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Bright Earth provides an astonishing
glimpse into a little-explored avenue in the history of
art and science: the creation of pigments and dyes and their
influence on painting, as well as on fashion, merchandising,
and the textile and chemical industries. For as long as
artists have turned their dreams into images, they have
relied on technical knowledge to supply their materials.
Today almost every shade imaginable is easily available
in off-the-shelf tubes; every hue and tincture is manufactured
and ready for immediate use by the painter. But up until
the eighteenth century, most artists ground and mixed their
own pigments, and by necessity had considerable skill as
practical chemists.
From the artistry of ancient Greece and
Rome to the metamorphosis of the Renaissance, through the
heady days of Impressionism, Modernism, and beyond, the
chemical advances of each age played an important role in
the supply of and demand for new and more sophisticated
colors. The purple of Imperial Rome came from shellfish;
crushed beetles provided some of the finest reads of the
Baroque era; Indian yellow was made from cows' urine; and
Peruvian guano was the raw material for a nineteenth-century
purple dye known as murexide.
The systematic chemical manufacture of color
came of age in the early nineteenth century, and its fruits
were the glowing canvases of the Pre-Raphaelites in England
and the iconoclastic styles of Impressionism and Fauvism
in France. Many of today's great chemical and drug companies
-- Bayer, Hoechst, Ciba-Geigy -- had their origins as dye
manufacturers in the nineteenth century, and their chemists
helped to turn color-making into an exact science.
In Bright Earth, Philip Ball illustrates
how chemical technology and the use of color in art have
always existed in a symbolic relationship that has shaped
both their courses throughout history. By tracing their
coevolution, Ball reveals how art is more of a science,
and science more of an art, than is commonly appreciated
on either side of the fence. Brilliantly researched, engagingly
written, and far-reaching in scope and implication, Bright
Earth will stand as the definitive work on color, its
development, and its many artistic and commercial applications
for years to come.
Philip Ball majored in chemistry at the
University of Oxford and received a Ph.D. in physics from
the University of Bristol. He is now a writer and a consulting
editor for Nature and the author, most recently,
of Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water (FSG, 2000).
He lives in London.
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