Chromorama: How Colour Changed Our Way of Seeing
by Riccardo Falcinelli (2017, translated from Italian 2022, published by Penguin Random House 2025; 470 pages)
What a beautifully illustrated, free-wheeling journey through history, art, graphic design, marketing, technology, science, and philosophy! This book is one of a kind, and it truly lives up to its subtitle for me – it has changed the way I see and think about and enjoy colour.
There is No Such Thing
Of course we know what Primary Colours are, don’t we? Once again I relish a book which challenges and seeks to overturn the assumptions we take for granted. For Falcinelli asserts that there is No Such Thing as primary colours. Yet the concept was held onto for generations of artists, and it continues to be a useful teaching aid.
The author introduces the history of colour theories and shows how colour wheels were invented in order to systematise and teach relationships between colours. Yet no two are the same. He discusses rainbows and Sir Isaac Newton’s revelation that the colours of the rainbow could be separated and recombined from and to white light. And he tackles how Newton, supreme scientist that he was known as, was not averse to ideology, when he described the rainbow as having seven colours. It is seven because it is a divine number, not an arbitrary drawing of lines, not a scientific observation. And there is No Such Thing as “indigo”.
The all-too-human propensity to organise and describe and create taxonomies of everything, as if some form of control, reached it’s limit with the industrialisation of colour – when the gradations and textures of naturally occurring colour give way to solid fields of a single hue.
There is a fascinating description of how printing techniques again revolutionised the way people conceive of and distinguish colours. We have a notion that 3-colour or 4 -colour printing can give us all the colours in the natural world, but often this is a mistaken idea. Do we remember the impossible blues of the exotic seas in holiday brochures, which never really matched the reality? This was a direct consequence of the Kodachrome process, when colour photography became more widely available. Seeing is not believeing.
Allusions and Illusions
Indeed, we do not always see what is really there. Here is where the perception of colour, its manifestation in our minds, is another layer of smoke and mirrors between the light that reaches our eyes and the “qualia” of how we experience colours. There are age-old questions of do you and I experience the “same” red when we look at the same red thing? Or how do different languages/cultures perceive the differences and similarities between colours?
Colours are not just fields which reflect light of a certain quality, and they not only form sensations in our minds, but light up cascades of allusions, accretions of meaning and experience and expectation. And this is one of the strongest aspects of the book. There are whole chapters on ‘hot orange’, ‘colonial beige’, ‘symbolic purple’ and ‘moral white’. The writing sweeps across history, art and science.
And regarding the science, there is the discovery of the “after-image” in complementary colour, and the perception of colours depending on their context: demonstrably the same thing can appear very different in contrast to another colour. These are well-known, but somehow still perplexing optical illusions. Just because we know what is going on, doesn’t mean our brains can “see” around the strange effects. The book also has a very good appendix which has over 25 pages describing optics and other aspects of colour from a scientific perspective.
Attention Grabber
The swirl of cultural associations with certain colours offer a toolbox of manipulative tricks which market research has honed into a different kind of science – targeting products to appeal to us and boost profits. Market research is a pillar of consumerism, and confirms that colour is one of the foundations of advertising.
But marketing in a global economy has shown how different colours have diverging associations in different cultures. Love is connoted by red in the West, but by subtle pastel shades in China. Why is orange “hot” or blue “cold”? We can come up with justifications, which may hold in one society, but not in another. Associations between colours and ideas or expectations are inevitable, but the meanings attached to them are culturally determined, and become part of how our brains work. At times this wonderful book felt like it was not just opening my eyes, but lifting the lid off the top of my head!
Elsewhere on the Bookshelf
Most of my books on art focus on art history or specific artists, rather than technical aspects, like colour. But reading Falcinelli’s book lit up several associations with things I have read.
In Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf, 2017) he discussed several forms of synaesthesia, in which the brain experiences associations between different senses and perceptions. These include synaesthesia in which a person sees lights and shapes instead of colour.
Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men (2022, Penguin Random House; 460 pages + extensive endnotes, hardback) is the most eye-opening, brilliant work of art history I have read. It is a magnificent attempt to redress the balance of centuries of ignoring great women artists. For me, reading this genuinely widened my horizons and revealed dozens of artists I had not known about, much as Leah Broad’s Quartet had done with women composers.
Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (2007/8, Penguin; 392 pages pbk.) is a fine history book which opened up (for me) a huge swathe of history which as far as I can remember was untouched in the UK school curriculum of the 1970s. It includes a memorable chapter called “Imperial Children, ‘Born in the Purple'”, which describes porphyrogennetos, in which royal babies were born in a completely purple room and swathed with purple-dyed swaddling clothes. The purple dye was incredibly expensive, obtained from the murex shellfish, and protected by sumptuary laws.
