Smith 2009

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Light at 500-510 Nanometers and the 17th-Century Crisis of Consciousness

Marvell, "The Garden"

Derrida, The Truth in Painting; color as a power, force, transgressive, refusing the strictures of the line

"Color is not an object out there in space, waiting to be named; it is a phenomenon, an event that happens between an object and a subject." (15)
"With color there is no 'thing-in-itself'. Color asks to be thought about, not as an object to be observed or as a text to be read, but as a transation to be experienced. That transaction happens within three coordinates -- space ,time, and body -- which are, in fact, the fundamental coordinates of all human experience." (16)

green curtains covering portraits; protecting them from light, dust

Green Closet at Ham House; framing of room by doors and portraits by frames; hanging locks of hair and curtain pulled back creates multisensory experience (20)

  • English equivalent of Italian studiolo

Wittgenstein, Remarks on Color -- color as a language game

"Color makes it impossible to separate subject from object." (24)

Nietzsche on color (24-5)

c17: Kuhnian paradigm shift in ideas about color; beginning of c17, mostly Aristotelian idea of color as "differing material transparencies ranged between black and white"; by the end of the century, Newtonian -- colors "understood to be an effect of light" (29)

sensation as a whole-body experience (30)

"A green thought would have involved not just the stimulation of the retina by waves of light at 500-510 nanometers and the brain's matching up this sensation with the concept 'green' but also (1) the fusing of the sensation with reports from the other senses by the faculty known as common sens, (2) the referral of this enhanced sensation to the combinatory powers of the faculty known as imagination or fantasy, (3) the transmission of the resulting kinesthetic sensation to the heart, and (4) the excitation there of the body's four humors according to whether the heart dilated in desire or contracted in avoidance. the perceiver experienced this rush of humors throughout the body as passion of one sort or another. Only then did ratiocination come into play." (30)