Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent unused condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> LEONARDO DA VINCI was clear about black. Black is no colour’ he said. Black however was still a pigment on his palette and one he used often – for backgrounds. His Lady with an Ermine (1489-90) is painted with silvery clusive colours – except for her clear red sleevebut behind her there is only opaque solid blackness. She also wears a black necklace. Again in Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi a ghostly Jesus floats before us-gazing it seems from the world of the dead with brown glazed unseeing eyes – and behind him is the solid black of coal or soot. So if black for Leonardo was not a colour still it made the perfect background against which colour showed. Other artists have been enthusiastic. Matisse said ‘black is a force’ while Renoir called black ‘the queen of colours’ and quoted Tintoretto’s ‘the most beautiful of all colours is black’. Historically there has always been the question: where does black stand in relation to colour? Black is not a colour in the spectrum: it cannot be since the spectral colours are made of light. Aristotle on the other hand believed – and Goethe later came to believe – that bright colours could be made by mixing white and black. The ambiguity of black – is it thick stuff or nothingness a colour or darkness? – has helped it to carry other opposite values: fertile soil or burned cinders; smart clothes or widow’s weeds; the sexual mysteries of the night or death depression and grief. Beethoven spoke of a ‘black chord’ in music. No other colour has been so identified with extremes that are opposite and absolute.2 (MP)