gems, color science, color theory, art, anthropology, Rome

In 1858, William Gladstone, British Prime Minister-to-be and a proficient Homeric scholar, famously argued that Homer’s colour system was founded exclusively upon light and darkness, and that the organ of vision “was but partially developed among Greeks”. He was not the first to make such a claim about defective Greek colour vision: a generation before, the German polymath Goethe had made similar claims about ancient art, and others had drawn attention to the material poverty of colour in the ancient Mediterranean environment – the scarcity of dyes, paints and flower varieties, as well as the relative uniformity of ancient body colours. In the nineteenth century, these ideas chimed well with some of Darwin’s theories about human evolution and the development of civilization, and some even invoked the newly-discovered phenomenon of colour-blindness to explain ancient insensitivities to colours. The question about the poverty and imprecision of ancient colour vocabulary has been hotly debated by philologists and anthropologists ever since, and studies of ancient colour vision across the last hundred years have been dominated by efforts to demonstrate that the ancients in fact employed a highly sophisticated colour system. This system operated, the argument goes, along somewhat different parameters from our own: rather than hue, the ancients were sensitive primarily to such things as luminosity, saturation and texture, or even less obvious variables such as smell, agitation and liquidity.