Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds

289 Early Modern Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Color Worlds www.brill.com/esm Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds Tawrin Baker, Sven Dupré, Sachiko Kusukawa, Karin Leonhard Thirty years ago Henry Guerlac was working on an edited volume of Newton’s Opticks, which unfortunately was not completed before his death.1 In a posthumously published article occasioned by this project he wrote: it was not long before I discovered how rich is the rapidly growing literature on the subject [of geometrical optics], yet how little, and that limited in scope, has been written about the physical theories of light and color before Newton.2 Guerlac’s article offered only a brief tour through nearly two thousand years of debate on the subject of a single question – whether there are colors in the dark – but his judgment on the historiography of color within the history of science was accurate. Since then few historians of science have followed him in attempting to fill this lacuna, and his judgment about the limited scope such treatments of color evince largely still holds true. This is particularly the case in the early modern period.3 Compounding this oversight is the fact that, among the few studies of color in the history of science in this period, most are ultimately preoccupied with Newton. Furthermore, even the scope of Guerlac’s statement was itself narrow, being concerned with the theoretical understanding of light and color alone rather than color practices. As outlined below, it has been historians of art, rather than science, who have engaged most broadly and ambitiously with the history of color in the early modern period.4 1 Marie Boas Hall, “Eloge: Henry Guerlac, 10 June 1910–29 May 1985,” Isis, 77 (1986), 504–6. 2 Henry Guerlac, “Can There Be Colors in the Dark? Physical Color Theory before Newton,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986), 3–20, on 4. 3 However, see Colour Histories: Science, Art, and Technology in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. by Magdalena Bushart and Friedrich Steinle (this was forthcoming at the time the present introduction was written). 4 Much has been written about Newton and his interpretation of color in the history of art, too, and recently there have been rewarding conferences on this subject and the period which was ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) ISSN 1573-3823 (online version) ESM 1 Early Sciencebrill and nv, Medicine 20 (2015) © koninklijke leiden, 2015 | doi289-307 10.1163/15733823-02046p01 Early Modern Color Worlds 290 baker et al. Within the history of science and medicine, even narrowly considered, color is an important topic for the history of vision (of which mathematical optics can be considered a subset), medical theory and practice, alchemy and chymistry, natural history (especially in connection with plants and gems),5 scientific methodology and the relationship between science and technology. Many of these domains figured prominently in Scientific Revolution narratives that were foundational for the history of science as a discipline towards the middle of the twentieth century, but at that time color was generally only included as an example of the supposed reclassification of sensible qualities concomitant with the revival of ancient atomism and the rise of the mechanical philosophy. More specifically, color was referred to in the context of the formation of an “objective” notion of color in the seventeenth century, to be contrasted with the supposed “subjective” understanding of color among scholastics; many historians and philosophers connected this supposedly new objective understanding of color with the primary-secondary quality distinction introduced in the seventeenth century.6 A key example of such narratives is E.A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, but this sort of account has since cropped up in many places in the secondary literature.7 While Burtt’s narrative had significant influence on mid-century treatments of the Scientific Revolution in particular, a focus on the primary-secondary quality distinction has become less prominent in accounts of this period by historians of science,8 5 6 7 8 to follow. See e.g.: Verfeinertes Sehen: Optik und Farbe im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. by Werner Busch (Munich, 2008); Sarah Lowengard, The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Irvington, 2008); Ulrike Boskamp, Primärfarben und Farbharmonie. Farbe in der französischen Naturwissenschaft, Kunstliteratur und Malerei des 18. Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 2009); Werner Busch, ed., Nachbilder. Das Gedächtnis des Auges in Kunst und Wissenschaft (Zürich, 2011). For a discussion of color connecting natural history and the histories of medicine, art and the book, see Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago and London, 2012), 55–61, 63–81. Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity (Princeton, 1960), 40–2, 106. Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton (Princeton, 1961), 423–4; 431–3. Alfred Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science: 1500–1750 (New York, 1983; 1st ed. 1954), 104–6, 285. (cf. p. 169 in 1962 ed.). Marie Boas, The Scientific Renaissance 1450–1630 (New York, 1962), 260–4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1996; 1st ed. 1962), 104. See also H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago, 1994), 94–97. E.A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, Revised Edition (Garden City, 1954; 1st rev. ed. 1932). See especially Lorraine Daston, “History of Science in an Elegiac Mode: E.A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science Revisited,” Isis, 82, (1991), 522–31. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 291 although it continues to have currency in other fields.9 Perhaps most importantly, it is a clear example of precisely that narrow scope that Guerlac mentioned, as almost all discussions of color in this context are purely philosophical and are confined to a few well-known figures; moreover, in this context color itself is rarely investigated other than as an example of a sensible quality. Yet it is rather the case that color deserves a more nuanced treatment. The notion that we principally see color, rather than light, was the dominant opinion prior to the seventeenth century; by the end of that century, the notion that color is an affection of light was almost universally accepted, but the contours of this shift are as yet poorly understood. Moreover, throughout the early modern period sight was usually considered to be the most noble sense and was privileged in accounts of how knowledge is gathered from the senses. Changes to the understanding of color, as well as historical actors’ engagement with color phenomena in science, medicine and art, not to mention literary color practices, certainly deserve a place in accounts of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our use of ‘Color Worlds’ as a category of analysis, outlined in more detail below, is intended to highlight the many color disciplines and practices in this period, to address the problem of boundaries between them, and to emphasize points