances Nouvelles (1907), 656.
critical survey of recent work, P. K. Kaiser 1984, ‘Physiological 36 Reichard et al. (op. cit. n. 31 above) 225f. For Jacobson’s con-
response to color: a critical review’, Color Research and Application, tinuing concern for coloured hearing, R. Jakobson 1968, Child-
IX, 29-36. Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals, 82-4; R. Jakobson and
24 See espec. S. Baron-Cohen, J. Harrison, L. H. Goldstein, M. M. Halle, Fundamentals ofLanguage, 2nd ed. 1975, 45n.
Wyke 1993, “Coloured speech-perception: is synaesthesia what 37 Baron-Cohen ef al. (op. cit. n. 24 above) 420. This study also
happens when modularity breaks down?’, Perception, XXII, 419-26; proposes a possibly sex-linked genetic base for the faculty (423). See
R. E. Cytowic (1993), The Man Who Tasted Shapes, 1994, espec. 97, also B. Shanon 1982, ‘Color associates and semantic linear orders’,
108, 166. I am grateful to Dr Simon Baron-Cohen for this reference. Psychological Research 44, 76. There may of course be social reasons
25 W. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art, ed. and trans. K. C. why the response to a BBC Radio 4 programme was predominantly
Lindsay and P. Vergo 1982, I, 158. See also E. Heimendahl 1961, female, just as the reasons for the largely male sample of subjects in
Licht und Farbe: Ordnung und Funktion der Farbwelt, 210ff. Cytowic one ofthe earliest studies may have had a social origin (F. Suarez de
(op. cit. n. 24 above) 121, has emphasized the abstractness of colour- Mendoza 1890, L’ Audition Colorée. Etude sur les Fausses Sensations
synaesthetic experiences. Secondaires Physiologiques et Particuli¢rement sur les Pseudo-Sensations de
26 See Gage 1993, Colour and Culture, 209. Couleurs Associés aux Perceptions objectives des Sons, Paris: 39 female
27 Galton (op. cit. n. 18 above) 111. Many discrepancies in cases cases out of 134). Mérodack-Jeaneau (see n. 35 above) may have
recorded since 1812 have been tabulated by Schrader (op. cit. n. 8 been a patient of this Angers doctor, and quotes the book exten-
above) 37; see also L. E. Marks 1978, The Unity ofthe Senses, 87-9. sively in his 1907 article.

305
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311
 List of Illustrations

Measurements are given in centimetres and inches, height preceding width

Frontispiece: The German illuminator complementary colour (after-image) of red. 30-1 Tomaso da Modena, Cardinals Hugh
Brother Rufillus, self-portrait painting the de St Cher and Nicholas de Fréauville, c.
letter ‘R’ from a shell. From a Passionale 14 Paul Klee, Crystal Gradation, 1921. 1352. Frescoes, Chapter House, S. Nicolo,
from Weissenau Abbey, ¢. 1170-1200. Bib- Watercolour on paper mounted on card- Treviso. Photo Orio Frassetto Fotografo,
liotheca Bodmeriana, Geneva, Cod. Bodm. board 24.5 x 31.5 (9% x 12%).Offentliche Treviso.
127. f. 244. Kunstsammlung, Basel. Photo Martin
Buhler (© DACS 1998). 32-3 Willem Key, Portrait of an Illuminator,
1 Johannes Itten, Colour-sphere, 1921. From 1565. Oil on panel. National Museum of
B. Adler (ed.), Utopia - Dokuments der Wirk- 15 King David window, Augsburg Cathe- Fine Arts, Valletta.
lichkeit, Weimar 1921 (O DACS 1998). dral, c. 1135. Photo AKG, London/Erich
Lessing. 34 Painting from a palette, detail of the
2 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-portrait holding letter ‘P’. From a French Bible of ¢. 1300.
his Palette, Brushes and Maulstick, c. 1663. Oil 16 Jan van Eyck, the Virgin, the Ghent Rheims, Biblio. Municipale MS 40, f. 83v.
on canvas 114 xX 97 (45 x 38). Kenwood Altarpiece, 1432 (detail). Oil on panel 350 x
House, London, courtesy The Trustees of 461 (11°5% x 151%). Cathedral of Saint 35 James Le Palmer, painting the letter “C’.
the Iveagh Bequest. Bavo, Ghent. Photo AKG, London. From Omne Bonum, 14th century. British
Library, London. MS Royal 6E.VI f. 329r.
3 Henri Matisse, The Snail, 1952. Gouache 17 Dieric Bouts, Altarpiece of the Last
on paper 286.4 x 287.9 (112% x 113). Tate Supper, 1464-8. Oil on panel, central panel 36 Brother Rufillus, self-portrait painting
Gallery, London (© Succession H. Matisse/ 182.9 x 152.7 (72 x 60%). Church of St the letter ‘R’ from a shell. From a Passionale
DACS 1998). Pierre, Louvain (Leuven). Photo Stedelijke from Weissenau Abbey, c. 1170-1200. Biblio-
Musea, Leuven. theca Bodmeriana, Geneva, Cod. Bodm.
4 Charles Hayter, ‘Painter’s Compass’. From 127, f. 244.
Hayter, An Introduction to Perspective, London 18 Jean-Francois Millet, The Gleaners, 1857.
1813. Oil on canvas 83.8 x 111.8 (33 x 44). Musée 37 Cast of Antique cornelian carved with
du Louvre, Paris. Apollo and Marsyas, with a setting, first half
5 A. Maerz and M. R. Paul, ‘Blue’. From A of sixteenth century, by Lorenzo Ghiberti.
Dictionary of Color, 3rd ed. New York 1953. 19 Andrej Rublev, The Trinity, 1411. Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photo BPK.
Tempera on panel 144 x 142 (56% x 55%).
6 Ignaz Schiffermiller, The Bright Colours, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo AKG, 38-9 Antique cornelian carved with the
coloured engraving, Schiffermiiler, Versuch London. Rape of the Palladium. Museo Nazionale,
eines Farbensystems (Essay on a System of Naples. Photos DAI, Rome.
Colours), Vienna 1771. 20 Edouard Manet, The Balcony, 1868-9. Oil
on canvas 169 x 125 (66% x 49%). Musée 40 Inca poncho woven with black-and-
7 Patrick Syme, ‘Blues’. From Syme, d’ Orsay, Paris. white chequerboard motif, 1476-1534.
Nomenclature of Colours, Edinburgh 1821. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts,
21 The Transfiguration, mosaic, ¢. 1100. Boston. William Francis Warden Fund.
8 Winifred Nicholson, Colour Chart, 1944, Church of Daphni. Photo Josephine
From Nicholson, Unknown Colour: Paintings, Powell. 41 Aztec cosmic map, Codex Féjérvary Mayer,
Letters and Writings of Winifred Nicholson, p. 1. Courtesy The Board of Trustees of
London 1987 (© Trustees of Winifred 22 Moses receiving the Law, mosaic, ¢. 560, the National Museums and Galleries on
Nicholson). Monastery of St Catherine, Sinai. Merseyside.

