Throughout art history, how artists use color has been shaped as much by symbolic tradition and optical science as by personal intuition. For the pioneer of abstract art Wassily Kandinsky, writing in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), color was never a mere physical reflection of light, but an inner "spiritual vibration" capable of touching the human soul directly. Across the centuries, painters have harnessed color to awaken the senses, encode sacred meaning, and stir deep psychological emotion.
Sacred Symbolism and Bellini’s Ultramarine
In ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and medieval Europe, temples, sculptures, and church interiors blazed with polychrome pigment. Within medieval Christian art—from gilded Byzantine icons and carved altarpieces to luminous stained-glass windows—color carried a codified spiritual language. Long before the Reformation, the Church’s liturgical calendar prescribed specific hues for sacred seasons: green for Ordinary Time after Epiphany and Pentecost, white and gold for Christmas and Easter, crimson for Pentecost and martyrs’ feasts, and penitential violet (purple) for Advent and Lent (beginning on Ash Wednesday).
Deep ultramarine blue—ground from precious lapis lazuli imported from Afghanistan at a cost exceeding gold—symbolized heavenly grace, humility, and divine contemplation, nowhere more memorably than in the Virgin Mary’s radiant mantle in Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow (c. 1505).
From Renaissance Elements to Newton, Goethe, and Chevreul
During the Renaissance, artists began pairing symbolic color lore with empirical optical observation. Following Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci linked primary hues to the four classical elements—red to fire, blue to air, green to water, and yellow (or ash) to earth—while noting in his Treatise on Painting how adjacent colors alter one another in perception: dark clothing makes human skin appear lighter, white drapery makes flesh look darker, and vivid red attire drains the face of its natural blush, making it seem pale.
Between the 17th and 19th centuries, modern color theory took shape through a dialogue between physics, physiology, and art:
- Isaac Newton’s Prism (1666–1704): In the late 1660s and 1670s, English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton used a glass prism to prove that white sunlight contains the full visible spectrum. In his Opticks (1704), he bent the spectrum into the first color wheel, revealing how opposite (complementary) hues relate systematically.
- Goethe’s Theory of Colors (1810): Challenging Newton’s purely mathematical optics, the German poet and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe argued in Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre) that color is fundamentally a subjective human perception shaped by the eye and brain—a view that deeply inspired Romantic and modern painters.
- Chevreul’s Simultaneous Contrast (1839): French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul demonstrated that any color changes appearance depending on the hue placed beside it, formulating the law of "simultaneous contrast" (contraste simultané). Late 19th-century French Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists (such as Georges Seurat) translated Chevreul’s law onto canvas, juxtaposing unmixed dabs of complementary pigment to create vibrant optical mixing in the viewer’s eye. Captivated by the sun-drenched light of Provence, Vincent van Gogh echoed this law in 1888: "There is no blue without yellow and without orange."
Van Gogh’s Passions, Albers’s Geometry, and Rothko’s Color Fields
For Vincent van Gogh, color became an autonomous emotional language. In The Night Café (1888), he wrote, "I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green," while in The Bedroom (1888) he used tranquil lilac walls, chrome-yellow wood, and pale green windows to suggest "absolute rest" for the mind and imagination.
That breakthrough paved the way for 20th-century abstraction, where color needed no narrative pretext at all. While Bauhaus master Josef Albers explored the perceptual relativity of simultaneous contrast through nested geometric squares, Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko dissolved edges altogether—suspending luminous, breathing rectangles of pigment in his Color Field paintings to awaken the very "spiritual sensation" Kandinsky had envisioned half a century earlier.
