So, in a way, the color we perceive an object to be is precisely the color it isn’t: that is, the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.
it is the cones that are most responsive to color.
Pure white sunlight was considered a gift from God; it was unthinkable that it could be broken down or, worse still, created by mixing colored lights together.
Disegno represented purity and intellect; colore, the vulgar and effeminate.
the first was that color categories were innate; the second was that if we didn’t possess a word for a color, it affected our perception of it.
We also know that not having a separate word for something does not mean we can’t distinguish it. The Greeks, of course, could see colors perfectly; perhaps they just found them less interesting than we do.
White
white has an otherness to it.
anything you add to that pigment will only take it in one direction: toward black.
Artists were so generous with their use of lead white that, today, when paintings are X-rayed, its dense outline can form a kind of skeleton within a painting, allowing technicians to see alterations and later additions.
poisonous makeup
undermining the Shogun regime,
Lewis Chessmen,
models for the wizards’ chess set in the first Harry Potter film.
over half of China’s current supply of ivory may have come from woolly mammoth tusks.
Diego Huallpa built a fire to keep the chill of the alpine night at bay. As the fire burned, the ground beneath it began to ooze liquid silver, like blood from a wound.
In Scottish folklore a silver branch, covered with white blossoms or bearing silver apples, could act as a kind of passport into the fairy otherworld.
The metal was also thought to be able to detect poisons, changing color if it came into contact with one. This belief became so widespread that silver tableware became fashionable and then the standard.
silver’s link with the night.
Silver also waxes and wanes in alternate cycles of polishing and tarnishing.
Argentina’s name is derived from the Latin argentum, meaning silvery.)
Whitewash is the cheapest of paints,
Its disinfectant qualities mean that it has always been popular with dairy farmers,
1601 Isabella’s husband, Archduke Albert VII of Austria, began the siege of Ostend. Isabella, believing the siege would be short-lived, vowed she would not change or wash her underwear until he won Isabelline is the color the queen’s linens had become when the siege finally ended three years later.
White Horse, for example, is one of the stylized chalk figures created in Europe during the Late Bronze Age. It still prances high on a hillside on the edge of the Berkshire Downs in southern England.
painstakingly constructed by cutting shallow trenches and filling them with chalk.
“beige." The word [beige] was loaned in the mid-nineteenth century from French, where it referred to a kind of cloth made from undyed sheep’s wool.
“that somehow beige is interpreted as a neutral—an ambiguous color that everyone will like.” 4 In fact the situation is even worse than that: the hope is not that everyone will like it, but that it won’t offend anyone. It could be the concept-color of the bourgeoisie: conventional, sanctimonious, and materialistic.
evolved from being sheep-colored to being the color adopted by the sheeplike.
Yellow
Chrome yellow Beresof gold mine in deepest Siberia.
new element. 4 It was a metal, which he named chrome or chromium,
Research carried out on Van Gogh’s paintings in Amsterdam over the past few years has shown that some of the chrome yellow in the flowers’ petals has darkened significantly, due to the reaction of chrome yellow with other pigments in sunlight. 6 Van Gogh’s sunflowers, it seems, are wilting, just as their real-life counterparts did.
Gamboge is the solidified sap of Garcinia trees, and comes principally from Cambodia—
It takes over a year for the bamboo to fill up and the sap to harden. When some unprocessed resinous clots were broken open during the rule of the Khmer Rouge, it was discovered that they contained stray bullets, trapped like ancient insects in amber.
“an excellent and powerful purgative.” Just a small amount could produce “profuse watery discharges”; larger doses could be fatal. 9
Brownian motion, 10 an idea Einstein posited three years earlier. Using tiny puddles of gamboge solution, just 0.005 in. deep, Perrin showed that, even days after being left untouched, the little yellow particles still jiggled around as if they were alive.
orpiment is actually a naturally occurring mineral;
used in ancient Egyptian art.
Eberhard Rumphius recalled seeing a woman who had taken too much in Batavia (now Jakarta), in 1660, in his book The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet. She had become mad, “and climbed up the walls like a cat.”
In China even regular yellow had been special for over a thousand years.
Each color corresponded with a season, direction, element, planet, and animal. Yellow was allied with the element of earth—an ancient Chinese saying is “The sky is blackish blue and the earth is yellow”—the center, Saturn, late or long summer, and the dragon.
“Common people and officials,” it read, “are forbidden to wear clothes or accessories in reddish yellow.”
Like its sister metals iron, copper, and silver, gold has a structure that contains mobile electrons that strongly reflect light.
Objects, when rendered in flat gold leaf, do not look real; the light falls across them evenly rather than glinting white off the highlights and falling blackly into the shadowed areas as it would do naturally.
Orange
orange referred to first, the color or the fruit, fruit was probably first cultivated in China,
“Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers.”
in Ireland, where Protestants are known as Orangemen. 6
In part this is because orange wasn’t seen as a separate color in its own right until relatively recently
Take the humble carrot, for example. Originally a tough and rather bitter tuber from South America, prior to the seventeenth century it was usually purple or yellow. Over the next 100 years, however, Dutch famers selectively bred carrots to produce orange varieties.
the Amber Room,
intricately carved panels and mosaics made of glowing honeyed amber, studded with semiprecious stones and backed by gold leaf.
Phaeton’s sisters, the Heliades, whose grief over the death of their brother is so fierce that they are turned into poplar trees, their cascading tears transfigured into droplets of golden amber. 6
Angélica Dass.
2,500 portraits of different people from around the world.
