Chromorama by Riccardo Falcinelli

A Review

Chromorama by Riccardo Falcinelli is what we in the book trade call a hefty tome. Weighing in at nearly 450 pages, with footnotes and appendices, this is more of an academic work than a lighthearted romp through colour theory. If you’re a student of art or design I imagine this will be extremely useful.

Or if you have to squash something fierce.

For the layperson like me, it’s a bit more of a challenge. I’ve been reading it in manageable chunks for several months now.

This is by no means a comprehensive review. I think we would all be bored to death by that. I’m here mainly to throw down some ideas I got from the book that sparked something in me.

Falcinelli is extremely good on explaining why our understanding of colour is not static.

As William Carlos Williams put so succinctly:

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Basically, each of us not only sees colour as an entirely unique experience because of the way we neurologically process it, we are also influenced by the context of where we see the colour in question and what we see it in comparison with. It also has to do with our cultural affinities.

A clear example of this would be the use of the colour white in weddings in much of Western society and for funerals in Eastern countries.

Falcinelli also talks about technology and the changes it has wrought on our appreciation of, but also access to, colour. I was fascinated by his exploration of the lack of colour in Homer’s poetry. He posits that his description of a ‘wine dark sea’ may have been because in order to name a colour you have to be able to not only reproduce it, but make it accessible to people, otherwise you have no way of visualising it. How medieval religious paintings used lapis as the most holy colour simply because it was the most expensive colour to make and how mauve was created as a by product of the need to synthesise quinine.

The book is also really good at directing us to look more closely at things like the use of colour in advertising, commerce and film. There is a particularly strong chapter on Hitchcock’s use of colour in the film Vertigo that has made me want to watch it again with this in mind, and also to dig out Peter Greenaway’s seminal film; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, which is a masterclass in the use of colour in film.

Oh, and Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein and of course, his masterpiece, Blue.

All this means that colour is not as fixed as we imagine. We have an entire, unconscious subtext for colour which kicks in whenever we encounter it. When we stop to unpick it, it can lead us to some surprising conclusions.