9 Winifred Nicholson, Starlight and Lamp- 23-4 Crucifixion scene, mosaic, ¢. 1180. 42 Antonio da Pisa?, after a design by
light, 1937. Oil on canvas 76.2 x 88.9 (30 x Church of Daphni. Lorenzo Ghiberti, St Barnabas window,
35). Tate Gallery, London (© Trustees of 1441, Florence Cathedral.
Winifred Nicholson). 25-6 The Covenant of Noah, mosaic, ¢. 1180-
90. Monreale Cathedral. Photo Alinari. 43 Mixtec mask, inlaid with jadeite and
10, 11 Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies- turquoise mosaic. Museo Nazionale
Bergere, 1881-2. Oil on canvas 96 x 130 27-8 Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon Preistorico e Etmografico, Rome. Photo
(37% x §1¥%). The Courtauld Institute Gal- on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86 Scala.
leries, London. (details of divisionist technique). The Art
Institute of Chicago. Helen Birch Bartlett 44 Inca royal tunic, Late Horizon. Tapestry
12 Aribert, Crucifixion book-cover, 11th Memorial Collection. Weave 91 X 76.5 (35% X 30%). Dumbarton
century. Enamel 42.6 x 33.9 (16% x 13%),
Oaks Research Library and Collections,
Cathedral Treasury, Milan. Photo Scala. 29 Georges Seurat, Les Poseuses, 1886-7. Washington DC.
Oil on canvas 200.6 x 250.8 (79 x 98%). The
13 Red and white discs to illustrate the Barnes Foundation, Merion. 45 Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Earth, c. 1570. Oil

312
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

on panel 70.2 x 48.7 (27% x 19%). Private 61 Sir Isaac Newton, Colours of Thin Plates Kugel). From Runge, Die Farben-Kugel,
collection. (‘Newton’s Rings’). From Newton, Opticks, Hamburg 1810.
Book I, Part ii, London 1704.
46 Claude Boutet, artist’s colour-circle. 80 J. M. W. Turner, Landscape with a River
From Boutet, Traité de la Peinture en Migna- 62 Frantisek Kupka, Newton’s. Wheel, and a Bay in the Distance, c. 1845. Oil on
ture, The Hague 1708. version of Newton’s colour-circle, ¢. 1910. canvas 94 X 124 (37 x 49). Musée du Louvre,
From Kupka, Tvoréni V Umént Vitvarném Paris.
47 Frantisek Kupka, Discs of Newton, 1912. (Creation in the Plastic Arts), Prague 1923 (©
Oil on canvas 100.3 x 73.7 (39% x 29). ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 1998). 81 J.M. W. Turner, Colour-circle No. 2,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise c. 1825. Watercolour 54 x 74.3 (214 x
and Walter Arensberg Collection (© 63 William Blake after Michelangelo, Abias, 29%). Tate Gallery, London, The Turner
ADAGBP, Paris and DACS, London 1998). 1770s. Pen and grey ink, grey wash on paper Collection.
24.4 X 174 (9% x 6%). Copyright British
48 William Blake, illustration to Young’s Museum, London. 82 J.M. W. Turner, Rouen Cathedral, c. 1832.
Night Thoughts, VII, 1797. Pen and grey ink Gouache on paper 14 x 19.4 (5% x 7%).
with grey wash and watercolour 42 x 23.2 64 William Blake, Newton, c. 1795. Water- Tate Gallery, London.
(16% x 9%). Copyright British Museum, colour 46 x 60 (18% x 23%). Tate Gallery,
London. London. 83 Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, 1892-4.
Oil on canvas 99.7 x 65.7 (39% x 25%). The
49 John Everett Millais, The Blind Girl, 65 Henry Fuseli, Twelfth Night, 1777. Pen Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
1856. Oil on canvas 82.6 x 62.2 (32% x and brown ink with grey wash over graphite Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915.
24%). City Museums and Art Gallery, on paper 35.5 X 20.8 (14 x 8). Copyright
Birmingham. British Museum, London. 84 Philipp Otto Runge, The Small ‘Morning’,
1808. Oil on canvas 109 x 88.5 (42% x
50 Theodoric of Freiberg, Refraction-diagram, 66 Giorgio Ghisi after Michelangelo, The 347%). Hamburg, Kunsthalle.
c. 1304, from De Iride (after Wiirschmidt). Persian Sibyl. Engraving, sixteenth century.
56.8 X 43 (22% X17). 85 Franz Pforr, Sulamith and Maria, 1811.
51 Robert Grosseteste, Scutum Fidei, before Oil on wood 34.5 x 32 (13% x 12%). Private
1231. Copyright of the Dean and Chapter 67 Sir Isaac Newton, refraction through a collection.
of Durham. MS A III.12, f. 14v. prism. From Newton, Opticks, Book I, Part
u, London 1704. 86 Franz Marc, Blue Horse I, 1911. Oil on
52 Giovanni Battista della Porta, prismatic canvas TI2 x 84.5 (44 x 33%). Stadtische
diagram. From Della Porta, De Refractione, 68 After George Romney, Newton and the Galerie im Lenbachhau, Munich. Bernhard
1593. Prism, 1803-4. From William Hayley, Life of Koehler-Stiftung.
George Romney, 1809. By permission of the
53 René Descartes, prism-diagram, 1637. Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 87 Franz Marc, The White Dog, 1910-11.
From Descartes, Opera Philosophica, 1656. Oil on canvas 62.5 x 105 (24% x 41%).
By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge 69 James Basire after -William Blake, Stadelscher Museumsverein e V. Frankfurt.
University Library. vignette of The End of the Deluge, 1774.
From Jacob Bryant, A New System...of 88 Wassily Kandinksy, Yellow-Red-Blue, 1925.
54 Thomas Harriot, crystal triangular prism, Ancient Mythology, IU, 1774. Oil on canvas 128 x 210.5 (50% x 82%).
c. 1610. By permission of The Bntish Library, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.
London. Add. MS 6789, f. 148. 70 Benjamin West, Venus Comforting Cupid
(Cupid stung by a Bee), c. 1796-1802. Oil on 89 Arthur Segal, Fisherman’s House on Sylt I,
55 Sir Isaac Newton, Experimentum crucis, canvas 76.8 x 65.7 (304 x 25%). The 1926. Oil on canvas 142.5 X 133 (56xX52%).
1666-72. By permission of the Syndics of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas Musée Petit Palais, Geneva.
Cambridge University Library. MSS Add. City, Missouri (Purchase: Nelson Trust).
4002, f, 128a. 90 Philipp Otto Runge, Ideal and Real
71-5 James Gillray, Titianus Redivivus; or Colours, c. 1809. From Runge, Hinterlassene
56 After Carlo Maratta, The Academy of The Seven Wise-Men consulting the new Venet- Schriften, Hamburg 1840.
Design, engraving 1677/83. Ashmolean ian Oracle, 1797. Etching and watercolour
Museum, Oxford. 54.5 X 41 (21% x 16%). Copyright British gt Friedrich Overbeck, Italia and Germania,
Museum, London. 1828. Oil on canvas 94.4 x 104.7 (337% x
57 After Nicholas Poussin, Self-portrait, 41%). Neue Pinakothek, Munich.
1649. Jean Pesne, engraving, 17th-century. 76 J.M. W. Turner, Shade and Darkness: the
Evening of the Deluge, 1843. Oil on canvas 92 Wassily Kandinsky, Table I. From
58 Sir Isaac Newton, colour-circle. From 78.7 x 78.1 (31 x 30%). Tate Gallery, Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 1911-12.
Newton, Opticks, Book I, Part 11, London London. (Engl. trans ed. K. Lindsay and P. Vergo,
1704. New York 1982). (© ADAGP, Paris and
77 J.M. W. Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s DACS, London 1998).
59 Moses Harris, prismatic circle. From The Theory): the Morning after the Deluge — Moses
Natural System of Colours, c. 1776. T. Phillips, writing the Book of Genesis, 1843. Oil on 93 Horace Vernet, sketch of M.-E. Chevreul,
Lectures on the History and Principles of Paint- canvas 78.7 x 78.7 (31 x 31). Tate Gallery, c. 1850. Bibliotheque de l'Institut de France,
ing, London 1833. London. Paris. Photo Jean-Loup Charmet.

