Goethe’s counter-argument to Newton, treating colour not as a property of light alone but as an experience arising between light, darkness, and the human eye. Though rejected as physics, it profoundly influenced painters, and its account of perception still fascinates artists.
Sources for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Theory of Colours
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Theory of Colours in Visual Art
Held in the Visual Art chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Vitruvius — De Architectura (c. 15 BCE)
- Cennino Cennini — Il Libro dell’Arte (c. 1400)
- Albrecht Dürer — Of the Just Shaping of Letters (1525)
- Giorgio Vasari — Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550)
- Leonardo da Vinci — A Treatise on Painting (1651)
- Giovanni Pietro Bellori — Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1672)
- Edmund Burke — A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
- Denis Diderot — Salons (1765)
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)
- M. E. Chevreul — The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (1839)
- John Ruskin — Modern Painters (1843)
- John Ruskin — The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
- John Ruskin — The Stones of Venice (1851)
- John Ruskin — The Elements of Drawing (1857)
- Eugène Viollet-le-Duc — Discourses on Architecture (1863)
- Émile Zola — Mon Salon (1866)
- Charles Blanc — The Grammar of Painting and Engraving (1867)
- Walter Pater — The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)
- Leonardo da Vinci — The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)
- Bernard Berenson — The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1896)
- Vincent van Gogh — Letters (1913)
- Clive Bell — Art (1914)
- Louis Sullivan — The Autobiography of an Idea (1924)