COLOR. - Both the sensation produced by matter permeated with a light that determines in it a "quality," and the light itself that defines such quality, are called color. In art, color is one of the elements of figurative language, and as such it participates in constituting the very essence of the work of art, taking part in it in various ways along with the other elements, according to the stylistic requirement by which the artist informed his creation.

The pictorial properties of color are quality, intensity and tone. Quality is the distinction of matter within the luminous spectrum (e.g., red, yellow, blue, etc.); intensity is given by the greater or lesser distance of the quality from the neutrals; tone is the fusion of matter and light, or rather the value that a given color acquires according to the quantity of light it absorbs and reflects.

By neutrals are meant those gradations of gray, from white to black, which, lacking light, have within themselves the implicit negation of color.

The history of art's development is founded on these properties, through the varying alternation of expressive means capable of provoking luminous or chromatic sensations.

To tone properly so called, which was a recent conquest in modern painting (it is well known that the name of Giorgione [1480-1510] is linked to "tone"), there is in fact opposed chiaroscuro (v.), which has a more ancient tradition (it was Masaccio who was the first to understand its faculties fully); it is based on the gradations of neutrals superimposed on pure colors to create the effects of shadow, contrasting with the effects of light suggested by those. By contrast, tone will be obtained through the succession of qualities of color in function of light and in function of shadow (a light yellow and a dark violet, for example, joined together to create respectively the light passage and the adjacent shadow passage).

Quite different was the stylistic vision of Leonardo da Vinci, who opposed to the use of tones of color that of gradations of neutrals, blended in their chiaroscuro (v. chiaroscuro). Thus the shadows predominant in his pictorial ideal, departing from the richness of color, delineated one of the most suggestive and poetic attitudes of Western painting.

Bibliography7 works

BIBL.: C. A. Petrucci, P. Zancani Montuori, G. Giorgi, s. v. in Enc. Ital., X (1931), pp. 881-86; S. Bottari, I miti della critica figurativa, Milan-Messina 1936, passim; id., Il linguaggio figurativo, ibid. 1940, passim; L. Venturi, La pittura, Rome 1947, passim; M. Marangoni, Saper vedere, 3rd ed., Milan 1948, passim; C. Brandi, The Cleaning of pictures in relation to patina, varnish and glasser, in The Burlington Magazine, London 1949, pp. 183-88; id., Restauro, in Enc. Ital., Appendice II (1949), pp. 698-701.

Giovanni Carandente

@incollection{ec4_colore, author = {Carandente, Giovanni}, title = {Colore}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {IV}, pages = {22}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1950}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/colore} }

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