Ancient Greek:

- revered idealized and abstract thought

Aristotle: "one who haphrzardly throws around even the most beautiful colors cannot delight the eye as one who has drawn a simple figure against a white background."

- ideal = pure, so mixed colors or pigments was a no-no. in part, mixing of poor quality pigments lost color, produced brown or gray colors.

-ideal = symmetry, henc the parallel between teh classical four colors (white, black, red, yellow) and the four elements: earth, air, wind and fire.

 

Medieval Culture

Art and Alchemy: move forward together

• - most artists prepared their own pigments and so were essentially chemists
• - De Re Metallica, Georgius Agricola (1556); is the first book on mining, metallurgy, alchemical process
• - the definitive text for 200 yrs; translated into 10 languages
• translated from latin by president Herbert Clark Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover.
• - details of mine construction, machine building, smelting processes, chemical reactions
• - woodcuts diagramming constructions & processes

Painters and Alchemists: second class citzens,

• - another example of two cultures
• - craftsmen vs. scholars; "holy art" vs intellectualized "liberal" art

The Harry Potter connection: the philospher's stone (check out the cover: the stone is a translucent red)

• The elusive goal of the alchemists: the "tincture" to turn any metal into gold.
• Identical to ancient pigment Vermillion, mercuric sulfide, HgS.

 

The Enlightenment (Renaissance, rebirth, of classical (Greek) thoguht)

Reason highest value, influences art/painting in several ways

• - developing ideas of perspective and shadow as rational undestanding of space/lighing acquired, as based on mathematics
• - ranking designo (line) over colore (color, pigments); so little development of new pigments (except greens)

Painters and alchemists wanted to improve their rank, move from craftsman to scholar, and so both groups began to favor a systematic approach to art and to the transformations of materials (which is chemistry).

This disparity of rank, this separation of cultures, between craftsman and scholar continued into the 1900's. John Ruskin deplored art's two cultures, arguing that decorative arts and crafts should not be regarded as a degraded or separate kind of art.

 

Art and Science: looking back

the contemporary idea?: art <--> science are opposed

NOT the case historically: there was more that allies painters and chemists with each other than with other artists and scientists. Medieval artists were chemists.