60 Sir Isaac Newton, Spectrum and Musical 78 J. W. von Goethe, frontispiece to Die 94 Horace Vernet, The Battle ofHanau, 1824
Scale, 1670s. From T. Birch, The History of Farbenlehre, Tiibingen 1810. (detail). Oil on canvas 174 x 289.8 (68% x
the Royal Society of London, III, London 113%). National Gallery, London. Repro-
79 Philipp Otto Runge, Colour-Sphere (Farben- duced by courtesy of the Trustees.
1757:

313
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

colour-mixtures. From August Laugel, 123 Gustave Le Bon, illustration of experi-

95 Eugéne Delacroix, Algerian Women in their
L’ Optique et les Arts, Paris 1869. ment to show the action of ‘black light’.
Apartment, 1834 (detail). 180 x 229 (70% x
From Le Bon, L’Evolution des Forces, Paris
9%). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo ©
RMN. 110 August Laugel, colour-circle. From 1908.
Laugel, L’Optique et les Arts, Paris 1869.
124 Henri Matisse, design for a black
96 J A. D. Ingres, Odalisque with a Slave,
11m Georges Seurat, Seated Nude Boy, chasuble, 1950-2. Musée Matisse, Nice (©
1839-40. Oil on canvas mounted on panel
1883. Conté crayon 31.3 xX 24.1 (12% x Succession H Matisse/DACS 1998).
72 x 100.3 (28% x 39%). Courtesy of the
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard. University 9%). Private collection.
Art Museums. Bequest of Grenville L.
125 Wassily Kandinsky, Table II from
Winthrop. 112 Louis Hayet, Banks of the Oise, 1888. Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, 1911-12.
Oil on canvas. 52 x 75 (20% x 29%) Collec- (Engl. trans ed. K. Lindsay and P. Vergo,
97 Georges Seurat, Evening, Honfleur, 1886. tion Conseil Général du Val d’ Oise. New York 1982.) (© ADAGP, Paris and
Oil on canvas 65.4 X 81.1 (25% x 32). The DACS, London 1998).
Museum of Modern Art., New York. Gift 113 Albert Dubois-Pillet, Saint-Michelle
of Mrs David M. Levy. Photograph © 1997 d’Aguille in Snow, 1889-90. Oil on canvas. 126 Kasimir Malevich, paintings displayed
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 60 X 37 (23% x 14%). Musée Crozatier, Le at the Last Futurist Exhibition, 0.10, Petro-
Puy-en-Velay. grad, 1915. Photo Galerie Gmurzynska,
98 Henri Matisse, French Window— Collioure, Cologne.
1914. Oil on canvas 116.8 x 90.2 (46 x 35%). 114 Henri Matisse, colour-diagram for
Private collection, Paris (© Succession H Danseuses, fond noir, fauteille rocaille, 1942, 127 Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting,
Matisse/ DACS 1998). from Verve, IV, 1945. By permission of the 1917-18. Oil on canvas 97 x 70 (38 % x 27
Syndics of Cambridge University Library Y%). Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
99 Louis Hayet, Colour-circle,1885. Painted (© Succession H Matisse/ DACS 1998).
paper laid on card. Ashmolean Museum, 128 K. V. Matiushin, colour-charts used in
Oxford. 115 Henri Matisse, black sun, 1943, used as the studio, Moscow, 1924. Photo Galerie
title-page for De la Couleur, Verve, IV, 1945. Ricard, Nurnberg.
too M.-E. Chevreul, Colour-circle, painted By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge
engraving. From Des Couleurs et de leurs University Library (© Succession H 129 Wassily Kandinsky, Panel for Edwin
Applications aux Arts Industriels, Paris 1864. Matisse/DACS 1998). R. Campbell, No. 1, 1914. Oil on canvas
162.5 x 80 (64 x 31%). The Museum of
tor August Macke, Large, Bright Shop 116 Edouard Manet, Portrait of Zacharie Modern Art, New York. Mrs Simon
Window, 1912. Oil on canvas 106.8 x 82.8 Astruc, 1866. Oil on canvas 90 x 116 (3542x Guggenheim Fund. Photograph © 1998
(42 x 32 %). Sprengel Museum, Hanover. 45%). Kunsthalle, Bremen. The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Photo AKG, London. (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London
117. Henri Matisse, The Moroccans, Novem- 1998).
to2 E. J. Lind, Lawyer Spoke Stith’s address ber 1915 and summer 1916. Oil on canvas
to the jury, 1900. From A. B. Klein, Coloured 181.3 x 279.4 (71% x 9’ 2”). The Museum 130 August Macke, Colour Circle II (Large),
Light, London 1937. of Modern Art., New York. Gift of Mr 1913. Coloured crayons 27.3 X 24.3 (10% x
and Mrs Samuel A. Marx. Photograph 9). Stadtisches Kunstmuseum, Bonn.
103 London Shell-shock Ward, advertise- © 1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New
ment. From Colour, VIII, March 1918. York (© Succession H Matisse/DACS 131 Jean Metzinger, Landscape, Coucher de
1998). Soleil, 1906-7. Oil on canvas 72.5 x 100
104 Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on (28% x 39%). Kroller-Miiller, Otterlo (©
the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884-6. Oil on 118 Henri Matisse, Gourds, 1915-16. Oil ADAGBP, Paris and DACS, London 1999).
canvas 207.6 X 307.9 (81% x 10° 14). The on canvas 65.1 x 80.9 (25% x 31%). The
Art Institute of Chicago. Helen Birch Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs 132 Wilhelm Ostwald, Colour-circle. From
Bartlett Memorial Collection. Simon Guggenheim Fund. Photograph Ostwald, Die Farbenfibel, 1916 (Trans: The
© 1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New Color Primer, New York 1969).
105 Charles Henry, Colour-circle. From York (© Succession H Matisse/DACS
Henry, Cercle Chromatique présentant tous les 1998). 133 Piet Mondrian, Composition with Grey,
compléments et toutes les harmonies de couleurs, Red, Yellow and Blue, 1920. Oil on canvas
Paris 1889. 119 Georges Seurat, The Balcony, 1883-4. 99.7 X 100.3 (39% x 39%). Tate Gallery,
Conté crayon 31.4 xX 24.5 (12% x 9%). London (© 1998 Mondrian/Holtzman
106 Georges Seurat, colour-star drawn at Private collection. Trust, % Beeldrecht, Amsterdam, Holland
the foot ofa sheet of studies for La Parade, and DACS, London).
c. 1887-8. Private collection. 120 Gustave Le Bon, the ‘black spectrum’.
From Le Bon, L’ Evolution des Forces, Paris 134 George Field, ‘Colours and Sounds’,
107 Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asniéres, 1908, from Field, Chromatics, 2nd ed. London
1883-4. Oil on canvas 200.9 x 299.7 (79 1845.
x 118). Reproduced by courtesy of the 121 Gustave Le Bon, Venus de Milo stat-
Trustees, The National Gallery, London. uettes photographed by ‘black light’. From 135 Francis Galton, coloured vowels.
Le Bon, L’Evolution des Forces, Paris 1908. From Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty,
108 Georges Seurat, The Nurse, 1884. London 1883.
Conté crayon 22.9 x 30.5 (9 x 12). Albright- 122 Henri Matisse, Portrait of Mlle Yvonne
Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. Gift of A. Landsberg, 1914. Oil on canvas 147.3 X 97.5 136 Charles Féré, graph showing the
Conger Goodyear, 1963. (s8 x 38%). Philadelphia Museum of Art. effects on muscular activity of exposure to
The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collec- various colours. From Féré, Sensation et
109 Hermann von Helmholtz, table of tion (© Succession H Matisse/DACS 1998). Mouvement, Paris 1887.

