Investigation Five: Exploring Color

In Investigations One through Four, students investigated various aspects of perspective and symmetry, concepts central to art. Finally, in Investigation Five, students expand their exploration of science and art by focusing on color.

Color has always been important in art, particularly when attempting to create images that realistically depict real objects in the real world. This practice dates back tens of thousands of years in human development and was a primary way of recording events before written language evolved. For example, below is a painting created about 35,600 years ago in a cave in Spain. It contains an image of a bison.

Notice the realism in this painting. Body proportions are relatively close to what this ancient artist had likely observed firsthand with frequency. The artist carefully shows all four legs, and the colors add to the realism.

Egyptian Art

The group of photographs below deals with ancient Egyptian art. Examples of this type were found in temples and tombs. While most artwork is found in a condition similar to that shown in panel A, this is likely due to the loss of paint over the last 3,000 – 4,000 years of exposure to the elements. We know this because we also find works that have retained at least most of the paint that was applied over the stone (panel B). With such information, reproductions of ancient Egyptian art that demonstrate the likely original colors are prepared (panel C).

Greek and Roman Art

Ancient Greek and Roman art were no less colorful than Egyptian art. It would be a mistake to conclude that ancient Greek and Roman statues were colorless white marble, based on the many unpainted white marble statues produced during the Renaissance by artists like  Michelangelo. In the Renaissance, many Greek and Roman statues were rediscovered, and the style inspired a flurry of white marble statues by many famous artists. 

However, essentially all of these ancient artworks that resurfaced had lost their original, highly-painted surfaces.Ancient Greek and Roman art was likely painted in bright colors. Below is an example of painted Greek pottery.

Finally, below is a statue of Julius Caesar housed in the Vatican Museum in Rome. The image on the left shows how the statue was found and how it looked to the Renaissance artists who studied it. Therefore, many of the sculptures it and similar marble statues inspired were completed in unpainted white marble. However, in a recreation of the statue painted like it likely was originally, the figure on the right (below) was more likely what the statue looked like. As can be seen, the statue is far from what was initially thought after its rediscovery. Clearly, color was very important to ancient Greek and Roman artists.

Finally, below is a photograph of a room in Pompeii, a city in the southern part of Italy. Pompeii was covered by volcanic ash in a catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 BC. The eruption completely and rapidly buried the city and its inhabitants. As a result of this terrible event, however, Pompeii was essentially entombed with solid, hardened ash for centuries. This acted to preserve the city and its buildings extremely well and has served as a valuable data source for historians. The image of the room below gives us some idea of just how colorful the city must have been at the time.

The Color Wheel

For centuries, artists have mixed their colors using something like the color wheel. The color wheel shown below arranges the three primary colors (abbreviated as “P“), red, yellow, and blue, around a wheel. The primary colors can be mixed to form many different colors, beginning with the three secondary colors. As shown, red mixed with blue makes purple/violet. Yellow and blue mixed make green. Finally, red mixed with yellow makes orange. Depending on the proportions, one can mix a redder orange or a yellower orange. The secondary colors are denoted by the “S” on this color wheel.

A general feature of the color wheel is that the cool colors and the warm colors are grouped on opposite sides of the wheel. As can be seen, the cooler colors are in the green, blue, and purple range, and the warmer colors are in the red, orange, and yellow regions. Artists use cool and warm colors not only to set the overall mood of their paintings, but within a painting, the warmth of colors can create a sense of depth and distance.

In Investigation 5 Lab, students will have the opportunity to mix and analyze all of the colors shown in the color wheel.