Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay Page B
Authors: Victoria Finlay
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blue, and emerald green. Conservators at the National Gallery of Art in London report that in this painting Monet used almost no black pigment at all. 2
THE FIRST PAINTING
According to one Western classical legend, the first paint was black and the first artist female. When Pliny the Elder was writing his Natural History —a summary of everything available in the Roman marketplace and quite a few other things besides—he told a story of how the origin of art was found in epic love. After all, what better inspiration for art is there than passion? According to Pliny one of the first artists was a young woman in the town of Corinth in Greece who one evening was weepily saying good-bye to her lover before he set out on a long journey. Suddenly, between impassioned embraces, she noticed his shadow on the wall, cast by the light of a candle. So, spontaneously, she reached out for a piece of charcoal from the fire and filled in the pattern. I imagine her kissing the image and thinking that in this way something of his physical presence would be fixed close to her while his beloved body was far away in the distant Mediterranean.
As an origin theory it is a mythic image that has reappeared in paintings and drawings throughout the centuries since. It particularly appealed to the Georgians and Victorians, with their fashions both for cut-paper silhouettes and stories of desperate love. 3 In 1775 the Scottish portrait artist David Allan painted The Origin of Painting , showing a very flirty lady sitting on her film-star boyfriend’s knee as she fills in his profile on the wall. Her flowing robes have slipped to reveal her right breast, the sight of which is evidently keeping the young man occupied while she gets on with the serious business of the first portrait. Quite apart from the toga effect, it is a deliciously challenging image—of using something that has already burned out to symbolize a love you want to last forever.
THE OTHER EARLIEST PAINTINGS
Pliny had no access to anything like our modern theories about the world’s earliest paintings, which suggest that the first human artists were inspired by things like winter boredom, techniques of hunting lore, sacred ritual practices or even just by the simple joys of illustrated storytelling. The proof was there if he or anyone else had wanted to find it—beneath the Niaux cave paintings in the French Pyrenees, for example, the imprint of a Roman centurion’s sandal testifies that the Neolithic paintings had been seen by at least one man in the classical world. But the scholarly world was not, apparently, ready for anything more than Pliny’s charming mixture of anecdote and mythology, and the first of Europe’s major prehistoric cave-painting galleries would not be discovered by the academic world for nearly two millennia.
However, if this opinionated Roman natural historian had been given the chance to move forward through time, and witness the discovery of the Altamira caves in northern Spain, for example, I think he would have felt a little smug. He was not necessarily accurate about the inspiration for early Spanish paintings. There is a lot more hunting than lovemaking in these caves, although interestingly some Swedish petroglyphs of a slightly later date contained so many pictures of men with impressively large erections that their documenter, Carl Georg Brunius, had to consult his colleagues about whether or not the mid-nineteenth century audience was ready to see these early examples of Swedish porn. 4 The colleagues were divided on the matter. But Pliny was at least right about the painting materials. Ochre may have been undeniably the first colored paint, but even the earliest artists usually liked to draw their designs first with charcoal—sometimes just to make sure they got the shapes right before they committed to coloring them in, and sometimes to give their works powerful outlines. And if it was not necessarily a woman who had scribbled the early
THE FIRST PAINTING
According to one Western classical legend, the first paint was black and the first artist female. When Pliny the Elder was writing his Natural History —a summary of everything available in the Roman marketplace and quite a few other things besides—he told a story of how the origin of art was found in epic love. After all, what better inspiration for art is there than passion? According to Pliny one of the first artists was a young woman in the town of Corinth in Greece who one evening was weepily saying good-bye to her lover before he set out on a long journey. Suddenly, between impassioned embraces, she noticed his shadow on the wall, cast by the light of a candle. So, spontaneously, she reached out for a piece of charcoal from the fire and filled in the pattern. I imagine her kissing the image and thinking that in this way something of his physical presence would be fixed close to her while his beloved body was far away in the distant Mediterranean.
As an origin theory it is a mythic image that has reappeared in paintings and drawings throughout the centuries since. It particularly appealed to the Georgians and Victorians, with their fashions both for cut-paper silhouettes and stories of desperate love. 3 In 1775 the Scottish portrait artist David Allan painted The Origin of Painting , showing a very flirty lady sitting on her film-star boyfriend’s knee as she fills in his profile on the wall. Her flowing robes have slipped to reveal her right breast, the sight of which is evidently keeping the young man occupied while she gets on with the serious business of the first portrait. Quite apart from the toga effect, it is a deliciously challenging image—of using something that has already burned out to symbolize a love you want to last forever.
THE OTHER EARLIEST PAINTINGS
Pliny had no access to anything like our modern theories about the world’s earliest paintings, which suggest that the first human artists were inspired by things like winter boredom, techniques of hunting lore, sacred ritual practices or even just by the simple joys of illustrated storytelling. The proof was there if he or anyone else had wanted to find it—beneath the Niaux cave paintings in the French Pyrenees, for example, the imprint of a Roman centurion’s sandal testifies that the Neolithic paintings had been seen by at least one man in the classical world. But the scholarly world was not, apparently, ready for anything more than Pliny’s charming mixture of anecdote and mythology, and the first of Europe’s major prehistoric cave-painting galleries would not be discovered by the academic world for nearly two millennia.
However, if this opinionated Roman natural historian had been given the chance to move forward through time, and witness the discovery of the Altamira caves in northern Spain, for example, I think he would have felt a little smug. He was not necessarily accurate about the inspiration for early Spanish paintings. There is a lot more hunting than lovemaking in these caves, although interestingly some Swedish petroglyphs of a slightly later date contained so many pictures of men with impressively large erections that their documenter, Carl Georg Brunius, had to consult his colleagues about whether or not the mid-nineteenth century audience was ready to see these early examples of Swedish porn. 4 The colleagues were divided on the matter. But Pliny was at least right about the painting materials. Ochre may have been undeniably the first colored paint, but even the earliest artists usually liked to draw their designs first with charcoal—sometimes just to make sure they got the shapes right before they committed to coloring them in, and sometimes to give their works powerful outlines. And if it was not necessarily a woman who had scribbled the early
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