Bright Earth

Title: Bright Earth – The Invention of Colour

Author: Philip Ball

Publisher: Penguin, 2002 (First published 2001)

ISBN: 9780140296624

Pages: 434

An elephant is noted for its muscle power, a cheetah for its speed and a dog for the extraordinary ability to smell. What is man worth? Undoubtedly, he is the most intelligent among all creatures, but intelligence is an abstract faculty that is not always obvious – at least for a few among us. The facility of colour vision makes up for a lot of disadvantages in other departments. The ability of the human eye to perceive colour in its rich variety and multitude of hues makes it a truly versatile one. Only a few bird species possess even better capacity to perceive colour than us. Awash in varied colours in our day to day lives, men naturally wanted it to be preserved in art forms civilized societies cultivated. Even primitive tribes are noted for the deft attention to colour they spent on cave paintings on scenes such as the hunt. As art developed into pictures drawn on walls, canvas and paper, artists faced a daunting task as to reproduce the originals according to the artistic mores of the time. This book narrates the development of colour reproduction over the ages and progress of technologies from canvas to the digital computer. The book makes a survey of art in general and concentrates on how the magic of colour was faithfully copied to a medium of expression. Philip Ball is a science writer who has several books to his credit. He regularly contributes to science journals such as Nature and New Scientist. His talent at art appreciation is evident from the fact that he had curated for an exhibition on science and art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Even though this book was found in the chemistry shelf of the library, it has more of a claim to be in the ‘art’ category. Ball’s description of the famous paintings noted for the ingenuous application of novel pigments and colouring styles are essential reading to students of art and painting. Until the advent of modern synthetic pigments in the nineteenth century, artists’ colours were finely ground minerals. Most of them were later found to be metal-containing compounds. Natural dyes didn’t come in plenty. Hardly a dozen or so pigments were available from nature then, which had exploded to nearly 9000 synthetic dyes as of now. Colour is the medium of painters for expression and communication. As a result, they had diversified the range of colours by careful and skilled mixing of dyestuffs. The book incorporates an excellent narrative on famous paintings and elucidation of the peculiarities of each. All this is backed up with a lot of colour plates depicting those very pictures in detail. Novices in art also find this section extremely helpful, as the author stoops to keep them also on board for his informed appreciation of the pictures. A case in point is the difference that exists between Renaissance paintings with the earlier ones. The painters in the middle ages were equally adept, but the norms that limited their creativity were rather narrow and utilitarian. Painting was a way of telling a story without words. Important characters in the frame should be clearly identified and portrayed in colours that encoded symbolic meanings and redounded to the splendour of the Lord. Renaissance changed all that. The observer’s presence on the scene became implied. The light and shadows and realism of the scene mandated the perspective of the observer to be maintained in the picture. The portrayal became real and effectively tangible. Painting really arrived with the glorious artists of Italian Renaissance. Ball also mentions the characteristic features of later techniques like impressionism, pointillism, fauvism and Orphism.

The twentieth century belonged to physics, but the nineteenth marked the high tide of chemistry. Scientists quickly discerned the intricacies of chemical reactions and the molecular structure. New elements were discovered, after casting out the four ancient elements of earth, air, fire and water. It is with this background that Ball proudly declares that “there will never be another fifty years in chemistry like those that began in the 1770s”. By 1820, chemists spoke much the same language as they do today. For the first time in history, experimenters could somehow predict the outcome and physical properties of their trials, including its colour. A wide range of synthetic dyes soon flooded the market. The pride of place belonged to purple, as all earlier efforts to synthesize this colour of the royalty had failed. The Roman aristocrats used a rich tint of it called Tyrian purple which was extracted from an internal gland of a kind of shell fish found in the ancient city of Tyre. Extraction of the dye was painfully time consuming and the cost of it was astronomical. Each shell fish yielded just a drop and one ounce of the dye could be collected only after sacrificing an astounding 250,000 shell fish in the bargain. It is no wonder then that a pound of purple-dyed wool cost around three times the yearly wage of a baker. This made the colour a monopoly of the rich and powerful in the empire. Later emperors restricted its use among the reigning coterie. This discrimination was overcome not by war or reforms. A revolution of a different kind was needed to democratize the privileges traditionally enjoyed by the wealthy. The spurt in the development of science and technology offered the masses some of the luxuries that couldn’t even be dreamed about by great monarchs – however powerful their stature was. Alexander couldn’t communicate in real time with his governor sitting thousands of miles away however hard he tried, Akbar didn’t receive the quality of medical care when he died at 56 which even a layman now takes for granted. The examples are endless. Similarly, as new chemical processes developed, new dyes of huge range of tints in aniline derivatives appeared by 1850s. Purple came within the reach of ordinary people. Major European corporations like Bayer, Hoechst and BASF were born around this time, mass-producing the colours.

Any treatise on colour won’t be complete without touching upon how colours are preserved or restored after they had aged due to action by light and corrosive gaseous chemicals. This book includes a chapter on preservation techniques. The author being a science writer, the book is up to date with nuances of colour reproduction in the photographic arena as also digital media such as a computer. The author’s comment on the slow development of photography that “many technologies blossom not when the technical means are available, but when a conceptual advance unlocks their potential” is thought provoking.

The book is not at all designed for easy reading, but more than compensates for it by the entry it affords to the reader in the realm of pure art. The experience of glancing over and enjoying the works of masters of painting is exhilarating. It also contains detailed descriptions of chemical processes and materials, which is a little tiresome. A long list of various pigments in its natural form is good for comprehensiveness but unsuited for smooth reading. The book includes a long section on Notes and offers a good bibliography. The index is comprehensive, but a separate list of the paintings would’ve added much more utility. I would have normally rated this book 3-star, but owing to the deep artistic knowledge of the author and for the great opportunity it provided me for getting familiarized with some of the grand representatives of it, I would place it a notch higher.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star