of connection when evident. A history of chemistry without reference to color is impossible, and the topic of color abounds in works by historians of chemistry. The imitation of the visible properties of natural objects – precious metals and gems, especially – through artifice is considered a driving force in the original development of Beginning with Richard. S. Westfall, The Construction of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1992; 1st ed. 1971), major treatments of the Scientific Revolution have tended not to place the primarysecondary quality distinction as a major component of the scientific revolution. One exception is Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1998), 52–5. His account, however, is largely a paraphrase of Burtt. A good marker of this shift in emphasis among historians of science is that there is only one, brief analysis of the primary-secondary distinction in the third volume of The Cambridge History of Science: Lynn S. Joy, “Scientific Explanation from Formal Causes to Laws of Nature,” in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge, 2006), 87–93. 9 In philosophy, see Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, eds., Readings on Color, Vol. 1: The Philosophy of Color (Cambridge, 1997); Lawrence Nolan, ed., Primary and Secondary Qualities: The Historical and Ongoing Debate (Oxford, 2011). In the introduction to the latter Nolan writes that “‘mechanical philosophers’ drew a distinction between primary and secondary qualities and this distinction was at the heart of the new science,” and while (he says) this distinction has roots in the ancient and scholastic thought, “the formulation in the modern period (roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) is rightly regarded as definitive.” Ibid., 1–2. In psychology, see Thomas Hardy Leahey, “Cognition and Learning,” in Handbook of Psychology, Volume 1: History of Psychology, ed. Donald K. Freedheim and Irving B. Veiner (Hoboken, 2003), 114. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 292 baker et al. alchemy, and mastery over color phenomena is a major part of alchemy, chymistry as well as chemistry at every point in these disciplines’ history.10 Yet while color is often mentioned, there nevertheless remain few dedicated treatments of color in the history of alchemy and chymistry in the early modern period.11 Historians have traced the development of color indicators,12 the connection between alchemical theory and artisanal practice,13 and the connection between alchemy and optics.14 In all of these areas significant work remains to be done – particularly in mapping the various theoretical color notions among early modern chymists and connecting them to chymical and medical practice, not to mention the fact that there are many areas besides that remain unexplored. In the Hippocritean and Galenic medical traditions, colors were associated with the four humors, and the understanding of complexion lies at the heart of medical theory and practice. The further development of an idea of complexion by Avicenna and later medieval and Renaissance physicians suggested an intricate relationship between color, physical (and what we would now consider mental) constitution, health and disease. Discriminating subtle differences in color was a key part of uroscopy, and urine color charts were created with the purported aim of helping physicians on this basis.15 Domenico Bertoloni Meli has also recently pointed to the shifting attitudes toward the epistemic significance of color (particularly the many colors of blood) at the intersection of medicine, anatomy and philosophy in the seventeenth centu- 10 11 12 13 14 15 William R. Newman, Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature (Chicago, 2005). For a slightly earlier period, see Spike Bucklow, The Alchemy of Paint: Art, Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages (London, 2009). Allen G. Debus, “Sir Thomas Browne and the Study of Colour Indicators,” Ambix, 10 (1962), 29–36. William Eamon, “New Light on Robert Boyle and the Discovery of Colour Indicators,” Ambix, 27 (1980), 204–9. Pamela H. Smith, “Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking,” in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, eds. Ursula Klein and E.C. Spary (Chicago, 2010), 29–49. Margaret D. Garber, “Chymical Wonders of Light: J. Marcus Marci’s Seventeenth-Century Bohemian Optics,” Early Science and Medicine, 10 (2005), 478–509. William R. Newman, “Newton’s Early Optical Theory and its Debt to Chymistry,” in Lumière et vision dans les sciences et dans les arts, eds. Danielle Jacquart and Michel Hochmann (Geneva, 2010), 283–307. Michael Stolberg, “The Decline of Uroscopy in Early Modern Learned Medicine (1500– 1650),” Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2007), 313–36. Laurence Moulinier-Brogi, L’uroscopie au Moyen Âge: ‘lire dans un verre la nature de l’homme’ (Paris, 2012). Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 293 ry.16 Nevertheless, there is much still to be uncovered about the understanding and use of color by physicians, particularly the theoretical underpinnings of color by physicians of all allegiances – Galenic, Paracelsian, Corpuscular – how precisely color was used in daily practice, and the role of physicians in mediating between the color worlds of humanists, scholastics and artists, among others. The history of vision is perhaps the most obvious place in which an analysis of color ought to be given, but among historians of science, light has received far more attention than color, and conceptions of color in sixteenth-century visual theory have been particularly neglected.17 Both David C. Lindberg’s seminal Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler and A. Mark Smith’s just-published From Sight to Light take Kepler as an end-point in their narratives, but on the question of color they jump from antiquity and the middle ages, clear over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to arrive at Kepler’s Ad Vitellionem paralipomena.18 Furthermore, nor do they attend to the gritty philosophical details of color within the many Aristotelianisms of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.19 Histories of the rainbow, which fall at least partly within the history of vision and geometrical optics, provide another very suitable place for the discussion of color. Carl Boyer, who remains the de-facto authority on the history of 16 17 18 19 Domenico Bertoloni Meli, “The Color of Blood: Between Sensory Experience and Epistemic Significance,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, eds. by Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago, 2011), 117–34. An influential example of the neglect of color in favor of light is Vasco Ronchi, Storia della luce, 2nd ed. (Bologna, 1952; 1st ed. 1939). For an English translation, with further revisions and additional material by Ronchi, see Vasco Ronchi, The Nature of Light: An Historical Survey, trans. V. Barocas (Cambridge, 1970). David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago, 1976), 147–85. A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago, 2015), 278–353. Although he has little analysis of color itself, another major foundation for the history of vision in the early modern period is Stephen Straker, Kepler’s Optics: A Study in the Development of Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy, (PhD diss., Bloomington, 1970). For example, Smith writes, “The very idea that certain colors are primary because they cannot be produced by mixture is in fact inconsistent with the notion that all colors are a blend of black and white in specific proportions.” Smith, From Sight to Light, 73. This assumes both that scholastics did not distinguish between a mixture of pigments, that of intentional species (i.e., in the case of projected lights), and what might be called a ‘chemical’ mixture, and also that their account of the color changes that occur in each type of mixture are identical. Cf. Eric Kirchner and Mohammad Bagheri, “Color Theory in Medieval Islamic Lapidaries: Nıshābūrı, Tūsı and Kāshānı,” Centaurus, 55 (2013), 1–19. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 294 baker et al. the rainbow within geometrical optics, wrote, “No century in the history of mankind was more concerned about the rainbow, if one can judge by the multiplicity of books on the subject, than the sixteenth.”20 Boyer took sixteenthcentury interest in the rainbow as ultimately detrimental to a geometrical understanding of the phenomenon, concluding “the bad explanations seem all too often to have driven out the good ones.”21 Since Boyer, little has been carried out on sixteenth-century studies of the rainbow, and the majority of sixteenth-century texts remain unanalyzed. A good deal of attention has been paid to the seventeenth century, especially to Descartes, but the full context for Descartes’ understanding of color and the rainbow is wanting. Most importantly, within the history of science, analyses of texts on the rainbow rarely venture beyond the confines of the history of geometrical optics.22 Again, art historians have generally led attempts to integrate color understood within geometrical optics and its treatment in other domains. Newton exerts a powerful pull for historians of science dealing with color, and it is partly to avoid the potential distortion of Newton-centered narratives that this volume has not focused on him. The historian of science who has investigated pre-Newtonian color in connection with vision and optics most carefully is Alan Shapiro, and he is also the leading scholar on Newton’s optics.23 Thus, while it is not a criticism to say that much of his work on pre-Newtonian color theory is undertaken with Newton in mind, a look at color without a focus on Newtonian optics reveals a somewhat different picture of the early modern period than the one Shapiro has given us. Shapiro’s “Artists’ Colors and Newton’s Colors” is perhaps most relevant to the concerns of this volume.24 Based on groundbreaking work by art historians such as Charles Parkhurst, John Gage and Martin Kemp, Shapiro offers a compelling account of the transition from the notion, advocated by Aristotle among others, that all colors are generated from the contraries white and black (or, more properly, light and dark) to the idea that for the painter primaries of red, blue and yellow are the generators of colors. He also shows the influence 20 21 22 23 24 Carl Boyer, The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics (Princeton, 1987; 1st ed. 1959), 145. Boyer, The Rainbow, 145. One exception is Simon Werrett, “Wonders Never Cease: Descartes’s ‘Météores’ and the Rainbow Fountain,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 34 (2001), 129–47. Alan E. Shapiro, “Kinematic Optics: A Study of the Wave Theory of Light in the Seventeenth Century,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 11 (1973), 134–266. Alan E. Shapiro, “The Evolving Structure of Newton’s Theory of White Light and Color,” Isis, 71 (1980), 211– 35. Alan E. Shapiro, Fits, Passions and Paroxysms: Physics, Method and Chemistry and Newton’s Theories of Colored Bodies and Fits of Easy Reflection (Cambridge, 2009). Alan E. Shapiro, “Artists’ Colors and Newton’s Colors,” Isis, 85 (1994), 600–30. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 295 of this shift in basic assumptions about color mixture, arising initially among painters rather than natural philosophers, on Newton. Shapiro’s engagement with art history is a demonstration of the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary studies, especially when addressing difficult and boundary-crossing topics such as the history of color. In many ways Shapiro’s work prior to Newton is a fruitful beginning of an investigation into pre-Newtonian color, but it is a beginning nevertheless. His treatment in “Artists’ Colors” is highly compressed, and his discussions of color elsewhere are almost exclusively centered on “modification theories” of color held by seventeenth-century writers on optics (of which more will be said below). Moreover, “Artists’ Colors” deals almost entirely with the connection between painting and natural philosophy. His analysis of color among painters and scholastics, as well as the emerging accounts by natural philosophers who first advocated the painters’ primaries in print, admittedly follows the work of the art historians Charles Parkhurst and John Gage closely.25 Yet Parkhurst, Gage and Shapiro all fail to explicate the subtlety and diversity of scholastic natural philosophy, as well as developments within it, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most historians of optics focusing on the seventeenth century, including Shapiro, label Aristotelian theories of color “modification theories.”26 While the notion that color arises from modified light can arguably be read into Aristotle’s discussion of the rainbow in Meteorology III, most Peripatetic philosophers continued to take Aristotle’s account of color in De anima and, especially, De sensu as more fundamental. Thus most scholastics held that color properly refers to a quality inhering in a substance – that color is “the limit of the transparent in a determinately bounded body” – and that the specific color of the body was determined by the ratio of bright (or white) and dark (or black) present in the ingredients constituting it.27 To call an Aristotelian theory of color a ‘modification theory’ is to implicitly assume that light, rather than color, was the chief object of sight, and thus to gloss over the monumental shift 25 26 27 Shapiro, “Artists’ Colors,” 601–3. Richard S. Westfall, “The Development of Newton’s Theory of Color,” Isis, 53 (1962), 342–4. A.I. Sabra, Theories of Light, from Descartes to Newton (London, 1967; reprint Cambridge, 1981). Hideto Nakajima, “Two Kinds of Modification Theory of Light: Some New Observations on the Newton-Hooke Controversy of 1672 Concerning the Nature of Light,” Annals of Science, 41, (1984), 261–78. Translation from Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. by Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1984), 439b1–439b14. On color in Aristotle, see Richard Sorabji, “Aristotle, Mathematics, and Colour,” The Classical Quarterly, 22 (1972), 293–308; Richard Sorabji, “Aristotle on Colour, Light and Imperceptibles,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 47 (2004), 129–40. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 296 baker et al. from a belief that color and light are distinct qualities to a belief that color is merely an affection or modification of light. It also glosses over the adoption, again occurring in the seventeenth century, of prismatic colors as the main explanandum in the philosophical and experimental study of color, when previously a preoccupation with color among the learned was with colored bodies and, only after an account of this was given, explicating the notion of species of color and their relationship to light. Research into color science during the period before Newton obviously shows enormous gaps, not only within its own historiography but also when it comes to sharing insights with other disciplines. Oddly enough there have been few attempts to connect the investigations to the rich discussion of color theory and color practices in the history of art, though Shapiro, Gage and Kemp have provided possible links. In his Science of Art, and in his chapter on the “Aristotelian legacy” in particular, Martin Kemp tries to connect contemporary color theories to the working practices of artists such as Cennino Cennini, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens or Nicolas Poussin amongst others, and John Gage bridged the gap between the different fields in multiple ways, as he understood the history of art and especially of color as a unifying subject that needs, more than anything, an enlarged contextual knowledge. He was one of the first to emphasize the engagement of practising artists and craftworkers in color-perceptions, the implicit color knowledge that circulated in workshops, but also the technological constraints that came along with any color practice, and he also checked on color theories accessible to artists and craftworkers. What he misses, however, mainly because of his interest in sketching a larger picture of “colour and culture” or “colour and meaning,” is a deeper and more subtle investigation of the aesthetic changes within the history of art and how they relate to a philosophical framework, i.e., the relationship between form and matter and to theories of visual perception.28 Within the history of art, for example, color has been discussed chiefly in relation to the art of drawing figures (disegno), with color being an accidental property of an object and therefore less highly regarded than the outline of a figure. In early modern art theory, the contour line (circonscrizione, disegno) defines the essential form of a body, while the application of paint (colore, colorito) may emphasize the individuality and liveliness of its appearance, but it only describes a secondary mode of being that can be gained and lost. 28 There is, however, a chapter on “The formalist tradition” in his book on Colour and Meaning where he introduces the protagonists of a phenomenological Koloritgeschichte such as Theordor Hetzer, Hans Sedlmayr, Kurt Badt, Wolfgang Schöne, and Ernst Strauss, cf. John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London, 1999), 36–40. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 297 Several decades of art historical scholarship have elucidated the artistic competition between line and color, with the mapping out of the varying differences between the two categories, placing a special focus on Italian Renaissance art theory.29 They have also shown that it was both the elaborate technique of glazing translucent layers of oil paint, as it was exemplarily performed by the Van Eyck brothers in fifteenth-century Flanders, and the refined tonality in Venetian fifteenth- and sixteenth-century painting by Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione or Titian, that put new emphasis on the aesthetic value of color.30 Within their artistic pursuits, the colorito of an object was no longer regarded as being of minor value or as the ‘flesh’ of a body but, quite on the contrary, as its animating soul (anima) which has completed the last stage of enlivenment, the fulfilment of a mimetic painting.31 For achieving such a high degree of liveliness, and for situating bodies in specific spatial and temporal arrangements, for making them look ‘real’ or creating refined chromatic effects, artists were in permanent search of new variants of colorants and pigments.32 These new colorants could be used in glazing techniques, and that is as optical mixtures, but artists were also experimenting with color mixtures on their palettes, with physical mixtures specifically. Colors were generated and blended in many different ways, and when reading early modern sources one is often confronted with dichotomies concerning the relationship between the mixing results of 29 30 31 32 For an overview of this debate, cf. Charlotte Kurbjuhn, Kontur. Geschichte einer ästhetischen Denkfigur (Berlin, 2014); Verena Krieger, “Die Farbe als ‘Seele’ der Malerei. Transformationen eines Topos vom 16. Jahrhundert zur Moderne,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 33 (2006), 91–112; Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London and New York, 2007); Manlio Brusatin, Storia delle linee (Turin, 1993); Wolfgang Kemp, “Disegno. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Begriffs zwischen 1547 und 1607,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 19 (1974), 219–40. For the theoretical implications of ‘color’ in Venetian painting, cf. Michael Brunner, ed., Venezianische Malerei von 1500 bis 1800: Kontur oder Kolorit? Ein Wettstreit schreibt Geschichte (Engen, 2003). Cf. Krieger, “Farbe als ‘Seele’.” The literature on Titian’s color practice is ample; highly influential was Theodor Hetzer, Tizian. Geschichte seiner Farbe (Frankfurt, 1935). For the new emphasis on color from the sixteenth century onwards, cf. Werner Busch, Das unklassische Bild: Von Tizian bis Constable und Turner (Munich, 2009). For the relationship between the color of living and dead flesh in painting, cf. Daniela Bohde, “‘Le tinte delle carni.’ Zur Begrifflichkeit für Haut und Fleisch in italienischen Kunsttraktaten des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Weder Haut noch Fleisch. Das Inkarnat in der Kunstgeschichte, eds. by Daniela Bohde and Mechthild Fend (Berlin, 2007), 41–63. Recent research, mainly from technical art history, has been done on the trade in artists’ materials, see, e.g., Jo Kirby, Susie Nash & Joanna Cannon, eds., Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700 (London, 2010). Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 298 baker et al. artistic (i.e., pigments) colors and that of colored light (i.e., in prismatic experiments). However, as soon as we consider the various ways of color blending from a historical perspective, our systematization reveals potential for confusion. Premodern philosophers and alchemists, for example, would have made a distinction between mixture by juxtaposition, mixture by overlay and true mixture by interpenetration (or, according to one’s matter theory, mixture by very strong composition).33 These do not map perfectly onto the modern classification of optical mixture, physical mixture and chemical mixture – both juxtaposition and overlay were considered by many to be a form of ‘optical’ mixture, namely a mixture of species in the medium, and a mixture of pigments on the palette was usually thought of as a mere juxtaposition of small particles. Moreover, there were many early modern ideas about whether new colors might result from the various kinds of mixtures outlined above, yet the full range of such positions has not yet been mapped. One key issue is the distinction between additive and subtractive mixture, a distinction which was not fully introduced until much later than the period covered here.34 Such a negligence of the subtle negotiations in early modern color systematization has resulted in serious gaps in secondary literature. Groundbreaking studies by Moshe Barasch, Manlio Brusatin, Samuel Edgerton, John Gage, K.T.A. Halbertsma, Marcia Hall, Charles Parkhurst, Martin Kemp and Alan E. Shapiro, among others, have dealt with the problem of sorting out different mixing ratios in the early modern period. But these either focus on artistic developments in blending color or tone in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, or concentrate on the clash between light theories and paint mixtures in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with an overall emphasis on the new achievements in color order systems which both inherited and ruled out the long-lasting Aristotelian legacy.35 A more differentiated view 33 34 35 Cf. e.g. William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy: Chymistry and the Experimental Origins of the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2006). Cf. Shapiro, “Artists’ Colors,” 606. Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York, 1978); Manlio Brusatin, Histoire des couleurs (Paris, 1986); Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., “Alberti’s Colour Theory: A Medieval Bottle without Renaissance Wine,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 32 (1969), 109–34; Gage, Color and Meaning; John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London, 1999); Marcia Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (Cambridge and New York, 1994); Jonas Gavel, Colour: A Study of its Position in the Art Theory of the Quattro & Cinquecento (Stockholm, 1979); Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La couleur éloquente. Rhétorique et peinture à l’âge classique (Paris, 1989); K.T.A. Halbertsma, A History of the Theory of Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 299 on how early modern color practices in dialogue with the reception of Aristotelian theories of vision and color theory shaped a plurality of color concepts is still missing, and we can once more confirm a statement by John Gage that “historians of science have long been familiar with the art of science; historians of art are still perhaps reluctant […] to consider the science of art.”36 Until recently, such investigations were also limited to the art of applying pigments in painting, while other artistic media such as sculpture, pottery, glass work and enamelling, textile dyeing or illumination in watercolor had been crucially neglected.37 Since then color has certainly moved into focus in discussions among scholars interested in the interactions between art, craft, science and technology. But while this discussion has drawn in scholars from various disciplines, the focus on interactions between categories of art, craft, science and technology, unreflectively defined according to modern disciplines, has not been helpful in understanding color in the early modern period. This is why our own approach takes color practices – cutting across the categories of art, craft, science and technology – as its central category of analysis, while also acknowledging the different sources and types and the various uses of color knowledge. But many questions still remain. How do these practices relate to the theoretical assumptions, e.g., of chromatic primaries and mixtures of pairs of neighboring primaries? And can they relate to them at all? When and where, for example, did artists get the three-color primary system (yellow–red–blue) as a basis for color mixing? The common narrative is that “this is the nub of a larger historical problem we wish to consider, that is, why three different 36 37 Colour (Amsterdam, 1949); Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art (New Haven and London, 1990)¸ Charles Parkhurst, “A Colour Theory from Prague: Anselm de Boodt, 1609,” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin, 29 (1971), 2–10; Charles Parkhurst, “Aguilonius’ Optics and Rubens’ Color,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 12 (1961), 35–49; Charles Parkhurst, “Louis Savot’s ‘Nova-antiqua’ Color Theory, 1609,” Album amicorum J.G. van Gelder, eds. J. Bruyn, J.A. Emmens, E. de Jongh and D.P. Snoep (The Hague, 1973), 242–7. For the different historical approaches in color systematization, see also the comprehensive article Thomas Lersch, “Farbenlehre,” in Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1974), 6: 157–274. Gage, Color and Meaning, 9. An exception is Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass 1250–1550 (New Haven and London, 1999). While recent publications have started to look into workshop practice as well as into the materiality, circulation and consumption of color, see e.g. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, eds., The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments 1400–1800 (Farnham and Burlington, 2012); Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop and Pamela Smith, eds., The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, c. 1250 – 1750 (Manchester, 2015). Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 300 baker et al. descriptions of a red–yellow–blue mixing system came into existence at about the same time in three different books.”38 Charles Parkhurst, cited here, refers to the three early color treatises by Franciscus Aguilonius, Anselm de Boodt and Louis Savot, but there are more names to be considered when tackling this question.39 The common painters’ practice of mixing pigments emerged gradually in the late Middle Ages but did not become widely adopted until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when painters started to experiment more freely with mixed pigments. Leon Battista Alberti, for example, writing in 1435, “by his own admission did not regard black and white, the agents of all dark and light, as true colours at all” but as two principles that can be added to any color hue to darken or brighten it.40 Alberti’s passage still owes a lot to a more ancient attempt towards a systematization of gradual changes in color lightness, known to us in written form from Cennino Cennini’s treatise on the art of painting around 1400, a concept that was famously labelled the “Cennino system” by art historian Marcia Hall.41 Alberti, however, wished to take this particular development a step further, in order to devise a suitable system for mixing paints, providing a “ratio colorandi,” as he called it. He wrote only a few lines on this subject in Della pittura; black and white now assume their own dimensions, with the four previously mentioned chromatic colors all having equal spacing. But Alberti intentionally retains the parallel to ancient elemental theory. Thus, the four elements should correspond to four “veri colori”: red corresponds to fire, blue to air, green belongs to water and grey to the earth.42 We find a similar connotation of the element earth as being ‘white’ or ‘grey’ in an early seventeenth-century