314
 Index

Figures in italics refer to plate caption numbers

Bede, the Venerable 72-3 cavilla 90

FNsas 144; 63, 64 Beechey, Sir William 155, 158, 160 Cellini, Benvenuto 100-1
Academy, French 45, 135, 198-9 Bellona Island 30 Cendrars, Blaise 254
Adami, Valerio 7 Belyi, Andrei 247, 267, 303 n. 28 Cennini, Cennino 50-1, 101-2
Aétius 85 Bening, Simon 91 Centula Gospels 73
Africa 34 Bequerel, Henri 236 Cézanne, Paul 36, 48-9, 250, 256
age, artists in old 18-19; 1, 3 Berenson, Bernard 65 Chantrey, Sir Francis 163
Albers, Josef 22, 50, 53, 191 Bergson, Henri 235 Chardin Jean-Siméon 33
Alberti, Leon Battista 43-4, 89, 98-9, 101, Berkeley, George 36 Chenavard, Paul 211
138 Berlin, B. and P. Kay, Basic Color Terms Chevreul, Michel-Eugéne 15, 18, 47-8,
Albertus Magnus 104, 122, 124, 129-30, II, 20, 29, 56, 68, 105-7, 112; 43 78, 121, 142, 165, 167, 196-200, 209,
132 Bernal, Martin 35 212, 214, 217-19, 223, 226, 284 n. $4,
alchemy 46, 69; 15 Besant, Annie 193, 242, 260, 267 293 n. 19, 299 col. I n. 9, 301 n. IT; 93,
Alexander of Aphrodisias 85 Beuys, Josef 190 94, 100
Alexis, Paul 219 Bezold, Wilhelm von 191 On the Law of Simultaneous Contrast of
Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) 87, 100, 121, Bifrést, bridge of 34 Colours 197-8, 200, 249-50, 254,
286 nn. 10, IT Binet, Alfred 263, 265 2560-7
Allesch, G. J. von 49 Biringuccio, Vannoccio 130 Christophe, Jules 214, 223
Angrand, Charles 196, 301 col. 1 n. 3 Blake, William 9, 134, 144-52; 48, 63, 64, Chromo-luminarisme 78
Annibale di Capua, Prince 127 66, 67, 68, 69 Cicero 44
Anonymus Bernensis 43, 72 Blanc, Charles 35, 47-8, 78, 196, 199, 211- CIE System 243
Antiochus of Athens 73 I2, 227, 300 n. 23, 301 n. 27; 95 Cleaver, Miss 160-1
Antonio da Pisa rol, 102; 42 Blok, Aleksandr 247 Cleomedes 23
Apelles 44 Blue Rider, The/Blaue Reiter, Der 193, 253; Clerget; G7 EB. 199
Aquinas, St Thomas 104 86 Cobo, Bernabé 111
Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 45, 128; 45 Boas, Franz 108 Cohn, Jonas 192, 250
Anibert, book-cover of73; 12 Bocklin, Arnold 190-1 colore. See disegno
Aristotle (see also Pseudo-Aristotle) 16, 26, Boehme, Jakob 149 COLOUR
I2I, 126-8, 132, 141, 262, 284 n. 60, Bonin, Mlle de 257 after-images 21-2, 254; 13
291 nN. 39, 292. n. $8 Boutet, Claude 137-8; 46 ‘apparent’ and ‘material’ 47, 127-8
Arnheim, Rudolf 29 Bouts, Dieric 14; 17 -atlas 17, 19
Arnoldus Saxo 132 Boyer, Carl B. 121 basic (see also primary) 14, 29, 54, 68,
Atahualpa 111 Boyle, Robert 129, 136 1i2? 17
atoms 85-6 Boydell, Josiah 154, 157; 72 -blindness 11-12; 78
audition colorée 247, 263, 266-7; 102, 135 Bracquemond, Félix 200, 226, 299 col. 1 n. -change (‘shot’colours, cangianti) 45, 51,
Augustine, St 23 10, 301 n. II 124, 279 nn. 143, 147
Awsiter, Dr 294 n. 4 Brakel,J.van and B. Saunders, 29 -contrast. See Cheyreul
Aztecs 107; 41 Brass, Arnold 193, 277 n. 98 definition of 11, 50, 69
British School, the 160 dynamics of 252, 254, 257; 105, 130
Brticke, Ernst 212, 220-2, 300 n. 17 and gender 35-6, 187, 193, 195, 260,
Bes. Roger 71, 90, 102, 122, 124, Brunello, Franco 36 268; 84, 90
291 n. 16 Bryant, Joseph 150-1; 69 -harmony (see also colour: complemen
Badt, Kurt 37-8, 48, 73 Burliuk, Nikolai 303 n. 28 tary; music) 14-15, 44, 48, 55-6,138,
Bahr,J. K. 191, 298 n. 27 Bussy, Simon 231 142, 172, 174, 198, 218, 258, 259-
Bann, Stephen 241 Butts, Thomas 146, 148 60, 300 n. 28
Bardwell, Thomas 42 Byron, Robert 56; 19 -hearing. See audition colorée
Barr, Alfred 232, 301 col. 2n. 1 hue 11, 51-2
Barri, Signor 153 induction (see also colour-spread) 18
Barry, James 149, 153, 160 Cth Bi ANTHEA 42 -language 11-12, 15, 21, 23, 26-7, 29-
Bartholomeus Anglicus 96-7 Camoin, Charles 232, 235 30, 52, 54, 56-7, 67, 92-4, 96, 105-9,
Basil I, Emperor 84 Campbell, Edwin 129 226-7, 245, 261-2; 5
Bassano 160 Cantacuzenos, John 73 as language 243, 247-8, 253
Bauhaus 16, 49-50, 195, 248, 250, 252, Capodivacca, Graham 128 liturgical 53, 70-1
206,303 1. 3132 Cardano, Fazio 292 n. 64 local 210-11; 82
Baxandall, Michael 42 Cardano, Girolamo 125-6, 130 -mixture, additive and subtractive 219
Beaubourg, Maurice 214, 218 Carracci, Annibale 153 disc 78-9, 284 n. 60, 296-7 n. 24.
Beaumont, Sir George 158, 161; 74 Castel, Louis-Bertrand 141, 143, 174 glazing 86, 213
Beckmann, Karl 298 n. 27 cataract 19 optical 78-9, 85, 214-15, 217, 254

