Our modern understanding of light and colour began with Isaac Newton (1642-1726) and a series of experiments that he published in 1672. He was the first to understand the rainbow , by refracting white light with a prism, resolving it into its component colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.
In the late 1660s, Newton started experimenting with his ’celebrated phenomenon of colours.’ At the time, people thought that colour was a mixture of light and darkness, and that prisms coloured light.
Early theory: scale that went from brilliant red, which was pure white light with the least amount of darkness added, to dull blue, the last step before black, which was the complete extinction of light by darkness.
Newton set up a prism near a window, and projected a spectrum onto the far wall. To prove that the prism was not colouring the light, he refracted the light back into white light.
Artists were fascinated by Newton’s clear demonstration that light alone was responsible for colour. His most useful idea for artists was his conceptual arrangement of colours around the circumference of a circle, which allowed the painters’ primaries (red, yellow, blue) to be arranged opposite their complementary colours (e.g. red opposite green), as a way of denoting that each complementary would enhance the other’s effect through optical contrast.
In the late 1660s, Newton started experimenting with his ’celebrated phenomenon of colours.’ At the time, people thought that colour was a mixture of light and darkness, and that prisms coloured light.
Early theory: scale that went from brilliant red, which was pure white light with the least amount of darkness added, to dull blue, the last step before black, which was the complete extinction of light by darkness.
Newton set up a prism near a window, and projected a spectrum onto the far wall. To prove that the prism was not colouring the light, he refracted the light back into white light.
Artists were fascinated by Newton’s clear demonstration that light alone was responsible for colour. His most useful idea for artists was his conceptual arrangement of colours around the circumference of a circle, which allowed the painters’ primaries (red, yellow, blue) to be arranged opposite their complementary colours (e.g. red opposite green), as a way of denoting that each complementary would enhance the other’s effect through optical contrast.
Until Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came along, no one had questioned the validity of Newton’s ideas about light and colour.
Goethe reformulated the topic of colour in an entirely new way. Newton had viewed colour as a physical problem, involving light striking objects and entering our eyes. Goethe realizes that the sensations of colour reaching our brain are also shaped by our perception — by the mechanics of human vision and by the way our brains process information. Therefore, according to Goethe, what we see of an object depends upon the object, the lighting and our perception.
Goethe’s diagrams in the first plate of Zür Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) include a colourwheel and diagrams of distorted colour perception. The bottom landscape is how a scene would look to someone who was blue-yellow colour blind.
Goethe - laws of colour harmony, ways of characterizing physiological colours (how colours affect us) and subjective visual phenomena in general.
Goethe studied after-images, coloured shadows and complementary colours. And he anticipated Hering’s “opponent-colour” theory, which is one basis of our understanding of colour vision today. Above all, Goethe appreciated that the sensation of complementary colours does not originate physically from the actions of light on our eyes but perceptually from the actions of our visual system.
Goethe reformulated the topic of colour in an entirely new way. Newton had viewed colour as a physical problem, involving light striking objects and entering our eyes. Goethe realizes that the sensations of colour reaching our brain are also shaped by our perception — by the mechanics of human vision and by the way our brains process information. Therefore, according to Goethe, what we see of an object depends upon the object, the lighting and our perception.
Goethe’s diagrams in the first plate of Zür Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) include a colourwheel and diagrams of distorted colour perception. The bottom landscape is how a scene would look to someone who was blue-yellow colour blind.
Goethe - laws of colour harmony, ways of characterizing physiological colours (how colours affect us) and subjective visual phenomena in general.
Goethe studied after-images, coloured shadows and complementary colours. And he anticipated Hering’s “opponent-colour” theory, which is one basis of our understanding of colour vision today. Above all, Goethe appreciated that the sensation of complementary colours does not originate physically from the actions of light on our eyes but perceptually from the actions of our visual system.
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