COLOR CHARTS

A beautifully illustrated history of the many inventive poetic and alluring ways in which color swatches have been selected and stagedThe need to categorize and communicate color has mobilized practitioners and scholars for centuries Color Charts describes the many different methods and ingenious devices developed since the fifteenth century by doctors naturalists dyers and painters to catalog fragments of colors With the advent of industrial society manufacturers and merchants developed some of the most beautiful and varied tools ever designed to present all the available colors Thanks to them society has discovered the abundance of color embodied in a plethora of materials cuts of fabric leather paper and rubber slats of wood and linoleum delicate skeins of silk careful deposits of paint and pastels fragments of lipstick and arrangements of flower petals These samples shape a visual culture and a chromatic vocabulary and instill a deep desire for color Anne Varichon traces the emergence of modern color charts from a set of processes developed over the centuries in various contexts She presents illuminating examples that bring this remarkable story to life from ancient writings revealing attention to precise shade to contemporary designers colo