315
INDEX

COLOUR continued green (see also colour-terms: Giftgriin) Constable, John 26, 84, 161, 168, 292 n. 3
patronage and 35 39, 44, 69, 71, 94, 96-7, 106, 242, Constructivism, Russian 49
-perception $4, 97, 227, 261 244, 258-9, 260, 283 n. 24; 10, 11, Conti, Antonio 139
-polarity 35, 96-7, 165, 169, 187, 193, 13, 14, 15, 20, 132. contracts, artists’ 13-14, 42
195, 252, 260; 76-7, 78, 90, 92,125 grey 200, 217, 223, 226, 254, 257-8, Copley, John Singleton 160
politics and 34-5, 216, 246, 299 col. 2n.3 260; 133 Coronation Gospels 73
primary (see also basic, simple) 14, 22, purple (see also colour-terms: purpureus) Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille 19
31, 44, 47, 54, 73, 86, 135-6, 138, 15, 69, 72, 108, 283 n. 30 Cortés, Hernan 107
143, 164-7, 175, 212-13, 244-7, 260, red (see also colour-materials: coccinus, Cosway, Richard 160
296-7 n. 24 kermes, minium, siricum, vermilion; Courtauld Institute, the 36
-reproduction. See engraving, photog colour-terms: colorado, escarlata, Couture, Thomas 78
raphy puniceus, rubeus, sinople, vermiculus) Crawford, T. D. 29
-scales 17,19, 27, 71, 97, 129, 214, 258, 1§, 31-2, 34, 69, 71-3, 92-4, 97, Cross, Henri-Edmond 168, 216
PS ry Real I10-12, 172, 242, 246, 260, 280 n. Cubism 260, 302 n.25
‘simple’ and ‘mixed’ (see also primary) 1§2, 283 n. 28, 290 n. 37; 13-15, 46, Cureau de la Chambre, Marin 141
44, 128, 136 84, 129 Curie, Marie and Pierre 236
-solid/-sphere (see also Forsius, Munsell, hair 188, 290 n. 40 Cyriac of Ancona 103
Runge) 17, 30, 46-7, 55, 65, 169, white 30, 34, 212, 246-7, 286 n. 103
258, 297 n. 27; 79 yellow (see also colour-terms: aureus,
spectrum (see also prism, rainbow) 23, coeruleus, flavus) 15, 36, 71, 96, 242, | ee Louis 197
25-6, 112, 123, 126, 132-3, 212, 274. 252; 103 Dahl, Johan Christian Clausen 298 n. 29
227, 236, 244, 271 col. 1 n. 6; 58 cold/cool (see also colours: ‘warm’ and Damasio, A. 21
-spread (Bezold effect) 79, 191 ‘cool’) 22-3, 36, 262, 272 n. 7; 4 Dante Alighieri 25, 150
-symbolism (see also colour: as language; complementary (see also colour-polarity; darkness 195; 22, 76
Virgin Mary) 34, 36-7, 42, 52-3, 70, colours: opponent) 15, 22, 48, 55, 87, active 45-6, 190
73, 109-10, 124, 165, 175, 187, 191, 142-3, 165, 169, 172, 185, 196-7, blue as 41; 12, 21
195, 242, 260, 271 col. I n. 6, 272 n. 199, 212, 217, 224, 244, 254, 260; brown as 41
9, 297 n. 33 13, 61 mystical 30, 73-5, 284 n. 44
-technology (see also alchemy, dyestufts) of flowers 186-7, 227, 207 n. 9 Darwin, Charles 22, 26-7, 31, 265
31, 42, 69 numbers of 25, 122, 132, 136 Darwin, Robert Waring 22
and texture 29 opponent (see also colours: complemen- Dastre, Albert 236
-theory 43-50, 185; passim tary) 29, 242, 258; 125 De Boodt, Anselm 45
-therapy 31, 32, 54, 192, 251-2, 265; 103 ‘warm’ and ‘cool’/‘hot’ and ‘cold’ 22-3, decorative art (see also flat tints, oriental
and translucency 99 36; 262, 272 0. Fig) 6 cultures) 198-9, 257
and transparency 47, 99, 128, 172, 254- COLOUR-TERMS Delacroix, Eugéne 47-8, 78, 196, 199-200,
6, 2907 N. 34, 303 n. 4; 101 alurgus 123 211, 220, 226; 232; 2741. 28:05
values (brightness and darkness) 11, 36, aureus 15 de la Hire, Philippe 185
51-2, 68, 87, 200, 214, 216, 258, azurium (asure) 93 Delaunay, Robert 38-9, 49, 193, 253-57;
260; 81 bloi 30, 92 101, 130
-vision $4, 223, 236, 244-5 brun 40 Delaunay, Sonia 257
COLOUR-MATERIALS coeruleus (caeruleus) 128, 132, 291 nn. 20, Delaval, Edward Hussey 165
(see also dyestuffs) 35, 42, 69, 72, 90, 38 Delf, Thomas 299 col.1 n. 9
92-3,108, 154, 161, 214-15, 220-1, colorado 111-12, 290 n. 41 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista 121, 126 :
228, 250, 300 n. 25, 301 col. 2n 1. Darstellungswert 50 128, 130, 132; 52
atramentum, See incaustum Eigenwert 50 Democritus 72, 85-6
azurite, 13, 14; 17 escarlata 111 Demus, Otto 76-7
coccinus 96, 111 fausse rose 93 De Piles, Roger 45, 134-5
incaustum 92 flavus 96 Derain, André 234-5
indigo 187 fuscus 92 Derrida, Jacques 7-8
kermes 96, 111 Gifigriin 39; 20 Descartes, Renée 46, 121, 128-9, 132, 134;
minium 93, 96 hyacinthus 129 53
siricum 96 pandius 68 De Stijl 49, 244, 258-9
ultramarine 13, 14, 35, 93, 226, 283 n. perse 08, 9-4 Digby, Sir Kenelm 130
33; 16 puniceus (feniceus) 93, 96, 123 Digulleville, Guillaume de 124
vermilion (cinnabar) 93, 94, 110, 290 n. purpura 111, 290 n. 36 Dillis, Georg von 298 n. 29
33; 103, 115 purpureus 94. Diocletian’s Price-Edict 81
woad 94 rubeo (rubeus) 93-4, 96 Dionysius of Fourna 70
COLOURS sinople 30 directions, colours and 109-10
black 30-1, 34, 50, 92, 228-40, 246; 98 ‘solar orange’ 210, 212 disegno 35, 134-5; 56
blue (see also colour-materials: azurite, turquoise 106, 289 n. 8; 43 Dittmann, Lorenz 37-40, 45; 18
ultramarine; colour-terms: azurium, venetus 93 Doesburg, Theo van 49,244, 259
bloi, coeruleus, hyacinthus, perse, vermiculus 94 dress 36, 50-1, 70-1, 188-9, 230-1, 276 n.
venetus; green) 13, 14-16, 25, 30, 34, xanthus 123 73, 279 n. 140; 85, 91, 116
36, 40, 42, 44, 71, 73-4, 75-6, 174, Compositiones Lucenses (Lucca MS) 68, 72, Dronke, Peter 52
186-7, 192-3, 195, 242, 252, 264-5, 285 n. 76 Dubois-Pillet, Albert 223; 113
281 n.169, 283 nn. 33, 34, 284 n. 44, Congrés Internationale de Psychologie Dumezil, Georges 34
295 N. 20; 5, 6, 7, 12, 19, 86 Physiologique 247, 263 Durand-Ruel 231
brown 40 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig 37, 39, 40 Duranty, Edmond 218
gold 15, 34, 71, 79, 89, 128, 283 n. 30 conservation 40, 42, 54 Diirer, Albrecht 45

