Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Discover the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors.For example: Cleopatra used saffron—a source of the color yellow—for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient...
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Discover the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors.For example: Cleopatra used saffron—a source of the color yellow—for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780812971422 (0812971426)
ASIN: 812971426
Publish date: December 30th 2003
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Pages no: 448
Edition language: English
Some passages are infectious with her fascination for the colors (pigments) and the histories. However, there was a lot of fanciful "What if"-ing, when the facts were not available. Also, the huge chunks of history could have been broken down into something easier to digest. The section on lapiz laz...
Colour is part travel, part history. Finlay has divided the book according to the rainbow and investigates how each colour was made in the time before synthetic colours. Where possible, she visits countries of traditional production and learns how to make these colours herself and also about how c...
This was not as sparkling (pun intended) as her work on gemstones, but it was full of interesting places to start more in-depth researches. I think I'm going to take her advice and read Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World while I'm at it.
This was a really interesting read! Each chapter is dedicated to a color and it's history and uses through the centuries.
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