"Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both. (It is typical of prejudices to conflate the sinister and the superficial.)"
- David Batchelor, Chromophobia
And so it was for centuries in the West: Color as a superficial, if not slightly immoral, distraction from more serious, weighty topics of consideration. The primacy of form over substance. The ideal of beauty as arid abstraction: odorless, tasteless, unadorned, and drained of color. The supremacy of the spiritual, the abstract, the pure and rarified, over the baseness of brute matter in all its multifaceted and altogether sensuous attire. The chiaroscuro play of light and shadow as the ultimate arbiter of being and non-being, truth and untruth; this but not that. After all, it was the bold elegence of Euclid that first represented the geometry of the world as an array of curved and straight dark lines set against an infinite colorless backdrop, even if in turn they too were representations of infinitely thin divisions of that gossamer plane.
To an Enlightenment-era philosopher like Locke, color was a "secondary" quality, a kind of sensorial chimera, not an intrinsic or primary quality essential to an object's state of being; an afterthought to any serious ontological appraisal. Primary qualities were those pertaining to extension, like position in space, length and breadth, solidity, mass or acceleration: precisely quantifiable notions, and hence those most amenable to the ostensible objectivity that lies, famously, at the root of scientific inquiry. Thus an object could only possess a color secondarily as one possible option among many ways in which the same essential object could be presented to an observer. One complex object might be composed of many component objects, the sum total of which comprises the complex idea thereby produced, but a color was never to be found in any list of components. Only extended qualities were taken to inhere in the object itself. Qualities pertaining to "sensation", such as perceptions of hot and cold, taste, smell, sound or shade of color were rather thought to exist as unextended mental impressions whose ontological basis was therefore limited to the sphere of the perceiving subject.
In contrast, today's scientists could reasonably contend that color is indeed a property of the physical world, whose measurable properties (in terms of wavelength, etc.) therefore correspond to a distinct configuration of some part of the material universe. At the very least the enormous increase in depth of scientific understanding of matter at the atomic and quantum scales certainly suggests that the phenomenon of color is far more than just a state of mind. One could even plausibly maintain such a view in light of the frequently counterintuitive and paradoxical formulations of quantum mechanics.
So in this sense color could really be, at least to some degree, an external phenomenon rooted in a type of knowledge about certain states of matter at a particular level of observation. That is to say, something that seems very much to meet Locke's criterion of a primary quality! And even if one takes the admittedly unconventional view, as James Jeans did, of considering that the whole notion of electromagnetic waves is nothing more than an imagistic convenience, that phantom mental image must nevertheless still bear some relation to a particular species of existential fact, regardless of the actual state of our peculiar knowledge regarding its potentially observable features. Of course, as for the actual experience of color, that may very well involve something related to a different type of knowledge that is not, strictly speaking, knowledge derived from some external ontological fact in the manner just described, but any definite answer to this likely depends on a number of unresolved questions surrounding just what role neural processes ultimately play in mediating not only the content but the "character" of conscious experience.
And while it's possible that some physical fact might be discovered about why the color red looks the way it does to me, over and above any physical facts about the world that occasion its appearance, this somehow seems tantamount to admitting that one's experience of a particular color cannot be considered a physical fact to begin with; a situation that appears paradoxical at best! In any event, such strictly philosophical considerations will have to be dealt with more thoroughly in another post. What I was going to talk about was statues.
Artistic sensibility too has long beheld color, especially the bold use of color, with a certain kind of suspicion, even outright disdain. There is perhaps no better way to illustrate this oddly deep-seated cultural bias than the ideal of aesthetic beauty embodied (quite literally) by the supposedly pure white marble of ancient statuary. Originally popularized by Renaissance artists like Michelangelo, the blank statue became the standard bearer of good taste, elegance, and artistic refinement, instantly recognizeable to generations of museum-goers and art collectors. And with the exception of some notable outliers such as El Greco, the Western tradition of oil painting also often exhibited a certain reserve in the use of color up until the dawn of the 20th century. Even today, the black-and-white photograph or film is frequently seen as inhabiting an enhanced "artistic" dimension from which color photos or movies are conventionally excluded.
But there was always something wrong with this altogether too neat and tidy picture. Researchers have since discovered, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the world of antiquity was in fact brightly painted. Sculpture, statuary, architectural works... all festooned in vivid color! Evidence from the ruins of Pompeii, the remains of Roman frescoes and statues, the Alexander Sarcophagus and other examples from ancient Greece slowly began to accumulate starting in the mid-17th century onwards that polychromy was a vital component of art across the ancient world. By the end of the 19th century the evidence had become overwhelming that the earlier imitations of classical style were deeply flawed. The ideal of the blank white marble statue was really a post hoc invention, a product of the attitudes and assumptions of later eras. Those assumptions were so strong that many had been content to simply ignore the flecks of paint and stains on the marble that hinted at a radically different vision of the past.
Thanks to latter-day spectroscopic imaging techniques, fluorescence analysis and advanced microscopy, contemporary archaeologists like Vinzenz Brinkmann and Mark Abbe have not only carried out sophisticated investigations on the surfaces of antiquities to reveal heretofore undetected traces of pigment, the fruits of this labor have even been used to create reproductions demonstrating the powerful effect these colors had on the art audiences of ancient world. Beginning in 2003, the "Gods In Color" exhibition featuring such reproduced works has been shown in over a dozen countries, helping to educate the public about this long-overlooked and misrepresented aspect of cultural history. And it must be noted that this misrepresentation was often quite deliberate on the part of those who saw in the "whitewashing" of antiquity ready vindication of their indefensible theories of racial superiority. For in many ways, the truth of the matter was always hidden in plain sight: even historical accounts from the period made occasional mention of the practice, such as in this revealing passage by Euripides from his drama Helen:
"If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue..."
The passage is fascinating not only in making plain the truth that has only recently come to be acknowledged after centuries of error, but in further demonstrating that the ancient conception of beauty bore very little resemblence to that which was attributed to it by subsequent generations.
Reproduction based on a c. 500 BCE sculpture of Paris, bane of Achilles, in Scythian dress. Source: Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung
One can only begin to speculate on what sorts of mischaracterizations future societies might someday make about our own!
