Decades.

1920s green here.

Thanks, Kurt.  Very telling.

Resonance.

Dossi, Jupiter, Mercury, and Virtue, 1524

The triple combination is mirrored at Jupiter's canvas, where three butterflies share in the process of creation. The insect under Jupiter's brush nears completion; the one to the right seems to rest on the picture's surface, whilst the uppermost butterfly is the most lively and three-dimensional. Life emerges in successive phases that are intimately linked, like frames from a film or a cartoon. In his "Allegory of Music", Dossi had used similar techniques to subdivide his theme. The history of music, from primal sound to the High Renaissance, was telescoped into a single scenario. A blow of hammer to anvil (the musical equivalent to Jupiter's painting) set creativity in train. The action is merely implied, though its after-effect is visible as a resonance of tiny notes from the anvil. The cause was evidently a rebounding hammer in Tubalcain's hand, poised to strike again. Musical sounds coalesced into a circle or triangle, as notated staves prescribing the formal progressions in time and pitch. Of course, nothing really changes in the static painting. 

If the music were heard, we might sense a kind of movement in the flow of melody through time. The Aristotelian "Problemata", printed for the first time in 1498, had puzzled over our response to music:

"Why is sound the only sensation which excites the feelings? Even melody without words has feeling. But this is not the case for colour, or smell, or taste. Is it because they have none of the motion which sound excites in us?  Now these motions stimulate action, and this action is the sign of feeling."

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Exuberant.

alphadesigner has a brief history of blue ...

For most of history, the color blue has been an exuberant luxury, reserved for the filthy rich. This is a story about how alchemy and science brought it to the blue-collar masses.

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Fugitive.

Vincent Van Gogh was obsessed with the pigments in his paints, and he knew as much or more about their composition and vulnerability as many of his contemporaries. So it is a tragic irony that many of the bright red and yellow pigments van Gogh used on his masterpieces are fading or changing color with time.

Pigment breakdown is, of course, not just a problem with van Gogh’s oeuvre: He was using many of the same pigments as other late-19th-century Northern European artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir or James Ensor. “You can safely say that many works from that period have probably been affected in some way by similar pigment issues,” says Ella Hendriks, senior conservator at the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam.

Yet the artwork of van Gogh has become a lens through which scientists study pigment degradation. He was a prolific painter—in the 10 years he was active as an artist, van Gogh produced nearly 1,000 paintings. He was also a prolific writer: In letters to family and friends, he discussed in detail the pigments he purchased and the colors of his newly painted canvases. These written records are a valuable starting point for scientific inquiry.

As a result, van Gogh’s canvases have led to multiple discoveries about the breakdown of fragile—or what conservators call “fugitive”—pigments. What follows is a series of vignettes about how analysis of his paintings has helped illuminate chemical degradation pathways in age-old pigments and how this research informs display and conservation practices for van Gogh’s inimitable masterpieces and other artworks of his time.

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