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)

"to green" as "to desire" in c16 and Scots (36-7)

colors of rhetoric (38); "the graphic line is to logical proof what colors are to passionate persuasion" (38)

historical phenomenology

• "In place of the universalizing assumptions that marked new criticism as a method of reading and liberal humanism as a controlling ideology, new historicism insists on the historical contingency of sense experience and the constructedness of verbal meaning. In a move beyond new historicism and deconstruction, historical phenomenology recognizes a continuity between intellect and other ways of knowing." (40)

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)

Descartes, Hobbes, La Chambre on passions (32ff); "at the moment Marvell was writing, an older model of subjective knowledge, known through the body, was being shallenged by a newer model of objective knowledge, known through the exercise of reason" (34)

Green Stuff

"green man"; out of fashion by 1600

Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, color as "material stuff" (56)

Foucault, knowledge through analogy: "That Hermes = Mercury = mercury = quicksilver = an excellent green is coincidence enough to detain the most enlightened skeptic. Under the aegis of Hermes' epistemology, to know metals is to know plants is to know the human soul. and to know all three, at the moment of transmutation, is to know green." (67)

"In experiment 327 of Sylva Sylvarum, Bacon again speaks of metals as if they were living, growing things." (64)

Between Black and White

Margaret Cavendish, "juxtaposition of rational argument and fanciful fiction" in pairing Observations with Blazing World (102)

"animate materialists": Isaac Barrow, Francis Glisson, unknown author of Raleigh's Sceptick; refuse mind-body binary; for Barrows, magnetism proves extension of spirit into matter (103-4)

Mapping Renaissance theories of mind to the color spectrum:

• Helkiah Crooke and Descartes (104-5)
• Montaigne; Edward Herbert, De veritate (1624) -- all but forgotten now, but grounds for Kant and phenomenology (107-8)
• Margaret Cavendish
• Descartes, Thomas Browne, Ralph Cudworth, Locke and a scene of writing (4.11) (121-2)
• spectrum can't be read chronologically (123)
• using Raymond Williams: at any given moment, residual, dominant and emergent ideas/cultures exist simultaneously

Green Spectacles

Ut pictura poesis, poetry is like a picture;

• picture is capacious word in Renaissance, can refer to tapestry, sculpture, painting, emblems, poetry;
• from Horace's "Ars Poetica"
• arts weren't distinguished by media until eighteenth-century aestheticians like Shaftesbury and Lessing sorted them that way

for Horace, both poetry and painting share the "coordinates of space, light value, and time" (126)

"Recent histories of 'the book' (note the singular) -- Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean martin's The Coming of the Book (1976), Eliza eth Eisenstein's The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (1983), Adrian Johns's The Nature of the Book (1998), John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie's The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4 (2002), Roger Chartier's Inscription and Erasure (1007) -- tend to assume a 'reader' (note the singular) who is absent in body, unlocated in space and time, sedentary in posture, totally absorbed by the printed text he holds in his hands. He never yawns, he never lets his mind wander, he never even looks around. Should he have done so, there would have been plenty to distract him in the spaces where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men and women actually did much of their reading: gardens like Marvell's and 'cabinets' or 'closets' like William Murray's at Ham House. The interplay of visual objects and printed texts in spaces like the Green Closet at Ham House produced, according to Stephen J. Campbell, a 'semiotic vituosity' in which texts might provide 'a poetic and metaphoric commentary on objects in the collections.' That virtuosity could, it seems to me, operate i nthe other direction as well, as images in the room informed texts in hand. In England at least, the ambience in such spaces was usually provided by folds of woven fabric in the form of tapestries, hangings, painted cloths, bed curtains, needlework cushions, and carpets. These woven artifacts figure as physical, period-specific versions of the assemblage, the interlacing, the weaving, the infolding that Derrida finds in the space between one letter and another. They give us reference points for understanding how Renaissance men and women walking, sitting, and reclining within arbors and chambers might have taken printed texts in hand and read them. Ambient reading in such spaces encourages constant -- and constantly varying -- interplay between the verbal and the visual." (127-8)