She explains and illustrates her argument with wonderful clarity.”-Jo Kirby, formerly Senior Scientific Officer, National Gallery, London “Marcia Hall covers a familiar historical path but in a way that encourages readers to look at works of art through a different and more subtle lens. “It has taken two years of writing and a scholarly lifetime to conceive, but Marcia Hall’s expansive study of how color has been a key through-line over five centuries of European painting is well worth the Herculean effort.”- Antiques and the Arts Weekly

“This excellently illustrated volume from Yale will serve as a comprehensive survey on color in Western painting from the fifteenth century to the age of Modernism.”-Andrew Shea, New Criterion Her insistence on the importance of examining technique and material to understand artistic meaning gives readers the tools to look at these paintings with fresh eyes. Using insights from recent conservation studies, Hall captivates readers with fascinating details and developments in magnificent examples-from Botticelli and Titian to Van Gogh and Kandinsky-to weave an engaging analysis. Marcia Hall explores how Michelangelo radically broke with his contemporaries’ harmonizing use of color in favor of a highly saturated approach how the robust art market and demand for affordable pictures in 17th-century Netherlands helped popularize subtly colored landscape paintings how politics and color became entangled during the French Revolution and how modern artists liberated color from representation as their own role transformed from manipulators of pigments to visionaries celebrated for their individual expression. Technical discoveries facilitated new visual effects, political conditions prompted innovations, and economic changes shaped artists’ strategies, especially as trade became global. Between the mid-15th and the mid-19th centuries, the materials of painting remained remarkably unchanged, but innovations in their use flourished. will serve as a comprehensive survey on color in Western painting from the fifteenth century to the age of Modernism.”-Andrew Shea, New Criterion This expansive study of color illuminates the substance, context, and meaning of five centuries of European painting.

Revealing the power of color as physical medium, a key to interpretation, and a mediator of social and political change “This excellently illustrated volume.

19 century painting man reader