Colour histories: science, art, and technology in the 17th and 18th centuries

Abstract

Knowledge of the properties, mixtures, harmonies, meanings and uses of colour has always been widely distributed among painters and architects, dyers and printers, pigment producers and merchants, physicists and chemists. This volume focuses on how different communities interacted with respect to their colour knowledge and practices and hereby provides a step towards a better understanding of a central cultural development.

Contents

Systems -- Richard Waller's Table of Colours (1686) / Sachiko Kusukawa -- Perceptions of Colours by Different Eyes / Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis -- Colour Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century: Practice, Systematisation, and Natural Philosophy / Friedrich Steinle -- Dyeing at the Gobelins in the Eighteenth Century: The Challenge of Quemizet / Bruno Belhoste -- Practices -- "Material Colours": The Heritage of Colour Knowledge in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Printshops / Elizabeth Savage -- "Almost an original": Eighteenth-Century French Porcelain and the Materiality of Reproduction / Susan M. Wager -- Border Spectra in the Skies of Hokusai and Hiroshige: Japanese Traces of Newton or Goethe? A Colour Mystery / Olaf Muller -- Kingfisher Blue in Ming Arts: Status Symbol, Material Invention and Intercultural Connections / Aida Yuen Wong -- Concepts -- Colour in Three Seventeenth-Century Scholastic Textbooks / Tawrin Baker -- "Painting upon the Life": Colour Knowledge and Colour Practice in English Art Writing and Cosmetic Treatises of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries / Romana Sammern -- Primary Colours in Eighteenth-Century France: Concepts and Uses / Ulrike Boskamp -- On the "Beauty and Perfection" of Yellow, Red, and Blue: Anton Raphael Mengs and the Origin of Colours / Robin Rehm -- Theories -- Putrid and the Pure: Colour-Theory of a Baroque Neapolitan Alchemist / David Brafman -- Flowering Colour -- Still Life Painting and Baroque Colour Theory / Karin Leonhard -- Colour: from Condemnation in the Scientific Discourse to Rehabilitation in Art Theory / Ioana Magureanu -- Colour Trouble / Theresa M. Kelley.