"Venetian Colour"
Afropea
quite fascinating. It covers Venetian art from the period between 1250 to
1550. Although it resembles a coffee table book in size and appearance, it's
actually a thoughtful study of the practical application of color theory.
Hill begins by reviewing Venetian mosaics and explains how their color schemes
were eventually applied to painting. Colors could be chosen not only for their
symbolical value, but also for complicated optical considerations. He
describes, for example, how changing light or various intensities could
manipulate a viewer's perception of subject matter. Of course it was more than
just how an artist used individual colors as the application of multiple colors
in conjunction with each other created significant visual effects.
Particular colors such as yellow were problematic. This was due both to the
negative symbolic association of yellow and the fact that as light changed
yellow might appear to "stick out" in appropriately. The author also explained
why the color brown does not appear till late in the period (in fact a this
time few Italian words that were even in use to describe the color brown).
HIll discusses color in glass and how the work of the glassmakers influenced
those colors found in Venetian paintings. There's also some wonderful
discussion on the use of color in architecture and why many of the colors and
materials found in Venice are neither found in nor would be appropriate in
other cities such as Florence.
Here's an excerpt that shows how the subtle use of color gives meaning to a
work of religious art. He's describing Bellini's famous "Pieta" from the late
1460s.
<<The devotional traditions of Christian art and poetry had long privileged
pallor and whiteness. Eucharistically the body of Christ is the white wafer,
the host, his blood is the red wine. Bellini took this devotional tradition
and integrated it with a contemporary feel for the candour of marble. The
flesh tones of the three protagonists are differentiated. John is slightly
flushed with sorrow; Mary is pale with the pain of compassion; Christ turns
almost green in death, the blood drained from his lips, his marmoreal pallor
emphasized by contrast with the blood of his wounds. Along the shadowed
contour or Christ's left arm blood is congealed as a red trace, a telltale sign
the this same arm was recently stretched up, nailed to the Cross.
In leaning forward to support her son, the Virgin casts a shadow across his
right shoulder and down his upper arm, therby bringing shadow within touch at
the very front of the picture. And shadow is also foregrounded within its
subject; as childbirth is the issuing into light--and Lucina its Roman tutelary
goddess--so the fall of shadow on Christ's flesh is adumbration of the passage
from life to death and from death to rebirth. In this way Bellini's shadow
elides two classical meaning of umbra as shadow and as ghost or shade of the
departed. In the contemporary diaries of Marin Sanudo the use the Italian verb
ombrare in the figurative sense of to number, include or present, as well as
the literal 'to shadow', is common.
A shadow falls on the body, clouds veil the sky. Clouds in many of Bellini's
devotional pictures set the key for the inwardness of the saints, outwards
tokens of the veiling of thoughts hidden behind lowered and unseeing eyes;
clouds of unknowing. Whereas the brightness of the traditional gold halo has
been attenuated to a single arc. Bellini's clouds are touched by aura, so
though the glory of sacred presence has been diffused in nature. In the
interplay of shadow and cloud, near and distant, Bellini preserved within the
optical continuum of Renaissance painting consoling sites of concealment and
dissimulation, of veiling from light--and sight.>>
Eve
mary_...@cix.compulink.co.uk
afr...@aol.com (Afropea) wrote:
[...]
> Particular colors such as yellow were problematic. This
>was due both to the negative symbolic association of yellow
>and the fact that as light changed yellow might appear to
>"stick out" in appropriately. The author also explained
> why the color brown does not appear till late in the period
>(in fact a this time few Italian words that were even in use
>to describe the color brown).
If you could expand on these two points, I'd be interested.
I knew that yellow had some negative associations -- later on
it's associated with prostitutes, which on the whole don't
get a positive press. I hadn't really thought about brown.
Mary
Afropea
>If you could expand on these two points, I'd be interested.
>I knew that yellow had some negative associations -- later on
>it's associated with prostitutes, which on the whole don't
>get a positive press.
Yellow was also associated with Jews. Further info on this can be found in
"Outcasts: The Signs of Otherness In Northern European Art of the Late Middle
Ages" by Ruth Mellinkoff. It was considered unsuitable to dress holy figures
in this color.
<<I hadn't really thought about brown.>>
How many people do? ;-)
Here's what Hills has to say--
<<In medieval Europe the medium which above all others set the standard for the
beauty of intense colour, what Italians termed bellezza di color, was stained
glass. Now it is hardly surprising that brown is a colour that comes across
badly in stained glass. Tertiary or impure colours such as brown or beige
cannot be matched by spectral browns; what might have been brown tends to be
replaced in glass by grey, by red or by violet or mauve hues, known in Italy
from the mid-fourteenth century by the term biffo.
Neither Latin nor Italian trecento vocabulary was rich in words for brown:
Petrarch and Boccaccio do not use terms such as marrone or castagno, relying on
the unspecific and latinate bruno. In medieval texts, brown, brunum, is
referred to as a dead colour, color mortuum. The range between brown and gold
was generally considered too muddy to dignify a painting; brown looked dull
beside vermilion or ultramarine. Purplish hues such as biffo, on the other
hand, enliven golds and yellows by complementary contrast.
