Power of Color, The: Five Centuries of European Painting

This expansive study of colour illuminates the substance, context and meaning of five centuries of European painting. Between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the materials of painting remained remarkably unchanged, but innovations in their use flourished. Technical discoveries facilitated new visual effects, political conditions prompted innovations and economic changes shaped artists’ strategies, especially as trade became global.

Marcia Hall explores how Michelangelo radically broke with his contemporaries’ harmonising use of colour in favour of a highly saturated approach; how the robust art market and demand for affordable pictures in seventeenth-century Netherlands helped popularise subtly coloured landscape paintings; how politics and colour became entangled during the French Revolution; and how modern artists liberated colour from representation as their own role transformed from manipulators of pigments to visionaries celebrated for their individual expression. Using insights from recent conservation studies, Hall captivates readers with fascinating details and developments in magnificent examples from Botticelli and Titian to Van Gogh and Kandinsky to weave an engaging analysis. Her insistence on the importance of examining technique and material to understand artistic meaning gives readers the tools to look at these paintings with fresh eyes.