Each is dyed to match the subject’s complexion (a sample is taken from the face), and the matching alphanumeric Pantone code is printed at the bottom. Angélica is a Pantone 7522 C.
Pink
“Pink & Blue Project,” which began in 2005, the Korean photographer JeongMee Yoon captures images of children surrounded by their possessions. All the little girls sit marooned in identical pink seas.
late 1979 a professor announced that he had found a way of making people less aggressive, the nation pricked up its ears. The secret, Alexander G. Schauss announced in the pages of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, was a sickly shade of bright pink.
amaranth has long been revered. Its name is homonymic, referring to the plant and also meaning “everlasting.” Garlands of amaranth were used to honor heroes like Achilles because they hinted, with their long-lasting blooms, at immortality.
popped amaranth, mixed with honey, is still used to make a sweet called alegria (“ happiness”) in Mexico. 7
Red
Ancient Egyptians wrapped mummies in linens dyed with hematite [here]; Osiris, god of the afterlife and underworld, was also known as the “lord of the red cloth.”
kermes dye was made from the bodies of insects so small that they were often mistaken for seeds or grains.
vermilion (mercury sulfide) comes from the mineral cinnabar.
red is associated with life—celebration, sex, joy—danger, and death.
The belief was that elephants had cooling blood and dragons, during the dry season,
craved something cool to slake their thirst. The dragons would hide in trees, waiting to ambush any elephants that might wander underneath, and then pounce. Sometimes they killed the elephants outright and drank their blood, but sometimes the elephant would crush the dragon and they would die together, their two bloods mixing to form a red resinous substance called dragon’s blood. 3
Purple
While the local Mixtec people, who had been using the caracol for centuries, milked the snails of their purple, leaving them alive, Purpura Imperial’s method was rather more fatal for the snails, and the population went into freefall. After years of lobbying the contract was revoked.
Were one to crack open the shell of one of these spiky, carnivorous gastropods, one would see a pale hypobranchial gland or “bloom” transecting its body. If this were squeezed, a single drop of clear liquid, smelling of garlic, would be released. Within moments, the sunlight would turn the liquid first pale yellow, then sea green, then blue, and finally a dark purple-red.
heliotrope often signified devotion, which is partly why it was one of the few colors women were allowed to wear after the death of a loved one.
Blue
It is also used to treat people with thallium and radioactive cesium poisoning, as it prevents the body from absorbing them. The only side effect is alarmingly blue feces. 7
William, a small ceramic statuette of a hippopotamus, can now be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Hippos were dangerous creatures, both in real life and in mythology, where they might upset your journey to the underworld. Figurines like this had their legs broken (William’s have subsequently been repaired) and were placed in tombs as talismans to protect their occupants on their onward journeys.
St. Elmo’s fire, for example, which dances on ships’ masts and across the windows in airplanes during storms, is bright blue, sometimes tinted with violet [here]. The effect is caused by the air becoming ionized: nitrogen and oxygen molecules become violently excited, releasing photons visible to the naked eye.
Many Hindu gods, including Krishna, Shiva, and Rama, are depicted with skin the color of the sky, symbolizing their affinity with the infinite.
Green
In the latter half of the nineteenth century whole districts of Paris were said to smell faintly herbal between 5 and 6 p.m., a time that became known as l’heure verte (“ the green hour”).
“Absinthomania” was increasingly seen as a medical complaint quite distinct from mere alcoholism. People were reporting hallucinations and permanent insanity.
The real problem with absinthe is that it is very alcoholic, varying between 55 and 75 percent, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Europe was experiencing widespread social upheaval of the kind that led many to become alcoholics.
Prior to this, during the Middle Ages, when each deadly sin had a corresponding color, green had been twinned with avarice and yellow with envy.
Napoleon’s body was exhumed in 1840 it was found to be curiously well preserved, a symptom of arsenic poisoning. A sample of his hair, tested in the twentieth century, was also found to contain abnormally high levels of the poison. Once it was discovered in the 1980s that the walls of his damp little room in St. Helena were papered with a verdant design containing Scheele’s green, the rumor spread that the British had poisoned their difficult prisoner.
In order to finally settle the question of Napoleon’s death, they tested other samples of hair from different stages of his life, and found that the levels of arsenic had remained relatively stable. They were, yes, very high by today’s standards, but not at all unusual for his.
Brown
For medieval artists, who disliked mixing on principle and saw the glory of God reflected in the use of pure precious materials like ultramarine [here] and gold [here], brown was inherently corrupt.
word russet used to denote a type of cloth rather than a color.
russet cloth was for the poor.
sepia (the ink of the cuttlefish)
Black
the black line is art’s foundation stone.
Qadi Ahmad, was under little doubt of ink’s numinous power. “The ink of the scholar,” he wrote, “is more holy than the blood of the martyr.” 10
black kind of jet is anything but insubstantial. Also known as lignite, it is a kind of coal formed over millennia from highly pressurized wood; when fine enough, it is so hard it can be carved and polished to an almost glasslike sheen.
Odin’s ravens were particularly esteemed. Named Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory), they traveled the world on his behalf, gathering information for him and making him all but omniscient.
“Pitch” is an appropriate epithet: just as the resinous wood-tar residue might stick to a careless hand, darkness can seem to cling and weigh us down.
Nyx, the ancient Greek goddess of night, is the daughter of Chaos; her own children include sleep, but also, more ominously, anguish, discord, and death.
Latin word for the darkest matte black is ater (there is another word, niger, reserved for the glossy, benign variety of black), which led to Latin words for ugly, sad, and dirty, and is also the etymological root for the English word atrocious. 5
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
