Color: A Natural History of the Palette Read Online Free PDF

attempt to preserve methods that he feared were about to disappear. And in the 1880s one of Holman Hunt’s friends, the designer William Morris, was a major force in bringing back some of the old colors being displaced by aniline dyes, calling the new ones “hideous” 17 and challenging people to take another look at the old colors, and see how “magnificent” they were. It is almost as if every few generations we seem to realize we have assigned our predecessors to a black-and-white past, and then rejoice together at rediscovering that they loved colors too.
    One of the most extraordinary moments in the history of paint happened in eighth-century Byzantium, where painted icons had been all but destroyed after senior church members argued it was against God’s teaching to make images. There was passionate debate on both sides, and in the end it was resolved that the works were celebrations of the natural gifts of God. Not only in their depictions but in their materials—and that by using plants and rocks and insects and eggs God was glorified through the very body of the artwork. 18 Which is one of the reasons why even today, when there is so much choice, it is an instinctive decision for an Orthodox icon painter to choose pigments that are as natural as possible. “Look for the sign to Bog,” my instructions read. “And then go along the other track.” I was looking for the studio-cottage of Aidan Hart, a New Zealand icon painter. The former Brother Aidan had been a novice Orthodox monk for sixteen years before leaving, with the blessings of his church, to get married. He was living on a very remote hillside on the Welsh borders: it seemed a fitting place to find a man who works with natural paints. He is not a rigid purist— there was a small pot of zinc white and a few other manufactured paints on his shelves among the intriguing flasks of colored stones and powders from Siberian riverbanks, Turkish trees and Italian mountains—but over the years he had found that natural colors fitted not only with his sense of aesthetics, but with his theology.
    “The natural paints aren’t perfect . . . and that’s the point,” he said, in words that would echo so much of what I would hear, throughout my travels, from people who worked with paints and dyes. He then poured a little French ultramarine powder (invented in the nineteenth century) onto his palm, to demonstrate his point. “All these crystals are the same size, and they reflect the light too evenly. It makes the paint less interesting than if you used real ultramarine, from stones.”
    When Aidan starts an icon painting, he always begins in the traditional way, by applying gesso to a panel made of ash or oak. Gesso is the Italian word for gypsum or plaster of Paris, although in fact artists have a choice of “whitings,” including chalk or alabaster. First he paints several layers of rabbit-skin glue (which before it is added to water looks like demerara sugar and smells like a pet shop), after which he lays a piece of linen on top, so if the wood cracks later it can be replaced without damaging the painting. Then he adds a dozen layers of glue and chalk, and sands them down so finely that the panel looks startlingly like white Formica. The Orthodox tradition emphasizes the light inside every human being: and so icon paintings also begin with light, which seems to shine through the pigments and through the gold laid on top.
    Icons are not just stories in paintings, Hart explained. “The intention is to introduce you to reality, not to imitate nature. It is to show you not what you see, but what is real.” So the figures of saints often go beyond the frame to show how there are no real boundaries, and buildings tend to have a strange perspective—you can see left and right and up and down, which is meant to represent the way God “sees” the whole world at once. The use of natural pigments is similarly embodied in the Orthodox teaching that