Review: Bright Earth, by Philip Ball

[Russ Allbery]

Bright Earth
by Philip Ball

Publisher: University of Chicago
Copyright: 2001
Printing:  2003
ISBN:      0-226-03628-6
Format:    Trade paperback
Pages:     337

The subtitle Art and the Invention of Color does a good job advertising
the topic of Bright Earth: a history of the creation of color pigments
for art (specifically European painting; more on that in a moment). It
starts with a brief linguistic and scientific introduction to color,
sketches what's known about use and creation of color pigments in
antiquity, and then settles down for serious historical study starting
in the Middle Ages. Ball catalogs pigment choices, discusses
manufacturing methods, and briefly surveys the opinions of various
schools of art on color from before the Renaissance through to the
modern art of today. He also takes two fascinating (albeit too brief)
side trips to discuss aging of pigments and the problem of reproducing
color art.

This is one of those non-fiction books whose primary joy for me was to
introduce me to problems and constraints that were obvious in
retrospect but that I'd never thought about. If someone had asked me
whether painters were limited in their subject matter and methods by
the colors available to them, I probably would have said "huh" and
agreed, but I never thought to ask the question. Like a lot of people
of my age in the US, I grew up watching Bob Ross's The Joy of Painting
and its familiar list of oil paints: phthalo green, alizarin crimson,
and so forth. But of course that rich palette is a product of modern
chemistry. Early Renaissance painters had to make do with fewer
options, many of them requiring painstaking preparation that painters
or their assistants did themselves before the popularity of art and the
rise of professional color makers. They knew, and were shaped by, their
materials in a way that one cannot be when one buys tubes of paint from
an art store.

Similarly, I was familiar with additive color mixing from physics and
from computer graphics projects, and had assumed that a few reasonable
primaries would provide access to the entire palette. I had never
considered the now-obvious problem of subtractive mixing with impure
primaries: since the pigments are removing colors from white light,
mixing together multiple pigments quickly gets you a muddy brown, not a
brilliant secondary color. The resulting deep distrust of mixing
pigments that dates back to antiquity further limits the options
available to painters.

Ball's primary topic is the complicated interplay between painting and
science. Many of the new colors of the Renaissance were byproducts or
accidents of alchemy, and were deeply entangled in the obsession with
the transmutation of metals into gold. Most of the rest were repurposed
dyes from the much more lucrative textile business. Enlightenment
chemistry gave rise to a whole new palette, but the chemistry of colors
is complex and fickle. Going into this book, I had a superficial
impression that particular elements or compounds had particular colors,
and finding pigments would be a matter of finding substances that
happened to have that color. Ball debunks that idea quickly: small
variations in chemical structure, and thus small variations in
preparation, can produce wildly different colors. Better chemistry led
to more and better colors, but mostly by accident or trial and error
until surprisingly recently. The process to make a color almost always
came first; understanding of why it worked might be delayed centuries.

In school, I was an indifferent art student at best, so a lot of my
enjoyment of Bright Earth came from its whirlwind tour of art history
through the specific lens of color. I hadn't understood why medieval
European paintings seem so artificial and flat before reading this
book, or why, to my modern eye, Renaissance work suddenly became more
beautiful and interesting. I had also never thought about the crisis
that photography caused for painting, or how much that explains of the
modern move away from representational art. And I had seriously
underestimated the degree to which colors are historically symbolic
rather than representational. This material may be old news for those
who paid attention in art history courses (or, *cough*, took them in
the first place), but I enjoyed the introduction. (I often find topics
more approachable when presented through an idiosyncratic lens like
this.)

Ball is clear, straightforward, and keeps the overall picture coherent
throughout, which probably means that he's simplifying dramatically
given that the scope of this book is nothing less than the entire
history of European and American painting. But I'm a nearly complete
newcomer to this topic, and he kept me afloat despite the flood of
references to paintings that I've never seen or thought about, always
providing enough detail for me to follow his points about color. You
definitely do not have to already know art history to get a lot out of
this book.

I do have one caveat and one grumble. The caveat is that, despite the
subtitle, this book is not about art in general. It's specifically
about painting, and more specifically focused on the subset of painting
that qualifies as "fine art." Ball writes just enough about textiles to
hint that the vast world of dyes may be even more interesting, and were
certainly more important to more people, but textiles are largely
omitted from this story. More notably, one would not be able to tell
from this book that eastern Asia or Africa or pre-colonial America
exist, let alone have their own artistic conventions and history.
Ball's topic is relentlessly limited to Europe, and then the United
States, except for a few quick trips to India or Afghanistan for raw
materials. There's nothing inherently wrong with this — Ball already
has more history than he can fully cover in only Europe and the United
States — but it would have been nice to read a more explicit
acknowledgment and at least a few passing mentions of how other
cultures approached this problem.

The grumble is just a minor mismatch of interests between Ball and
myself, namely that the one brief chapter on art reproduction was
nowhere near enough for me, and I would have loved to read three or
four chapters (or a whole book) on that topic. I suspect my lack of
appreciation of paintings has a lot to do with the challenges of
reproducing works of art in books or on a computer screen, and would
have loved more technical detail on what succeeds and what fails and
how one can tell whether a reproduction is "correct" or not. I would
have traded off a few alchemical recipes for more on that modern
problem. Maybe I'll have to find another book.

As mentioned above, I'm not a good person to recommend books about art
to anyone who knows something about art. But with that disclaimer, and
the warning that the whirlwind tour of art history mixed with the
maddening ambiguity of color words can be a bit overwhelming in spots,
I enjoyed reading this more than I expected and will gladly recommend
it.

Bright Earth does not appear to be available as an ebook, and I think
that may be a wise choice. The 66 included color plates help a great
deal, and I wouldn't want to read this book without them. Unless any
future ebook comes with very good digital reproductions, you may want
to read this book in dead tree form.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-01-09

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>