316
 INDEX

dyestuffs 36, 69, 72, 108, 289 nn. 14, 20, Ghisi, Giorgio 144; 66 Husserl, Edmund 37
290 n. 41 Gillray, James 154, 157; 71-5 Huszar, Vilmos 244, 259, 260
Gimpel, René 162 Huysmans,J. K. 162, 218
Giotto’s Navicella 285 n. 66
Dre te. CHARLES LOCK 161 Gladstone, W. E. 11, 12
Eaves, A. Osborne 252 glass, optical (see also prism) 130 lepencron CAESAR 294 n. 7, 295 n.
Eco, Umberto 21-2 glass, stained 38, 40, 44, 69, 98, 101-2, 17
Ecole des Beaux-Arts 214 254-5, 303 M. 4; 15, 42 illumination, manuscript 13, 38, 42, 51, 70,
Edda, Norse 34 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 8, 16, 32, 73, 90-4, 107;frontispiece, 34-6, 41
Egremont, Third Earl of 163 36, 46-7, 49, 53, 55, 132, 143, 147, 165, Impressionists, French 162-3, 164, 167
Egypt, Ancient 35 169-76, 186, 194-5, 298 n. 26; 76-7, 78, Incas 107-8; 40, 44
elements, the four 29, 73, 127-8, 292 n. 87, 89 Incorporated Society of Artists 294 n. 4
583 45 Die Farbenlehre/The Theory of Colours Ingres,J.A. D. 47-8, 196, 198-9, 200; 96
El Greco 33 46-7, 185, 187, 189-90, 192-3, 195, inventories $1
Elliot, John 262 245, 249-50, 252, 260, 272 n. 24, iris (stone). See prism, quartz
Empedocles 85-6 279 n. 134, 297 n. 2; 78, 88, 92 Isidore of Seville 72, 122
engraving, coloured 138-9, 144 Gombrich, Sir Ernst 241 Itten, Johannes 16, 49, 50; 1
monochrome 36, 144 Goncoutt brothers 81
Etty, William 153 Goncourt, Edmond de 162, 302 col. 1 n. 5
Euclid 121 Gowing, Lawrence 56 AKOBSON, ROMAN 247, 267-8
Euler, Leonhard 8 Graeco-Roman art 35 antzen, Hans so
Eyck, Jan van 14; 16 Grandi, Sebastian 155, 160 Japanese prints 31, 229-30
Gravell, F 298 n. 27 Jarman, David 8
Gregory of Nyssa 75 jewelery 44, 99-100, 126, 288 n. 16, 289 n.
ee coe, jo Hi J-=1. 226 Grosseteste, Robert 90, 121, 123-4, 287 n. 8; 37-9
Farington, Joseph 154-5, 158, 160; 72 42; 51 Joachim of Flora 70
Fauves 249, 260 Groult, Camille 162 Johannes Scotus Eriugena 104
Fechner, G. T. 12, 191, 227, 247, 257; Grtinewald, Mathias 22, 45 John of Skythopolis 76
263, 267-8, 301 n. 29 Guercino (Francesco Barbieri) 161 John of Trevisa 96-7
Federov, Nikolai Fedorovich 303 n. 32 Judaism 30
Felibien, André 45
feminism 35-6 Glee. EDOUARD 252
Fénéon, Félix 84, 209, 210-12, 214-16, Harriot, Thomas 127, 130, 1323 54 Kee GUSTAV 226, 301 col. I n. 3
218-19, 225, 232-3, 284 n. 59, 300 n. Harris, Moses 137, 165, 174, 243-4; 59; 81 Kaiser, P. 32
21; 118 Haupt, G. 52 Kandinsky, Wassily 16, 32, 49-50, 54-6,
Féré, Claude 31; 136 Hay, David R. 263-4 191-3, 241, 248, 250, 252, 254, 260,
Fermat, Pierre de 123 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 153 266-7; 86, 88, 129
Ficino, Marsilio 104 Hayet, Louis 223-5; 99, 100, 112 On the Spiritual in Art 49, 55-6, 192,
Field, George 153, 155, 160-1, 244, 263-4, Hayley, William 150, 294 n. 24 250, 252, 254, 260, 266; 92, 125
304-5 n. 17; 134 Hayter, Charles 22; 4 Kant, Immanuel 8, 271 col.1 n. 6
fire, colour of 22, 25, 126; 6 Hegel, Georg Willhelm Friedrich 190 Katz, David 29, 249-50
flags, colours of35 Helmholtz, Hermann von 48, 185, 212-14, Kemp, Martin 21
flat tints 198, 200 219-20, 221-2, 226, 262, 300 n. 17, 301 Kepler, Johann 45,
Flaxman, John 294 n. 24 N. IT; 99, 106, 109, 110, 111 Key, Willem 92; 32-3
Forbes,J. D. 261 Henry, Charles 48, 213-14, 218, 220, 254, Khlebnikov, Valimir 247, 268
Forsius, Sigfrid 46-7 300 n. 22; 105 Khlesl, Melchior 127
Foucault, Michel 243 “‘Heraclius’ 42 Kiefer, Anselm 190
frames, picture §3-4, 191 heraldry 15, 30, 52-3, 66, 97, 280 n. 155 Kirby-Tally, Mansfield 42
Fraunhofer lines 234 Herbert, Robert L. 213-14, 226 Kircher, Athanasius 47, 141
Fresnel, Agustus 239 Herder, Johann Gottfried 187 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 193
Friedlander (-Mynona), S. 194 Hering, Ewald 12, 49, 242, 244, 258, 304 Klee, Paul 16, 30, 38-9, 49-50, 55, 191,
Fuseli, Henry 144, 158; 65, 75 Gol 2 ms 25 257, 200 ne L8O; 14
Hersent, Louis 196 Klyun, Ivan 248
Hetzer, Theodor 37-8, 50 Koloritgeschichte 8, 37-40
Gro, AGNOLO IOI-2 Hilduin, 104 Kupka, Frantisek 142, 257, 303 n. 4; 47, 62
Gaddi, Taddeo 38 Hills, Paul 56, 274 n. 25 Kuschel, R. and T. Monberg, 30
Gainsborough, Thomas 84 Hoelzel, Adolf 49
Galen 85 Hokusai 229
Galton, Francis 261-2, 264-5, 266-7; 135 Homer 12 es J. W. anp K. SEINITZ, 42
Garnier, Charles 78 Homer, William Innes 209-10, 214-15 language 267-8
Gauguin, Paul 47-8 Hooke, Robert 136 LANGUAGES
Gautier Dagoty, Jacques-Fabien 139, 143 Hopp, Gisela 39 Anglo-Norman 90, 92-3
gems. See jewelery Hoppner, John 158 Anglo-Saxon 11
Géricault, Théodore 274 n. 28 Horace 84 Aymara 110-11
Gerstner, Karl 281 n. 170 Hugh of St Cher 91; 30 French, Old 30
Hugh of St Victor 283 n. 24 Greek, Ancient 11-12
Ghiberti, Lorenzo 44, 98-107, 124; 37, 42
Ghil, René 268, 304 col. 2 n. 15 humours, the four 128, 298 n. 18 Hebrew 11
Ghirlandaio, Domenico 38 Humphrey, Nicholas 21 Latin 15, 90, 125
Ghisi, Adamo 144; 63 Humphry, Ozias 158, 294 n. 7 Mexican languages 105-6

317
INDEX

Maxwell, James Clerk 23, 212, 301 n. 11 Orphism 49

LANGUAGES continued
Maya 109-10 Ostwald, Wilhelm 17, 55, 65, 195, 244-5,
Nahuatl 106-7, 112
medical literature’ 42 248, 257-60; 132, 133
Quechua 107
Medici, Lorenzo de’ 101 Overbeck, Friedrich 188-9; 91
Spanish 106-7, 110, 289 n. 16, 290 n. 28
megilp (Magilph’) 153, 294 n. 1 Ovid 84
lapis-lazuli. See colour-materials: ultrama-
rine Meier, Christel 52 Oxbury,J. and S. 21
Laugel, Auguste 48, 220; 110 Melville, S. 7-8
Lawrence, Thomas 158 Menzel, Adolf 298 n. 29
Le Begue, Jehan 93-4 Mérimée,J. F. L. 47, 199 Poe LUCA 124
Le Blon,J. C. 65, 138-9 Merrifield, Mary Philadelphia 161 palette 42, 44, 86, 94, 214, 226, 228, 300 n.

Le Bon, Gustav 235-40; 120, 121, 123 Mesarites, Nicholas 74-5 28; 34
Leenhoff, Léon 232 Metzinger, Jean 254; 131 Passavant, Johanne David 190
Lehmann, Henri 78 Meyer, Heinrich 46 Pastoureau, Michel 52, 66
Leonardo da Vinci 18, 33, 40, 44-5, 104, Michelangelo Buonarotti 144; 63-6 Pecham, John 122, 292 n. 64
121; 124, 127, 220-1 military uniforms 197-8; 94 Pedretti, Carlo. 44
Le Palmer, James 94-6; 35 Millais, John Everett 26; 49 Pelletier, Xavier 302 n. 33
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 241, 243 Millet, Jean Frangoise 37; 18 Peter Lombard $1
Liebermann, Max 190 Milton, John 149-50 Peter of St Omer 93-4
LIGHT Mocenigo, Filippo 128-9, 130, 132-3 Pforr, Franz 188-90; 85
(see also colour: value; lustre)102, 104, Moctezuma 111 phenomenology 8, 37, 249
121, 209-10 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo 50 Philoponus, Johannes 69
autonomous (Eigenlicht )67 Molina, Fray Alfonso de 106, 112 Philostratus 72
Christ as 70, 73-5, 87; 12 Mondrian, Piet 16, 38, 49, 143, 241, 244- Photius, Patriarch 85, 88
environmental (Standortslicht) 38 §, 259-60;
133 photography 30-1, 36, 236-7, 286 n. 105:
illuminating (Beleuchtungslicht) 67 Monet, Claude 19, 29, 77, 162-4, 168; 83 121
irradiation 221 Monro, Dr Thomas 154 colour 65, 78
metaphysics of 121 Morbelli, Angelo 303 n. 4 Picasso, Pablo 49, 234, 256
sun- 212, 300 n. 17 Moreau, Gustav 162 Pissarro, Camille 78, 215, 218-19, 223-5,
Lind, E. J. 263-5; 102 mosaic 71, 73, 76-89, 106, 261; 21-4, 131 231, 300 n. 49, 302 n. 16; 99
Lindberg, David 121 Moscow Institute of Art Culture 252, 303 Pissarro, Lucien 22;
Line (Hall), Francis 130 e310 Pizarro, Francisco 111
Locke, John 8, 36 Moscow Linguistic Circle 247, 268 PLACES
Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 47 Moses 75-6; 22 Alexandria 79
Lombroso, Cesare 265, 267 Miiller-Freienfels, R. 249 Arta 87
Longhi, Roberto 65 Miiller, Johannes 262-3 Asinou (Cyprus), Panagia Phorbiotissa
Lorenzo Monaco 102 Munch, Edvard 192 70
Loutherbourg, P. J. de 158, 160 Munsell, Albert H. 17, 20, 29, 65, 68, 106, Assisi, S. Francesco 38
Liischer, Max 32-3, 54-5 112, 243, 262 Augsburg, Cathedral 69, 15
lustre 72, 79, 100, 255-6, 285 n. 69; 101 Murano glass 130 Bitola (Macedonia) 285 n. 67
museology 53-4 Cajamarca 108, 111
MUSIC 15, 26; 45, $5,°132, 039-41, 192-3; Chartres 40, 76
A ee AUGUST 193-4, 253, 2573 101, 251-2, 263-4, 303 n. 33; 60, 129, 134 Chios, Nea Moni 70, 71
130 Constantinople (see also Istanbul)
Macklin, Thomas 157; 72 Church of the Holy Apostles 74
MacLaury, R. E. 30, 33 INE FRITZ 192 Church of the Virgin of the Pharos
Maerz, A. and M. R. Paul 23; 5 Neo-Impressionists 77, 165, 249, 260 85
‘Magilph’. See megilp Nequam (Neckham), Alexander 90-3, 96 Imperial Palace 85
magnifying lenses 90-2; 31 Neue Psychologische Studien 49 Cuyalapa (Coyolapan) 111
Majestas Domini 70 Newton, Sir Isaac 11, 15, 22, 24-6, 29, 46, Daphni 73, 76-7; 21, 23-4
Malevich, Kasimir 29, 224, 234, 241, 246, $5, 121, 128-9, 132-3, 134-43, 147-52, Delos, House of the Masks 84
301 n. 19, 302 n. 19; 126, 127 169, 172, 190, 263, 271 col.1 n. 6, 298 Florence
Malone, Edmond 156, 158, 160; 74 n. 27; 55, 58, 60, 61,67, 68 Baptistry 98
Maltese, Corrado 44 “Newton’s Rings’ 142; 61 Orsanmichele 98
Manet, Edouard 33, 39, 229-32; 10, 11, 20, Newton, S. M. 36 Sta Croce, Baroncelli Chapel 38
98, 116 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) 186-7 Sta Maria del Fiore (Cathedral) 98,
Mappae Clavicula 42, 72, 86 Niccoli, Niccold 100, 103-4 101; 42
Maratta, Carlo 135; 56 Niccolo di Piero 102 Sta Maria Novella 38
Marbod of Rennes 72 Nicholas de Fréauville 91; 31 Hosios Loukas 71, 72
Marc, Franz 36, 49, 193-4, 257; 86, 87 Nicholson, Winnifred 27, 49; 8, 9 Istanbul (see also Constantinople)
Marci, Marco 292 n. 65 Northcote, James 16, 158 Haghia Sophia 285 n. 70
Masson, André 302 col. 1 n. 4 Karije Djami 84, 285 nn. 65, 66, 77
Matisse, Henri 9,19, 35, 38-9, $5, 228-40, Laon 255
249; 3, 98, 115, 117-18, 122, 124 Oe WILLIAM of 125 Louvain, St Pierre 14; 17
Matiushin, Mikhail Vasilevich 128 ‘Ockham’s Razor’ 123, 124-5, 136 Lynthrankomi (Cyprus) 285 n. 65
Matteoli 261 oil-painting 14, 42; 17 Milan
Matthai, Rupprecht 36 Oken, Lorenz 297 n. 33 Cathedral Treasury 73; 12
Matvejs, Waldemars 303 n. 33 O’Neale, L. M. 108 S. Lorenzo, Chapel of S. Aquilino
Maund, Barry 8 Opie, John 158, 160 81
Maurolico, Francesco 121 oriental cultures 31, 48, 198-9; 95-6 Mistra, Church of the Hodgetria 76

