Smith 2009

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)