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Colour and Culture : Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction
Unfamiliar texts from all periods are featured, from the treatise that inspired Van Gogh to physicians' scales of hair and urine colours, and fresh light is thrown on the hidden meanings of many familiar masterpieces. The 20th century is often called the period when colour has finally come into its own. This is an attempt to examine what this claim means, and to suggest answers to many perennial questions about the role of colour.
336 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 23, 2017
The author gives a heads-up in the first paragraph of the Introduction that "...this is not an academic book." and that "...thus my book opens and closes with instance of how a failure to look at colour comprehensively has led to absurdities of theory, if not of practice."
I'm not sure how you can look at color comprehensively to try and expose past problematic theories without an academic approach. And in an attempt to do so, this book seems sometimes unorganized, sometimes rambling on without a point, and sometimes too full of historic names, dates, people, and places without clear organization.
This approach (the feeling that the human soul has been taken out of the color equation) isn't a new one. It's the same approach of Faber Birren in his two volumes Monument to Color and The Story of Color. Birren included some of the same information without what I felt was an overload of facts.
The one section I did appreciate was the author's look at the rainbow as portrayed by artists through the ages including a nice selection of color reproductions. Still, it isn't enough to make this book a good addition to my library. I had buyer's remorse 10 minutes into this book.
I'm not sure how you can look at color comprehensively to try and expose past problematic theories without an academic approach. And in an attempt to do so, this book seems sometimes unorganized, sometimes rambling on without a point, and sometimes too full of historic names, dates, people, and places without clear organization.
This approach (the feeling that the human soul has been taken out of the color equation) isn't a new one. It's the same approach of Faber Birren in his two volumes Monument to Color and The Story of Color. Birren included some of the same information without what I felt was an overload of facts.
The one section I did appreciate was the author's look at the rainbow as portrayed by artists through the ages including a nice selection of color reproductions. Still, it isn't enough to make this book a good addition to my library. I had buyer's remorse 10 minutes into this book.
March 11, 2008
ok read-some interesting parts
February 28, 2017
I think that help me to find more about colour within cultural ideal for my degree project
May 18, 2025
This book, undeniably interesting, is a very dense document. It is impeccably presented with plenty of colour plates. I shudder to think how it could be contextualised in an era where that kind of printing was too expensive to contemplate. In truth it lost me at times, particularly in the last chapter and the twentieth century. It also seemed to end very abruptly, with no concluding chapter or summing-up. Each chapter was an essay in itself, only connected to the rest by the overarching subject matter (and ‘colour’, as a subject matter, is pretty broad). I found the chapters about, say, the medieval symbology of colour far more appealing than Mondrian’s justification for pre-empting screensavers.
Facts:
Metamerism: colours appear different under different lights.
Apelles, in the fourth century, was the first to be attributed a four-colour palette of black, white, red and yellow.
An 18th century scholar calculated you could get 819 colorus from these.
Greek and Roman artists didn’t mix colours on the palette. Instead they did superimposed hatching.
The colour circle came out of scales for measuring the colour of urine.
Quotes:
‘At exactly this time the philosopher John of Salisbury developed a radical notion that art is a transformer of nature, improving on nature’s own methods by her methodon, or purposeful plan, ‘which avoids nature’s wastefulness and straightens out her circuitous wanderings.’’
Marsilio Ficino, ‘the experience of the light of Heaven itself had become an experience of laughter: ‘What is light in the heavens? Abundance of life from the angels, unfolding of power from the heaven, and laughter of the sky.’
Alberti: ‘If some indulgence must be given to error, then those who use black extravagantly are less to be blamed than those who employ white somewhat intemperately.’
Leonardo: Stain the paper medium dark, put in the darkest shades, then the principal lights in little spots, which are those first lost to the eye at a short distance.
El Greco: ‘Michaelangelo was a fine chap but did not know how to paint.’
George Sarton: ‘Ancient Alchemy and Abstract Art [...] a treasure of nonsense available to every irrational endeavour.’ Nowadays we might be inclined to substitute economists for abstract artists and invoke the occult power of the market.
Odile Redon: ‘His palette [...] is doubtless incomplete when he asks of it that fundamental grey which distinguishes the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.’