treatise on color by the Theatine monk and painter Matteo Zaccolini, who for some time had access to the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci.43 Leonardo, of course, was interested in colors as a painter and argued from an artistic point of view. Noteworthy in Leonardo’s 38 39 40 41 42 43 Parkhurst, “A Color Theory from Prague,” 8. Parkhurst, “A Colour Theory from Prague”; idem, “‘Aguilonius’ Optics”; idem, “Louis Savat’s ‘Nova-Antiqua’ Color Theory.” Samuel Y. Edgerton, “Alberti’s Colour Theory,” 109. Hall, Color and Meaning. There were problems with yellow, as, in Alberti’s case, there was no fourth primary color, but a mean value between the absolute values of black and white, and the resultant grey was seen by him as the color of the earth (replacing yellow), see Emil Maurer, “Leon Battista Alberti und die Farbe Gelb,” in Hommage à Paolo Cadorin: Amour de l’Art, eds. Théo-Antoine Hermanès et al. (Milan, 1999), 262–8. Cf. Thomas Kirchner, “Between Academicism and its Critics: Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Traité de la peinture’ and Eighteenth-Century French Art Theory,” in Re-reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe, 1550 – 1900, ed. C. Farago (Burlington, 2009), 299–324. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 301 straight-lined arrangement is the series of chromatic colors – giallo, verde, azzurro, rosso (yellow, green, blue and red ) – which form a slight contrast to the patterns of Aristotelian color order (yellow, red, purple, green, blue, spread between the main principles white and black) and at the same time begin to resemble the established sequence of modern color wheels.44 During the sixteenth century, we can observe a growing distance of artistic statements from those in natural philosophy, for example by claiming that black and white did not generate color hues but affected their brightness instead. In fact, following Shapiro, the notion that white and black specifically differed from the chromatic colors and could not generate them, was perhaps the most radical conclusion reached by Renaissance revisions of the concept of color. Since Antiquity, these contraries had dominated the realm of color, and now they were cast out and placed with the grays.45 Though this observation is a most important clue to some reason of the historical change in color concepts, a lot more work is needed to be done to understand the scholastic use of black and white as contraries, how they were connected to mixture on the palette, etc. For example, even in Avicenna and Averroes we have the notion that black and white can combine in many ways, one way giving intension and remission of whiteness (i.e., brightness), others giving rise to new species of colors (i.e., hue).46 Whether this sensitivity to the problem of hue remained in translation in the Latin West, though, is an issue that has not yet been addressed properly. Color orders either by brightness or hue are also discussed in early modern recipe books, a sometimes neglected genre of art literature that has regained much attention over the last decade, especially from the art technological side. Collections of artisanal recipes are considered to be key primary sources in the historical study of artistic practices and materials. In his 2001 publication The Art of All Colours, Mark Clarke compiled an inventory of 400 source 44 45 46 For Leonardo on color see e.g. Claire J. Farago, “Leonardo’s Color and Chiaroscuro Reconsidered: The Visual Force of Painted Images,” Art Bulletin, 73 (1991), 63–88; Janis C. Bell, “Aristotle as a Source for Leonardo’s Theory of Colour Perspective after 1500,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 56 (1993), 100–18; Maria Rzepinska, “Leonardo’s Colour Theory,” Accademia Leonardo di Vinci, 6 (1993), 11–33; Frank Fehrenbach, “Calor nativus – color vitale: Prolegomena zu einer Ästhetik des ‘Lebendigen Bildes’ in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Visuelle Topoi: Erfindung und tradiertes Wissen in den Künsten der italienischen Renaissance, eds. by Ulrich Pfisterer and Max Seidel (Munich, 2003), 151–70. In the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste was the first to distinguish between the two color types nowadays known as achromatic (namely, black, grey and white) and chromatic (all others). This is covered in Kirchner and Bagheri, “Color Theory in Medieval Islamic Lapidaries.” Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 302 baker et al. documents, dating from the production of the first artists’ recipe collections up to 1500.47 Since then, dozens of other surviving writings containing artisanal recipes have been discovered and filed into databases such as the Colour ConText database, that also aims at evaluating the circulation of knowledge of materials and substances used by artisans and shared with other communities (such as apothecaries or physicians) with an epistemic interest in pigments and coloring material.48 The investigation of historic pigments itself, of course, has triggered a large number of publications by conservation scientists, too – just to name the Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics that appeared in four volumes, an encyclopedic reference developed in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, or the most recent and comprehensive study, the Pigment Compendium, by Nicholas Eastaugh et al., which in a second edition is now combined with a dictionary of pigment names and synonyms used.49 One additional, highly influential work on color that falls outside the disciplines of the histories of science and art is Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s Basic Color Terms.50 Originally a work in anthropological linguistics, subsequent refinements to the thesis fall within the realm of modern color science.51 In addition to anthropology and linguistics, the work has been embraced with enthusiasm by some – especially within sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and cognitive science – and criticized fiercely by others.52 Of particular rele47 48 49 50 51 52 Mark Clarke, The Art of All Colour (London, 2001). Cf. Colour ConText, a project launched at the MPIWG in Berlin by Sven Dupré and Sylvie Neven (Liège); also cf. the pioneering work by Doris Oltrogge, Cologne Institute of Conservation Science: <http://db.re.fh-koeln.de/ICSFH/forschung/rezepte.aspx>. Robert Feller, Ashok Roy, Elisabeth West Fitzhugh and Barbara Berri, eds., Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics, 4 vols. (Washington, DC, and Oxford, 1987–2007); Nicholas Eastaugh, Valentine Walsh, Tracey Chaplin and Ruth Siddall, eds., Pigment Compendium (Amsterdam, 2008). The huge number of publications on pigments and dyes cannot be listed here, but some titles will be quoted in the articles of this volume. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley, 1969). For new approaches in color linguistics, see e.g. Carole Biggam, ed., New Directions in Colour Studies (Amsterdam, 2011). Paul Kay, Brent Berlin and William Merrifield, “Biocultural Implications of Systems of Color Naming,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 1 (1991), 12–25. Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, “Science ≠ Imperialism: There Are Nontrivial Constraints on Color Naming,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997), 196–201. See especially the essays in C.L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi, eds., Color Categories in Thought and Language (Cambridge, 1997). Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics: Primes and Universals (Oxford, 1996). Barbara Saunders, “Revisiting Basic Color Terms,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6 (2000), Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 303 vance is the historical dimension of their thesis, which they have retained in subsequent revisions to their model: namely, that “a language adds basic color terms in a constrained order, interpreted as an evolutionary sequence.”53 One criticism related to the use of Munsell color chips, a piece of color technology that in effect imports a post-industrial Western color system into the communities being studied.54 The Berlin and Kay thesis and debates over its validity bring together color terms and language, color technology, color theory, human biology and historical development. While the contributions to the present volume have not engaged with Berlin and Kay directly, the detailed historical work on color terms, color technology and color theory by many of the contributors is relevant. Color Worlds This volume contributes to filling these scholarly gaps by offering a glimpse of the rich variety of color worlds and practices – engagements with materials, productions, ordering and conceptualisations of color – between ca. 1550 and ca. 1650. While often lumped together as ‘pre-Newtonian’, these diverse practices deserve proper historical analyses on their own terms without the subtle distortions introduced by teleological narratives. The aim of the volume goes beyond documenting the diversity of color worlds. Around 1600 the various color worlds, previously separated and owned exclusively by either painters and other artisans, or natural historians, mathematicians and natural philosophers, appear to have intersected more intensively. The volume investigates the modes and obstacles of transmission between color worlds. ‘Color world’ is the central category of analysis in the volume. Color worlds consist of practices, concepts and objects. Essays are particularly interested in how practices, concepts and objects interact within and across color worlds.55 The essays included in this volume examine a variety of engagements with 53 54 55 81–99. For a response to Saunders, see Paul Kay, “In Defense of Color Categories in Thought and Language (Hardin and Maffi, Eds.): A Response to B.A.C. Saunders’s Review,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 102 (2000), 321–23. Paul Kay et al., “Color Naming across Languages,” in Color Categories in Thought and Language, eds. Clyde L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi (Cambridge, 1997), 21. John A Lucy, “The Linguistic of ‘Color’,” in Color Categories in Thought and Language, eds. Clyde L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi (Cambridge, 1997), 320–46. Although unknown to us during the formation of this volume, our ‘Color Worlds’ approach is serendipitously in line with that advocated recently in Agustí Nieto-Galan, “Revisiting Colour History,” Ambix, 62 (2015), 94–7. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 304 baker et al. color as ‘practices’ based on materials (e.g., wood, pigment, minerals, gems, manuscripts, books, prints) and productions (e.g., gunpowder, miniatures, theories, books), shaped by notions of skill and expertise, and guided by intended audiences, consumers and patrons. The focus is especially on the creation of languages and objects to communicate across color worlds, or indeed when and why this fails to happen. Scrutinizing new color languages and boundary objects in between color worlds, the essays document the intersections of color worlds as well as make the obstacles in crossing boundaries between color worlds visible. Indeed, one conclusion of the volume is that despite intersections and cross-fertilizations, boundaries between color worlds and languages, and consequent problems of translation, remained. Barbara Berrie discusses how greater availability of material such as cobalt, antimony and naphtha in the sixteenth century affected painters’ practices. These pigments, not necessarily easy to use or manipulate, were adopted from the crafts of glass-making and pottery-decoration, and used by artists, first in specific ways to achieve particular effects – for example, Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516) used antimony orange glass with azurite blue to adjust hue. This also suggests that the painter was conversant with the material properties and interaction of pigment – there was no other stable orange at the time that could be used with azurite. Analyses of paintings thus indicate how individual painters’ practices could be responsive to new material possibilities and complement the study of contemporary writings on art, method or recipes, and records of sales and purchases. However, while early modern painters might have been eager to adopt newly available materials, Doris Oltrogge shows that some mineral pigments (for example, fluorite) had a more limited circulation. Moreover, boundaries existed not only within and between crafts, but also between painterly practice and the world of natural historians. Comparing Georg Agricola’s Natura fossilium and Valentin Boltz’ Illuminierbuch, Oltrogge shows that the exchange between the color worlds of sixteenth-century painters and natural historians was limited. While Boltz was interested in the making and manipulation of organic and synthetic pigments, natural historians like Agricola focused on the classification of all minerals and fossils. Nevertheless, exchange was possible since the audiences of these books partly overlapped. Oltrogge suggests that especially the Kunstkammer served as a site where the interests of naturalists intersected with the color worlds and manual practice of painters. Likewise, Valentina Pugliano sketches a picture of limited exchange between the color worlds of natural historians and painters in the sixteenth century. Pugliano’s study of the archives of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), the naturalist, collector and patron, uncovers a variety of contexts in which Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 305 Aldrovandi operated. As a humanist, he built up a classical vocabulary and cultural association of color terms from learned authors, both ancient and modern; he developed a glossary of color terms including those used by contemporary painters, to develop verbal expressions for chromatic scale and color variations that enabled him to specify the characteristic features of naturalia and to supervise the artists who created thousands of drawings of those naturalia and decorated his villa. While he may have shown limited interest in the making and mixing of pigments, Aldrovandi’s patronage of pictorial works was as important in honing his sensitivity to color as was his work as a naturalist. More strongly intersecting, Romana Sammern argues, are the color worlds of physicians and painters. Focusing on Agnolo Firenzuola’s Dialogo delle bellezze delle done and Richard Haydocke’s Tracte of