Systems of classification may have played a part in impeding exploration of the
value of brown. In Leon Battista Alberti's writings the four elements are
associated with what he calls the four genera of colour: fire is red, air is
blue...water is green and earth is ash colour...As John Gage has noted, this
denomination of earth as ash accords with Alberti's Aristotelian system of a
scale of colours between the poles of black and white in which the ash grey of
earth represents a mean. In this scheme all colours partake of earth. The
single scale from black to white leaves no place to assign to what would now be
called tertiary or mixed colours such as brown.
The Venetians were not alone in representing browns--one can point to earlier
examples in Netherlandish painting and contemporary ones in Ferrarese-but they
are to the fore in demonstrating the potential richness of brown as a colour.
Here it may be significant that mosaic rather than stained glass had embodied
the dominant tradition of brilliant colour in Venice, because in mosaic mixed
tones of browns, sands and beige are vital in the modeling. Taking their cue
from the mosaicists, Venetian painters from from Paolo Veneziano onwards used
less green and more brown and red in their flesh colouring than the Tuscans.
Again, the influx in the late fifteenth century of Cretan icons, such as those
by Andreas Ritzos, with their solemn brown purple for the Madonna's mantle may
have reawakened Venetian esteem for the values of brown because of its
association with that most imperial and yet indefinable of colours, purple.
Exploration of the brown region of the palette was propelled by the change from
tempera to oil as binder, for the adoption of oil expanded the number of glazes
at a painter's disposal, and glazes have a natural tendency, when applied over
a pale ground, to create warm tones. Glowing golds or amber browns can be
achieved more readily in oil. In chalcedony glass, which was attracting
admiration at the end of the fifteenth century, rich browns swirled between
scherzi of jades and violets. In addition, the disappearance by 1500 of gold
backgrounds--those areas of burnished and highly reflective gold that
overwhelmed subtle golden-hued or brownish tints within a painting--freed the
golden to be treated as colour, to be mixed with other tints or experienced as
part of a gradation from the flaxen to the brown. In terms of colour
appearance brown is nothing but a darkened yellow, therefore it is noteworthy
that Giovanni Bellini, who was so cautious in his use of yellow, should have
responded to brown.
Eve
Martin Reboul
Afropea wrote:
I'd add that in magical associations and some religions, yellow is the 'colour of
death', and associated with disease, sickness and bad luck. Second hand car
salesmen will tell you that yellow is one of the hardest colours to sell, and a
yellow car can be worth signifcantly less S/H than another exactly the same of
another colour. I for one won't have a yellow car..... though that is mainly
because yellow paint fades in the sun and is difficult to match!
Cheers
Martin
Afropea
>I'd add that in magical associations and some religions, yellow is the 'colour
>of
>death', and associated with disease, sickness and bad luck.
>Second hand car
>salesmen will tell you that yellow is one of the hardest colours to sell,
>and a
>yellow car can be worth signifcantly less S/H than another exactly the same
>of
>another colour. I for one won't have a yellow car..... though that is mainly
>because yellow paint fades in the sun and is difficult to match!
OTH, in religions based on Yoruban beliefs (forgiving my possible spelling
errors) such as Voudon in Haiti, Candomble in Brazil and Brouharia in Cuba,
yellow is the color water goddess Yemanja (feel free to correct me if I have
the name wrong) and therefore the color of sex and love. It was common to wear
yellow colored underwear in hopes of "getting lucky".
Perhaps you should reconsider that yellow car? ;-)
Eve
Afropea
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/hills.html
I neglected to mention that he also had a wonderful chapter discussing fabric
and dyes. This was not so much a "how to" discussion as an explanation of the
social meaning between the different colors and shades. For anyone interested
in Renaissance costume I'd say this was a must.
I just took out the same author's book on the use of "light" in the Early
Renaissance. I'll let you know if I find it worthwhile.
Eve
David C. Pugh
Afropea <afr...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20011028100727...@mb-cn.aol.com...
> Martin Reboul says
>
> >I'd add that in magical associations and some religions, yellow is
the 'colour
> >of
> >death', and associated with disease, sickness and bad luck.
>
> >Second hand car
> >salesmen will tell you that yellow is one of the hardest colours to
sell,
> >and a
> >yellow car can be worth signifcantly less S/H than another exactly
the same
> >of
> >another colour. I for one won't have a yellow car..... though that
is mainly
> >because yellow paint fades in the sun and is difficult to match!
Damn! I bought a yellow car in August. "Flame gold", they call it.
Just as well I intend to run it until it dies -- Toyota, so that will
be a long time.......
> OTH, in religions based on Yoruban beliefs (forgiving my possible
spelling
> errors) such as Voudon in Haiti, Candomble in Brazil and Brouharia
in Cuba,
> yellow is the color water goddess Yemanja (feel free to correct me
if I have
> the name wrong) and therefore the color of sex and love. It was
common to wear
> yellow colored underwear in hopes of "getting lucky".
>
> Perhaps you should reconsider that yellow car? ;-)
That's more like it!! Thank you, Eve, from chagrin to optimism in the
course of a single post!
David
Martin Reboul
Afropea wrote:
Not the watersports goddess I hope (sorry, shockin' bad taste!).
> Perhaps you should reconsider that yellow car? ;-)
I did have one once.... a Dolomite Sprint, tuned to destruction, one of the most
lethal machines I've ever known. 'Mimosa' the paint was called, though the Demon
Rust came to my aid, and destroyed her before I wrapped her around a lamp post
fortunately. Never again!
Cheers
Martin