318
 INDEX

Monreale 76 Provis, Thomas 155, 157 Ruskin, John 87, 163, 168
Nerezi (Macedonia) 70 Pseudo-Aristotle Riith, Uwe Max 39
Oaxaca 111 De Audibilibus 284 n, 60 Rzepinska, Maria 37
Palermo, Martorana 76 De Mundo 285 n. 89
Paracas 108 Problems 96-7
Paris Pseudo-Dionysius 30, 75-6, 103-4; 21 rae FrAY BERNARDINO DE 106-7,
Louvre, Salle d’Apollon 200 psychology 31-2, $4, 96-7, 249-60, 262 rie
Musée du Luxembourg (former) 231 experimental 31, 191-92, 252, 253; 105 Sahlins, Marshall 29-30
Opéra 78 Gestalt 195 St Peter 70-1, 73
Palais Bourbon 200 Ptolemy 78-9, 82 Sand, George 199
Palais du Luxembourg 200 Purkinje, Jan-Evangelista 16, 46 Sandby, Paul 155, 158
Saint-Séverin 255 Sandby, William 153
Pergamon 79 Sarto, Andrea del 51
Quito 108 UARTZ 122, 124-5, 130, 132, 290 n, 9; Scarmiglioni, Guido Antonio 45, 127-30,
Ravenna 50, 54 1)
Basilica Ursiana 103 Schadow, Wilhelm 190
S. Apollinare Nuovo 73, 89, 285 nn. Schapiro, Meyer 196, 209, 216
70. gis ie Rave. Maurus 72 Scheffler, Karl 192, 249, 251
Sta Maria in Porta 103 radio-activity 236 Schelling, Freidrich Wilhelm Josef von 176
S. Vitale 77, Tos Rameau, Jean-Philippe 141 Scheper, Lou 305 n. 23
Rome Rameée, Pierre de la (Ramus) 126 Schiffermiiller, Ignaz 23-4, 173-4, 243; 6
Sta Costanza 284-5 n. 65 rainbow 17, 24, 26, 34, 70,-79, 112, 121-3, Schiller, Friedrich 32
S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura 84 125-7, 149-52, 291 n.16, 292 nn. 58, Schmid, F. 42
Sta Maria Maggiore 81, 89, 285 n. 70 63; 25-6, 48, 69 Schoenmaekers,M. H. J. 245, 260
Sta Prassede, Chapel ofS.Zeno 81, Raphael 261 Schoenberg, A. 55, 251
84, 285 n. 71 recipe books (see also technical literature) Schone, Wolfgang 12, 37-8, 53, 67
Vatican, Chapel of John VII 285 n. 13-14, 42-3, 68, 72, 93, 285 n- 76, 285- Schopenhauer, Arnold 190
68 6n. 97 Schwitters, Kurt 185
Capella Paolina 144 Redgrave, Richard 263 Scott, Cyril 267
St Peter’s 261 Redon, Odilon 226 Scriabin, Alexandr 267
Sistine Chapel 35, 144; 63, 65, 66 refraction (see also prism, quartz, rainbow) scriptorium (see also illumination) 90-4.
Salonika, Hagios Georgios 84, 285 n. 66 L533, 200 ms 20: sculpture, Greek 31
Sinai, Monastery ofSt Catherine 70-1, Reinhardt, Ad 232, 302 col. In. § Scutum Fidei 124; 51
73> 75-6; 22 Reisch, Grigor 125 Sedlmayr, Hans 37
Sopoéani 71 Reisner (Risner), Friedrich 126 Segal, Arthur 195; 89
Temixtitlan 107 Rembrandt van Rijn 19, 162; 2 Seneca 125-6
Tivoli, Hadrian’s Villa 284 nn. 63, 64 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste 163, 302 n. 4 Sérusier, Paul 48
Trebizond 86 reproduction: colour 13, 65 Seurat, Georges 9,16, 47, 77-8, 87, 142,
Vence, Chapel of the Rosary 240 monochrome 30-1 200, 209-27, 232, 244, 250, 254, 256,
Venice, S. Marco 71 Reutersward, Patrick 73 284 nn. $9, 60, 299 col. I n. 1; 99
Mascoli Chapel 89 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 84, 134, 153, 160; 75 Bathers at Asniéres 215, 219; 107
Plato 69, 104 Ribera, Jusepe 40 drawings 216, 221, 226, 233, 235; 106,
plein-air painting 190 Rich, Daniel Catton 216 108, 111, 119
Pliny the Elder 35, 43-4, 72, 103, 126 Richter, Jean-Paul 187 Evening, Honfleur 97
Plutarch 86 Rietveld, Gerrit 244 La Grande Jatte 78, 209, 212, 216, 219;
Poincaré, Henri 235 : Rigaud, John Francis 154-5, 158 27-9, 104, 108
Pollaiuolo, Antonio and Piero 40 Rigaud, Stephen 154 Les Poseuses 82; 29
Pollux, Julius 69 Riley. Gales ETO Shakespeare Gallery, Boydell’s 154
POPES Rimbaud, Arthur 247, 263, 304 col. 2 nn. Shearman, John $1, 56, 273 n. 2
Eugene IV 99-100 14, 15 Sheldrake, Timothy 156
Gregory I 70 Romney, George 150; 68 Shiff, Richard 48
Gregory XIII 261 Rood, Ogden 78, 209-10, 212-13, 218, Siebenhihner, Herbert 51
Innocent III 71 222-3, 244, 250, 255-6, 300 n. 21 Signac, Paul 78, 87, 168, 196, 212, 214,
Nicholas V 288 n. 32 Roosen-Runge, Heinz 38, 42 216-19, 223, 226, 251, 284 n. 55, 285 n.
Pius VI 261 Rosenstiehl, Auguste 185 94, 300 nn. 35, 50, 302 n. 16
Srxtus IV 35 Rosselli, Cosimo 35 Signorelli, Luca 40
porphyry 293 n. 9 Rothko, Mark 49 Silvéstre, Théophile 198
Porterfield, William 148 Rubens, Peter Paul 45, 53, 226 Skira 65
Poussin, Nicholas 45, 53, 134; 57 Rublev, Andrej 56; 19 Smirke, Robert 155-6, 158
Pre-Raphaelites (see also Millais) 153. Rudolph II, Emperor 45, 127, 130 Smith, R. 148
Previati, Gaetano 303 n.4 Rufillus, Brother 96; frontispiece, 36 Snow White 245
Priestley, Joseph 147-9 Ruisdael, Jacob van 154 Society of Arts 153, 156
‘primitive’ art 108, 253 Runge, Daniel 173 Solinus 122
‘primary shapes’ 252 Runge, Gustav 175 species 128
printing 92, 138 Runge, Philipp Otto 8, 35-6, 46-7, 169- spectacles 90-2; 30, 32
prism (see also glass: optical; quartz) 15, 76, 186, 303 n. 3; 79, 84, 90 Sprengel, C. K. 186
121-33, 152, 194, 290 N. §, 292 nn. $9, Farben-Kugel, Die/Colour-Sphere, The Stefanescu-Goanga, F. 192-3, 250, 252
46, 195; 79 Steffens, Henrik 169, 173-6, 186-7
63; 52-5, 67-8, 87
Provis, Ann Jemima 153-60, 156; 70-1 Times of Day, The 47, 175, 186, 187; 84 Steiner, Rudolf 250, 303 n. 3

