"This book would make an excellent addition to art history curricula, especially those built to expand students’ interest and knowledge into materials and process. . . . The extensive notes and bibliography will provide specialists with avenues for additional and deeper research."—L. L. Kriner, Berea College

This expansive study of color illuminates the substance, context, and meaning of five centuries of European painting. Between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the materials of painting remained remarkably unchanged, but innovations in their use flourished. Technical discoveries facilitated new visual effects, political conditions prompted innovations, and economic changes shaped artists’ strategies, especially as trade became global.

Marcia Hall explores how Michelangelo radically broke with his contemporaries’ harmonizing use of color in favor of a highly saturated approach; how the robust art market and demand for affordable pictures in seventeenth-century Netherlands helped popularize subtly colored landscape paintings; how politics and color became entangled during the French Revolution; and how modern artists liberated color from representation as their own role transformed from manipulators of pigments to visionaries celebrated for their individual expression. Using insights from recent conservation studies, Hall captivates readers with fascinating details and developments in magnificent examples—from Botticelli and Titian to Van Gogh and Kandinsky—to weave an engaging analysis. Her insistence on the importance of examining technique and material to understand artistic meaning gives readers the tools to look at these paintings with fresh eyes.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*

Author

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date May 2019 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780300237191

EISBN 9780300259728

Illustrations 212

Print Status in print

Publisher (in print)

WorldCat

Google Books

Base text size -

Chapter images ()