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"The Baroque Science of Color"
Jan. 17th, 2018 10:02 pmI went to a talk on this topic, today in the art museum, by Vera Keller. She was scheduled to talk for up to 90 minutes, but she spoke rapidly and was done in 30 minutes. (How not to give a public talk!)
The gist was that in the 1700s, one of the big ways to flaunt how powerful you were was to be able to use really fancy dyes, showing off how well you could command the forces of nature. For example, these dyes were used in the Barberini Tapestries, which are in our museum right now. It would be cool to see them in their dazzling original colors, but they're pretty faded.
A big theme in the age this woman studies was "competing with antiquity" - are we better than they were or not? Some people made tallies of ways the moderns were better or worse than the ancients, and right at the top of one person's "worse" list was the loss of the technology for making "Tyrian" or "imperial" purple. On the "better" ledger were the benefits from access to the New World, especially a new way of making cochineal red, from Mexico.
We also learned a bit about the how and why of the discrediting of alchemy as an important branch of science - Dr. Keller says it was mostly social pressure, as government-supported scientific endeavor didn't approve of the secrecy and flamboyance of the alchemists.
The gist was that in the 1700s, one of the big ways to flaunt how powerful you were was to be able to use really fancy dyes, showing off how well you could command the forces of nature. For example, these dyes were used in the Barberini Tapestries, which are in our museum right now. It would be cool to see them in their dazzling original colors, but they're pretty faded.
A big theme in the age this woman studies was "competing with antiquity" - are we better than they were or not? Some people made tallies of ways the moderns were better or worse than the ancients, and right at the top of one person's "worse" list was the loss of the technology for making "Tyrian" or "imperial" purple. On the "better" ledger were the benefits from access to the New World, especially a new way of making cochineal red, from Mexico.
We also learned a bit about the how and why of the discrediting of alchemy as an important branch of science - Dr. Keller says it was mostly social pressure, as government-supported scientific endeavor didn't approve of the secrecy and flamboyance of the alchemists.