Goethe's Visual World by Currie Pamela;

Author:Currie, Pamela;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Chapter 6

Classical Colour Harmony

Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on Jacques Louis David and his Pupil Gottlieb Schick, an 'emporstrebenden jungen Maler' in Rome

The Historische Teil of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre, published in 1810, contained two essays by Heinrich Meyer, including 'Geschichte des Kolorits seit Wiederherstellung der Kunst', a piece that is probably 'the first historical outline of color in painting'.1 Drawing on extensive first-hand knowledge of western European art gained from collections in Germany, and galleries, churches, and palaces in Italy, Meyer compressed the history of colour from the thirteenth century to his own time into fewer than twenty pages of text (761—79).2 But so far from allowing his material to collapse into a mere catalogue, he achieved the notable feat of structuring it in a distinctive — and distinctively Goethean — fashion, by subdividing Kolorit into two aspects: Kolorit in the strict sense ('im strengen und eingeschränkten Sinne'), and Harmonie der Farbe (766). By Kolorit in the strict sense he meant colouring in imitation of nature: 'die treue Darstellung der Natur' (766). The objects to be imitated were landscape features, fabrics, minerals and metals, and especially human flesh. This was a branch of art in which the Venetians excelled, Titian being 'vielleicht in diesem Stück für vollkommen und unübertrefflich zu halten' (766). Rubens, van Dyck and Rembrandt likewise belonged to the first order of Koloristen (771). Few of Meyer's contemporaries would have quarrelled with this part of his argument, but many must have been surprised by his relegation of Kolorit itself to a subordinate position within the art of colouring. For Kolorit, he wrote, 'bedeutet nur die künstliche Mischung [der Farben] und die treue Darstellung der Natur' (766, my italics). Thus the more important of the two aspects of colouring was Harmonie der Farbe. In so saying, Meyer adopted Goethe's view, which he expressed in so many words in 'Diderots Versuch über die Malerei', where harmony is 'der wichtigste Teil des Kolorits' (18: 590), and which inspired his colour research as a whole. Meyer's pioneering essay was thus an attempt not merely to assess the old masters' achievements in colour, but to chart the development of two sorts of excellence, in imitation of nature on the one hand, and colour harmony on the other.

Strangely enough, including the question of harmony under the broad general heading of colour in painting was already a departure from normal eighteenthcentury practice. In the prevailing tradition of chiaroscuro painting that had originated with Leonardo da Vinci, colour harmony was regarded merely as an aspect of chiaroscuro. For light and shade were seen as the means by which colours might be brought into a harmonious relationship.3 Bright light or deep shadow might assimilate disparate hues to one another, or else the suggestion of a colour, most often a golden yellow, in the light itself might tinge all the objectcolours equally and thus overcome any dissonance between them. But Goethe, who believed that colour harmony rested on its own laws — laws that he himself had discovered —

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