Historically, colour has been assigned a lower status than design in the European tradition. Colour only became recognised as a legitimate subject of study in the academic world around the time of the ‘material turn’ and this course looks at colour as a material phenomenon. This material approach to colour is a counterbalance to contemporary experience in which colour seems divorced from any particular material substrate – as something that originates in digital files and is expressed in illuminated screens, projected lights or printed dots. This fluid experience of colour is relatively new and the loss of an embodied dimension impoverishes our appreciation of the phenomenon.
The course of three seminars will examine three colours in artworks from the High Middle Ages and place them in their cultural contexts with a view to illustrating the richness of colour as an embodied phenomenon. The bodies in question include, of course, the body of the viewer but the focus of the seminars will be on the particular materials bodies with which light interacts to create colour.
The first seminar will set the scene with an exploration of (ultramarine) blue, as a colour associated with heaven and tranquillity, through details of its origins, preparation and non-visual uses. The second seminar will engage with the colour red, from the mythology of Adam’s creation in Eden through to the synthesis of vermilion, (al)chemical relative of the Philosopher’s Stone. The final seminar considers the colour gold with reference to the metal and its historical and astrological associations.
Together, the seminars should suggest alternatives to the dismissal of colour as a (natural or technological) epiphenomenon.
Learning outcomes
- Colour as a culturally specific phenomenon.
- Medieval aesthetics as the consequence of an embodied worldview.
- Coherent alternatives to colour as a (natural or technological) epiphenomenon.
