Why Violet Only Started Appearing In Art During The Mid-19th Century
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Previously, DesignTAXI reported on how humans couldn’t see the color blue till more recently. Now, Russian-American artist and cognitive scientist Allen Tager has published his research on possible theories why artists took thousands of years to use violet in their works.
Over the past 20 years, Tager visited 193 museums spanning across 42 countries. With him was 1,500 Munsell color chips – world-standard samples used in color science – which he used to examine 139,892 works of art, searching for pigments of violet.
After his extensive research process, the scientist concluded that before the 1860s, very few artworks contained the color. Only from the second half of the 19th century onwards did the use of violet become popular in paintings and drawings. But what caused the sudden switch?
For the next phase of his research, Tager teamed up with two color scientists, Eric Kirchner and Elena Fedorovskaya. The trio collected high-resolution photographs of 4,117 paintings from 14 of the world’s largest museums archives. The collection included objects from ancient civilizations, and from Middle East and Asia, spanning from the 4th century to the mid-19th century.
However, muddying the parameters of their exploration was the fact that there has yet to be a clear definition for the color violet. Currently, we have reliable image analysis tools that determine reds, oranges, yellows, greens, and blues – but not violets. Across the globe, many societies tend not to agree on what constitutes as violet.
For example, according to an article on Psyche, while the color on the spectrum beyond blue is called violet in the UK, it’s more commonly known as purple in the US. People stateside also tend to refer to reddish-purple as violet, whereas it might be known as burgundy in Britain. Therefore, the first thing the researchers needed was a working definition of the hue.
From over 1,500 mixtures of red and blue in the Munsell color system, the trio selected 51 color chips that represented violet. They then examined the museum archives using these chips, we backed up Tager’s previous findings. Until the mid-19th century, the color violet had only appeared in fewer than 4% of the artworks. After the mid-19th century, the use of the color rose significantly to 37% then again to 48% in the 20th century.
Tager, Kirchner, and Fedorovskaya didn’t stop there, they wanted to find out why this sudden appearance of violet in art came to be. They considered several possible scenarios. Firstly, the researchers thought violet used in artworks pre-19th century could’ve faded due to time. However, colors found in paintings from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and medieval Islamic cultures had survived especially well in dry climates, and still had no sign of violet hues, dispelling this theory.
The second theory was that violet paint could’ve been prohibitively expensive to artists pre-1860s. This was once again disputed, as other purple and blue hues had been expensive back then, but were still used by artists in their works.
It was also posited that perhaps violet only gained popularity from the Impressionist period onwards, considering it wasn’t a hue that appeared often in the natural world, and thus wouldn’t be used often in ancient or medieval artwork. As the Impressionists strayed from imitating natural colors of the world, it would make sense they used more of violet hues than painters before.
As a scientist, Tager pondered if it could be another cause altogether that enabled humans to finally see the color violet. In our eyes, the receptors in our retinas react to different wavelengths of light, allowing us to distinguish between different hues. The retina, which is an extension of the brain, evolved over millions of years, often in response to the changes in environment and light.
An existing hypothesis by zoologist Andrew Parker posits that the Cambrian explosion had led to an increase of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere, boosting the amount of light reaching our planet, which helped increased the evolutionary benefits of human vision. Could something similar have triggered humans to view the color violet?
Tager says the answer could be in a theory that comes from American astrobiologist Adrian Melott, at the University of Kansas. Melott suggested that cosmic rays produced by supernovae could’ve altered the ionization of our atmosphere, causing showers of subatomic particles called ‘muons’. These ‘muons’ could’ve then induced genetic mutations on Earth’s creatures, including humans.
Low levels of ionising radiation has been said to cause biological molecules to mutate slightly, which could also be the cause of genetic variation. This means that possibly, due to ‘muon’ shower midway through the 19th century, human retinas could’ve mutated to see more of the color violet.
Sounds probable? While most of us aren’t color scientists, it’s certainly interesting to ponder the sharp increase of a particular color used in world art. What’s your theory?
[via Psyche, cover image via Shutterstock]
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