Color: A Natural History of the Palette [Kindle Edition] Author: Victoria Finlay | Language: English | ISBN:
B000XUBDIA | Format: PDF, EPUB
Color: A Natural History of the Palette Epub Free
Download Color: A Natural History of the Palette [Kindle Edition] Epub Free from with Mediafire Link Download Link In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself.
How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo’s brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time.
Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish–which probably meant their scent preceded them. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza. And the popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washington’s National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes–painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style.
Embark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes; with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige; with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright.
From the Hardcover edition. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Color: A Natural History of the Palette [Kindle Edition] Epub Free
- File Size: 1907 KB
- Print Length: 448 pages
- Publisher: Random House (December 18, 2007)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000XUBDIA
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #66,222 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Art > Instruction & Reference > Color - #23
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Art > Art History > Schools, Periods & Styles - #36
in Books > Arts & Photography > Graphic Design > Techniques > Use of Color
- #2
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Art > Instruction & Reference > Color - #23
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Art > Art History > Schools, Periods & Styles - #36
in Books > Arts & Photography > Graphic Design > Techniques > Use of Color
Man, oh, man, did I want to love "Color," but it's bogged down by two major problems. The first is that it wants to be not only a) a history of dyes and pigments but also to some extent b) a history of various colors' cultural associations and c) a travelogue, and there just isn't room in this town for all three of those goals. Each chapter ricochets between the histories of several different types of dyeing materials, their cultural histories in their countries of origin, and author Victoria Finlay's modern-day adventures in those locales. Though the book is organized by the spectrum, with each color (plus black, white, and the first dye, ochre) receiving its own chapter, chasing Finlay's competing agendas makes the book overlong and trying to follow. The author just loses the thread too often.
The second is Finlay herself, who makes for a very trying narrator. She has an aggravating tendency to invent elaborate fantasies when facts fail her and expect us to invest in them throughout the chapter, when we just want her to get back to fact. She swears like Mark Twain thought all women did. Her scientific knowledge is lacking and apparently escaped fact-checking (her explanation of why the sky is red at sunset is wrong). Worst, however, is her unabashed colonialism; her globe-hopping quest for color often doubles as a tour of Britain's erstwhile empire, and there's a patronizing quality in Finlay's distanced view of these cultures that suggests a tyranny of low expectations.
Take the chapter on blue, which is in a way the book's strongest because it has a single long-term focus (a journey to a famed lapis lazuli quarry in Afghanistan) but is also one of the most amoral passages I've encountered in nonfiction.
I thoroughly enjoyed this reportage, where Victoria tracks down the origns of so many colours I knew from my childhood paintbox and later days with an aniline dyestuff manufacturer. However good the book is, and I highly recommend this to anyone interested in colourants and their origins, I was left wanting more......an upto date Part 2 please, to answer the questions that were left unanswered such as, "Is the lack of vivid bright orange just a reaction to the 60' & 70's overuse or is it still the case that cadmium orange (which does not get a mention) has not been replaced with anything quite as powerful? and what are the colours we now use in our paint boxes, wallpapers and so on?"
Why am I posing these questions, well Victoria is just the person to tell us auhtoritatively & accurately. I only had a few quibbles with the entire 400+ pages, one was an editor's slip that allowed India to be separated into Bangladesh, India & Pakistan in 1947! Which I am sure the author knows was not quite the instant route it seems (first it was the eastern half of the division known as Pakistan i.e. East Pakistan which then separated in 1971 I believe from West Pakistan and became Bangladesh). Another was the rather simlplistic way she refers to chemical formulas, yes of course AsS is a combination of 1 molecule each of arsenic & sulphur whereas As2S3 combines in the ratio of 2:3, however whether this means in fact the latter is any more poisonous than the former can not be assumed from the chemical formula....if I remember my chemistry correctly you need to understand which is more soluble in water or most readily adsorbed in the stomach (a solution of HCl I believe). If the author has confirmed this it was not clear from the text and copiuous and excellent notes.
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