painting, Sammern shows how different color worlds converge around the human body: cosmetics, medicine, art theory and painting. Haydocke connects the chromatic bodies of nature, the pigments of art and medicine and the colors of beauty. However, this does not mean that Haydocke’s concept of color was homogeneous nor that the convergence of different color worlds was complete. As Sammern shows, while Haydocke was familiar with the Aristotelian distinction between real and apparent colors, he did not apply it in his discussion of colors in cosmetics. This distinction is also central to Karin Leonhard’s investigation of Nicholas Hilliard’s (1547–1619) miniatures as ‘gems in a frame’. Hilliard’s idea of principal colors embodied in ‘perfect stones’ intersected with many possible sources for ordering color in the period – Aristotelian commentaries, lapidary literature, as well as heraldry. The art of blazoning codified a hierarchy of stones and colors in relation to social rank and chivalric virtues that appealed to the Elizabethan court. Hilliard most likely drew on John Ferne’s heraldic manual, Glory of Generosities, but focused his attention on the substantial qualities of color, perspicuity and opacity. For Hilliard, these were real and ‘true’ colors, to be deployed in his timeless miniatures without shading. But within a generation, such values began to be transformed and superseded. Simon Werrett’s and Andrew Morrall’s contributions to this volume provide us with a notable contrast of exchanges between different color worlds. While Werrett is primarily concerned with exchanges between various artisanal practices, Morrall shows how the learned and scholarly concepts of color were appropriated by painters in the sixteenth century. Werrett demonstrates the presence of color in early modern pyrotechnics, which had hitherto been invisible to historians. Several firework manuals show that early modern pyrotechnics shared materials of color, a finer sense of color difference, and various color associations with alchemy, painting, pottery and medicine. Artificers Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 306 baker et al. introduced color, not just for pleasing visual effects, but also for changing the strength of gunpowder and for evoking fear in their audience. They certainly believed their spectacle, involving sound, smell, scenery, costume, music and decoration, to be colorful. Such a world of color changed with the introduction of potassium chlorate, which made brightly colored explosions possible in the nineteenth century, and after Claude-Fortuné Ruggieri’s promotion of pyrotechnics as a ‘chemical science’. Interestingly different from the world of pyrotechnicians, Morrall’s close examination of a table top painted by Martin Schaffner (1477/78–1546/48) for a fellow goldsmith in post-Reformation Ulm, opens up the rich medieval tradition of color’s allegorical and symbolical association with septimal systems of planets, metals, courtly love, Christian virtues and liberal arts, some of which were circulating as woodcut motifs. Schaffner wove these associations into a pictorial expression of painting as a liberal art, and the painter as a learned painter of the world. Using color, the attribute of the painter, and drawing on well-known associations with knowledge and learned authorities, here was a painter who was self-consciously making a point about the status of his own craft in the spirit of Albrecht Dürer. The last section of this volume collects three contributions that are primarily concerned with the scholarly discussions of color in optics, chymistry and natural philosophy. Focusing on the observations and reflections on color in the diary of Isaac Beeckman, headmaster of the Latin school in Dordrecht, mechanical philosopher and acquaintance of Descartes, Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis reveals the diversity of conceptualizations of color in early seventeenth-century natural philosophy. On the one hand, natural philosophy had a clear disciplinary identity; it was a way of knowing, in the words of Dijksterhuis, which related in different ways to color practices. On the other hand, contrasting Beeckman and Descartes, Dijksterhuis argues for different corpuscular conceptions of optics in mechanical philosophy. From this perspective, although it was arguably the most successful in the seventeenth century, Descartes’ conception of color appears idiosyncratic in its emphasis on mathematization and its prediction of the rainbow as its most important epistemic object and context for problem-solving. Tawrin Baker discusses how color plays a role in Robert Boyle’s philosophy of experiment. Boyle realized that color complicates the problem of contingency, that is the “unknown factor that causes an experiment or procedure to diverge from results expected or previously obtained.”56 How did Boyle establish a matter of fact related to color? How did he decide that color was important in his experiments in the absence of a theory of color? Baker argues that 56 See Tawrin Baker’s essay in this volume. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307 Introduction: Early Modern Color Worlds 307 Boyle relied on artisanal knowledge rather than theory in determining when colors were indicators of significant ‘inward’ qualities. For this purpose, Boyle created access to the color worlds of metalworkers, dyers, glassworkers and other craftsmen. Boyle not only showed himself interested in the results of their workshop practices, but also in the ways they avoided pitfalls and what this revealed about nature. Complementary to Baker’s essay, Anna Marie Roos’ contribution to this volume places Boyle’s understanding of color within the color world he might most call his own – that of the chymists – and investigates the intersections with that of scholastic natural philosophers. Roos argues that Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Plot and Robert Hooke attributed color and color change in nature to salts and saline chymistry. This was a rejection of Aristotelian ideas that related color to hot and cold qualities of objects. Parallel to Baker, Roos confirms the importance of artisanal knowledge of color for English chymists, natural historians and philosophers of Boyle’s generation. She demonstrates that artisanal conceptions of pigment grinding and textile dyeing in the Royal Society shaped the conceptions of the saline chymistry of color among English virtuosi. In conclusion, the studies gathered here eschew simplistic oppositions such as theory and practice, popular and elite, or art and science. They acknowledge that, while different individuals professed expertise in color differently (in the names, associations, materials and skills for colors deployed), they were also conversant with registers of meaning, knowledge and skills of others. Very often, they could draw on different traditions and practices to forge something unique to themselves. Together they do not yet offer the reader a new and complete history of color in pre-Newtonian times, but applying the concept of a ‘color world’ to overcome such simplistic dichotomies, these studies are the foundation on which such a cross-disciplinary history of color knowledge can be built. Early Science and Medicine 20 (2015) 289-307