[HN Gopher] A Guide to Color from 1692
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A Guide to Color from 1692
Author : throw0101a
Score : 137 points
Date : 2021-04-09 20:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| dang wrote:
| If curious, there was at least one previous submission about
| this:
|
| _A colourful book (1692)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7702850 - May 2014 (8
| comments)
| gengelbro wrote:
| Recently read: "Secret Lives Of Colour" by Kassia St Clair which
| was very interesting from a historical perspective. I especially
| enjoyed the descriptions of the old chemical engineering (vats of
| vinegar, urine, lead, etc).
| tdeck wrote:
| In case anyone wonders what Aristotle's color system was, I found
| this great page that explores historical ways of modeling and
| thinking about color:
|
| http://www.huevaluechroma.com/071.php
| Daub wrote:
| This is an excellent resource. Thank you. Explains very clearly
| the pre-history of color systems.
|
| Two other refs....
|
| Kuehni, Rolf G., and Andreas Schwarz. Color ordered: a survey
| of color systems from antiquity to the present. Oxford
| University Press, 2008.
|
| And Handprint.com
|
| The guy that runs handprint probably knows more about color
| than any man alive.
| justinboogaard wrote:
| Wow, Handprint.com is incredible.
|
| I needed to spend some time clicking around to figure out
| what was where, but then just spent half an hour learning
| about which hue is actually the warmest (there is no
| universally accepted answer, but a common theme is scarlet).
| Stupulous wrote:
| Maybe it's just that I've subconsciously absorbed the
| scientific method, but I find it unbelievable that Aristotle
| had a theory based on a trivially false model where colors are
| all formed by mixing black and white. In Ramon y Cajal's Advice
| for a Young Investigator, he claims that Bacon's scientific
| method was just descriptive of an inherent human process. That
| felt true to me at the time. Did we really just make guesses
| and call them truth until the 1600s?
|
| On the other hand, white light does contain all of the visible
| spectrums. Maybe Aristotle had seen prismatic diffraction and
| considered it beyond his powers.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Amazing how much the Dutch language has changed. I'm a native
| speaker and that text is very hard to decipher for me. The hand
| writing is beautiful but very hard to pick apart to begin with.
| And that is made a lot harder by the many spelling, vocabulary,
| and grammar changes to the language. I tried to read a few
| sentences but couldn't make much sense of it. I suspect I'd still
| have a hard time even if somebody typed the text with a more
| legible font. I guess, a modern translation with original
| drawings would actually be an interesting thing to read for a lot
| of historians and designers.
| wazoox wrote:
| That's an interesting point to ponder. In France, there are
| constant calls to spelling reform and such. Of course, spelling
| and grammar as they are are incredibly annoying and backwards,
| but anyone with good command of them can read any text as far
| back as Rabelais (writing around 1510), and even Middle-Age
| French such as Villehardouin (writing before 1200) is perfectly
| readable with some effort (I've done it, without having more
| than 2 courses in Ancient French, back in the 80s -- you at
| least need to know that there are declensions, with 2 cases,
| and how they work -- OK, knowing some Latin definitely helps
| too :) ), it's getting really difficult IMO only with _Les
| quatre fils Aymon_ (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Sons_of_Aymon ) and
| prior works (roughly before 1100).
| gerdesj wrote:
| Several years ago I copied the javascript function reproduced
| below from a HN comment and turned it into a shortcut in my
| browser called "Remove floaters":
|
| javascript: (function () {var
| i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for
| (i=0;i<elements.length;i++) {if
| (getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='fixed' ||
| getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position==='sticky')
| {elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})();
|
| Some sites get upset but most don't. I'm very grateful to the
| original programmer who came up with this code.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| I only tested that on this site, but I've been looking for
| something like this for a while. I thought there would be
| plenty of extensions to do this automatically, but I've never
| found one. "Popups", "overlays", now "floaters" is a new term
| to me, is there a more conventional name for the whole class of
| "junk that pops up when you try to read a website"?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Google the phrase _kill sticky_ for various snippets of code
| that can be placed on your bookmark toolbar.
|
| In practice, you end up needing at least two or three
| different buttons to handle different sites. The one I
| usually use is
| javascript:(function(){(function()
| {var%20i,elements=document.querySelectorAll('body%20*');
| for(i=0;i<elements.length;
| i++){var%20p=getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position;
| if(p==='fixed'||p==='sticky'||p==='-webkit-sticky')
| {elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);}}})
| ()})()
| [deleted]
| spoonjim wrote:
| When I clicked I thought this said 1962.
| leoc wrote:
| It seems this book's colours were hand-painted, but I might as
| well mention two famous mid-C19 examples of colour printing, when
| (IIRC; I am not an expert) high-quality colour printing was still
| very expensive and rare:
|
| * the "Sobieski Stewarts'" dodgy _Vestiarium Scoticum_ :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestiarium_Scoticum
|
| > It was from Eilean Aigas, in 1842, that the brothers at last
| published their famous manuscript, _Vestiarium Scoticum_ . It
| appeared in a sumptuous edition limited to fifty copies. The
| series of coloured illustrations of tartans was the first ever to
| be published and was a triumph over technical difficulties. These
| illustrations were executed by a new process of 'machine
| printing' and, in the words of a scholar writing fifty years
| later, 'for beauty of execution and exactness of detail have not
| been excelled by any method of colour-printing subsequently
| invented'.
|
| > Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland
| Tradition of Scotland"
|
| * Oliver Byrne's colour edition of the first six books of Euclid
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Byrne_(mathematician)#B...
|
| And why not throw in _Shadows From the Walls of Death_
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_from_the_Walls_of_Deat...
| with its samples of intensely green arsenical wallpaper?
| hallarempt wrote:
| Coloritto or the Harmony of Painting (1720) is interesting as
| well: https://library.si.edu/digital-
| library/book/colorittoharmon0...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Very cool. I was grumbling about the absence of a straightforward
| .PDF download, but there actually is one, if you click on the
| "Impression ou telechargement du fichieres" (sp?) button at the
| bottom of the online viewer window.
|
| It's relatively large (336 MB), though, and much of the content
| is text that looks like it was handwritten in Elvish. The image
| of the title page shown at the openculture.com link has been
| color-corrected nicely, so the actual document looks
| significantly duller in comparison.
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(page generated 2021-04-10 23:01 UTC)