319
INDEX

Stobaios, Johannes 85 Titian 19, 40, §0, 84, 161, 282 n.199, 299 Wagner, Richard 219, 226
Stockholm Papyrus 72 n. 03s 7a Walden, Herwath 194
Stokes, Adrian 56 ‘Titian Shade’ 154, 157 Walt Disney 26
Stothard, Thomas 156, 158 Tomaso da Modena 91; 30- 1 Walter-Karydi, E. 39
Strauss, Ernst 37-8 Transfiguration, The 70, 74, 76; 21 Warburg, Aby 65
Stuck, Franz 191 Traversari, Ambrogio 103 Ward, James 16
Sturm Gallery 194 Tresham, Henry 155-6, 158 watercolour-painting 165, 190
Sturm, Der 194-5 Trevor-Roper, Patrick 54 Webster, J. Carson 215
Suger, Abbot 104 triangle, the 124 Werner, A. G. 26, 187, 297 n. 9
Suidas (Suda) 71 Trinity, colours of the 70, 124, 175, 187, Werth, E. 268
Sulzer,J.G. 174 297 n. 33 West, Benjamin 153, 154, 156, 157, 160;
Suprematism 247; 126-7 Trutfetter, Jodocus 125, 130 70, 72
Sutter, David 221 Tschudi, Hugo von 298 n. 44 Westall, Richard 157-8
symbolism 226, 247, 263, 268 Turner,J.M. W. 19, 33, 47, 53, 153, 158- Wiegers, Jan 277 n. 98
Syme, Patrick 26; 7 60, 162-8; 75, 76, 77, 80-2 Wierzbicka, A. 22
synaesthesia 55, 192, 247, 252, 261-8; 88, Twining, Henry 297 col.2 n.14 Wijnants, Jan 154
135, 136 Wilkie, David 153
William of Auvergne 71
No) ere PAOLO 102 Williams, Solomon 160
Wise 34 BROOK 137-8 Urso of Salerno 42 Wilson, Richard 158
Taylor, Thomas 146 Utitz, Emil 249 Wind, Edgar 66
technical treatises (see also Alberti, Anonymus Winfield, David 42
Bernensis, Antonio da Pisa, Bardwell, Witelo 99, 121, 122-4, 126
Beringuccio, Boutet, Cellini, Cennini, {Vie DER LECK, BART 244, 259 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8,14, 30
Cleaver, Compositiones Lucenses, Couture, Van de Velde, Henry 190 Wolfflin, Heinrich 36
Dionysius of Fourna, Field, Grandi, Van Dyck, Anthony138, 163 World Color Survey 29
‘Heraclius’, Ibbetson, Kirby-Talley, Le Van Gogh, Vincent 31, 47-8, 211 Wulff, Oskar 50
Begue, Le Blon, Mappae Clavicula, Vantongerloo, Georges 245, 260 Wundt, Wilhelm 12, 191-2, 242-3, 250,
Mérimée, Peter of St Omer, Provis, ‘Varnishing days’ 168 252
recipe books, Roosen-Runge, Sheldrake, Vasari, Giorgio 35, 84 Wiinsch, Christian Ernst 143
Society of Arts, Stockholm Papyrus, Velasquez, Diego 40
Theophilus, Urso of Salerno, Vibert, ‘Venetian Secret’, the 153-61; 70-1
Williams, Winfield) 42, 101, 153-4, Vermeer, Jan 33
214 Vernet, Horace 197, 198; 93, 94 Dates (INVISIBLE RADIATION) 235-6
Tériade, E. 228-9 Veronese, Paolo 226
Testa, Pietro 45 Vespasiano da Bisticci 103
textiles (see also dress, dyestuffs) 51, 68, 97, Vibert, J.-G. 214, 226, 300 n. 28 Yuwe EDWARD 151; 48
107-8, ITI, 196, 200, 257, 279 n. 139, Vienna Genesis 70
Young, Thomas 143, 223, 226; 113
280 n. 154, 289 n. 4, 299 n. 7; 40, 44 Virgin Mary 13, 15, 42, 76, 84, 87; 16, 23-4
Theodoric of Freiberg 121-3, 125, 132; 50 Vitruvius 35, 43
Theophilus 17-18, 43, 81, 86-7
Theophrastus 69, 72, 85 fae MATTEO 45, 134
Theosophy 242, 250, 260, 267 VV ACKENRODER, WILHELM HEINRICH Zelter, K. F. 173
Tieck, Ludwig 174, 186, 187 186 Ziegler, Jules-Claude 48, 199, 227

320
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John Gage, a graduate of Oxford University and the
Courtauld Institute of Art, has taught at the University
of East Anglia and the Yale Center for British Art. He has
been Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center
for Advanced Research in the Visual Arts, Washington
D.C., and Head of the Department of History of Art at
Cambridge University, where he is presently Reader in
the History of Western Art. An authority on colour and
on Turner, in 1997 John Gage won the Sikkens Prize,
awarded since 1959 by the Sikkens foundation, ‘to
stimulate social, cultural and scientific developments in
which colour plays a specific part’. John Gage’s most
recent book, Colour and Culture, was winner of the
1994 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art, and was
hailed as ‘a book of extraordinary erudition and beau-
ty’ (Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph), ‘In its wonder-
fully lucid command of detail, as well as in many other
ways... exemplary’ (Richard Wollheim, Times Literary
- Supplement), ‘of enormous scope, learned, lucidly writ
ten... indispensable for any scholar of the history of
Western Art’ (Richard Brettell, Apollo), ‘packed with
outof-the way information which, one readily believes,
took thirty years to assemble... enticing to browse in’
(Sir Ernst Gombrich, The Burlington Magazine).

Also by John Gage

COLOUR AND CULTURE

Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction
With 223 illustrations, 120 in colour

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