Goethe: ‘Painting is truer for the eye than reality itself. It presents what man would like to see and should see, not what he habitually sees.’
‘Black, said Cassagne, was the most fundamental colour in nature, entering into all three primaries to form an infinite variety of greys, those greys which were an important feature of van Gogh’s palette in Holland and with which he was still seeking to come to terms in Arles.’
Gauguin: ‘Seek for harmony and not contrast, for what accords, not what clashes. It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable colour to every object: as I have said to you, beware of this stumbling block.’
‘One of the assumptions developed [by Blue Reiter] was that at the level of sensual apprehension, pleasure in bright, saturated colour was common to all periods and peoples and that only the higher levels of aesthetic appreciation were the result of acculturation.’
Goethe: ‘From these three, light, shade and colour, we construct the visible world, and thus, at the same time, make painting possible, an art which has the power of producing on a flat surface a much more perfect visible world than the actual one can be.’
Field: ‘the inferior materials of the Old Masters meant that their key of colouring was necessarily lower, and compelled them to harmonise much below nature.’
Facts:
Metamerism: colours appear different under different lights.
Apelles, in the fourth century, was the first to be attributed a four-colour palette of black, white, red and yellow.
An 18th century scholar calculated you could get 819 colorus from these.
Greek and Roman artists didn’t mix colours on the palette. Instead they did superimposed hatching.
The colour circle came out of scales for measuring the colour of urine.
Quotes:
‘At exactly this time the philosopher John of Salisbury developed a radical notion that art is a transformer of nature, improving on nature’s own methods by her methodon, or purposeful plan, ‘which avoids nature’s wastefulness and straightens out her circuitous wanderings.’’
Marsilio Ficino, ‘the experience of the light of Heaven itself had become an experience of laughter: ‘What is light in the heavens? Abundance of life from the angels, unfolding of power from the heaven, and laughter of the sky.’
Alberti: ‘If some indulgence must be given to error, then those who use black extravagantly are less to be blamed than those who employ white somewhat intemperately.’
Leonardo: Stain the paper medium dark, put in the darkest shades, then the principal lights in little spots, which are those first lost to the eye at a short distance.
El Greco: ‘Michaelangelo was a fine chap but did not know how to paint.’
George Sarton: ‘Ancient Alchemy and Abstract Art [...] a treasure of nonsense available to every irrational endeavour.’ Nowadays we might be inclined to substitute economists for abstract artists and invoke the occult power of the market.
Odile Redon: ‘His palette [...] is doubtless incomplete when he asks of it that fundamental grey which distinguishes the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.’
Goethe: ‘Painting is truer for the eye than reality itself. It presents what man would like to see and should see, not what he habitually sees.’
‘Black, said Cassagne, was the most fundamental colour in nature, entering into all three primaries to form an infinite variety of greys, those greys which were an important feature of van Gogh’s palette in Holland and with which he was still seeking to come to terms in Arles.’
Gauguin: ‘Seek for harmony and not contrast, for what accords, not what clashes. It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable colour to every object: as I have said to you, beware of this stumbling block.’
‘One of the assumptions developed [by Blue Reiter] was that at the level of sensual apprehension, pleasure in bright, saturated colour was common to all periods and peoples and that only the higher levels of aesthetic appreciation were the result of acculturation.’
Goethe: ‘From these three, light, shade and colour, we construct the visible world, and thus, at the same time, make painting possible, an art which has the power of producing on a flat surface a much more perfect visible world than the actual one can be.’
Field: ‘the inferior materials of the Old Masters meant that their key of colouring was necessarily lower, and compelled them to harmonise much below nature.’
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2023
Cage provides a relatively brief history of the development of attitudes to and understanding of color over time (335 pages). It isn't a book I'd recommend reading from cover to cover, more a book to read when there is an interest in a particular period.
August 11, 2025
I would say this book is for people with advanced art history background- there were so many references to artists and artworks that I don’t know about. My interest is piqued though, and I intend to learn more.
January 2, 2024
Gage made an effort to be thorough but in doing so ran across the need for an edit. I’m not sure he needed to name check so many minor figures.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews