Essays
Four arguments that run across the whole atlas: what light has been asked to do since Caravaggio, what four centuries have quietly taken out of the paintings, how colour was turned into a number, and what happened when cinema finally got hold of it.
Painting with light
A single hard light in a dark room is the oldest special effect in European art. It passes from Caravaggio to the daguerreotype to film noir almost unchanged — and each time the medium changes, the same trick has to be re-earned against new chemistry.
10 min read
Why old paintings look brown
The golden gloom we associate with the Old Masters is partly a taste and partly a chemical accident. Four centuries of varnish, fading and darkening built a look that nobody painted — and then painters started imitating it.
9 min read
How colour became a science
Newton, Goethe, Chevreul, Munsell, and a committee in 1931: the four-hundred-year attempt to turn a sensation into a number. Painters knew most of it first, and got the credit last.
9 min read
When colour arrived at the cinema
Cinema had colour for thirty years before it had colour film. What changed in the 1930s was not the presence of colour but who controlled it — and the answer, for two decades, was one company with a monopoly and a woman with a rulebook.
10 min read