^When Niccolò met Gianni and Pierluigi, and Ugo, and Pietro.
“Pompeian red: you are taken to a roman villa
where lying men dressed in white peplum are served by young Egyptian slaves
elaborate dishes, animals stuffed with animals stuffed with other animals,
from the big ones to the small ones, and there is marble on the floor, outside
the Mediterranean is blue but the walls of the room are red. That is all you
see in a fraction when you hear Pompeian red.”
Nathalie Du Pasquier, Associations
Early Rome was a terracotta vase made from Red Ochre clay,
like the Latin soil, like the walls of its buildings, like the background of
its frescoes, with Yellow Ochre and Green Celadonite filling out squares and
circles and any number of patterns, straight from the mud of the Lazian rivers
and into the decorative schemes of ornamental objects, interiors, art. Figures
were defined by black lines whose marks were made by the charred reductions of
peripheral farmyard detritus, animal bones and discarded vegetation, not the
accumulation of every other colour but the burning away of all life, a black
nothingness for the depiction of anything. Egyptian blue glaze was like the eye
of a northerner, or the sky at dusk, but boiled in a vat like a broth of
minerals.
“Hours gave you gold
for your flesh, excellent colours for the extremities of your limbs; (…)
fortified your flesh with vermilion, so that you can live, so that you can live
forever, so that you can grow younger, so that you can grow younger forever.“
The Egyptian Book of
the Dead
Rome came from red, and to red it will return.
"a world of statues
that was reminiscent not of a trip to the British Museum today but rather of a
colourful, interactive, hands‐on visit to Madame Tussauds."
Professor Mark
Bradley, Colour and Meaning in the Ancient World
Numidian Yellow marbles, yellow Pavonazzetto from Phrygia, green
Cipollino from Greece, purple Porphyry, pink granite, black basalt, Alabastro from
Carthage, creamy Travertine from Tivoli, red veined Cottanello from Sabina. The
buildings of the Forums in Rome were dazzlingly decked-out in multi-coloured
marbles from the farthest reaches of the empire, just as much as its cosmopolitan
crowd were dressed in every exotic attire that might be worn in any of the
myriad nations whose lands laboured under the wealthy warmth of the imperial
sun.
^Salvatore
Imperial colour was cosmopolitan.
“For colour is the material
in , or rather of, painting, the irreducible component of representation that
escapes the hegemony of language, the pure expressivity of a silent
visibility that constitutes the image as such”
Jacqueline
Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French
Classical Age, P.4.
Vermilion, Ultramarine, Azurite, and Verdigris mixed into
the brightest of bright pinks, pale blues, opalescent greens, limpid purples
and bulbous reds that spread across acres and acres and acres of walls, ceilings,
and canvases in palaces, churches, apartments, villas and monasteries across
the city. Popes saw themselves as emperors and St Sebastian became the focus of
a gaze not quite in line with what might have been considered that of a pious Christian’s.
Michelangelo terminated the Sistine chapel in an awesome cascade of writhing
nude figures, pinned to the blue plaster surface of the wall like a squirming
taxonomy of artistic ingenuity. Raphael built a villa for a Cardinal that was
to have rivalled the palace of Nero in its devotion to the senses and
saturation by chromatic display.
‘According to Hebrew
tradition, man’s first name, Adam, stands for “red” and “living”.’
Manlio Brusatin, The
History of Colours
An indolently naked Adam reached out to a purply-red man-God
in a twisting bed of golden figures, and as their fingers touched the
renaissance burst like a firework across the drab spectacle of medieval Europe.
“…savage nations,
uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours;
that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement
avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and
seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.”
Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. C. L. Eastlake, p. 55. (qtd. in Batchelor,
David Chromophobia)
A whitewash descending over half of Europe. A darkness
consisting of the brightest pigment. The renunciation of idolatry, the
elevation of text, the installation of a suspicion that the power of pigment is
too much for the unwitting worshipper whose autonomy is superseded by dumb awe.
No more ceilings like the sky at night or the heavens in your most voluptuous
dreams. No more saints in the grip of other-worldly ecstasy or rooms whose
walls were gardens that between them contained green shoots from which grew
carnal pleasures in abundance. The North paled.
Calvin and Luther conflated colour and Catholic corruption.
“In Egypt colors were
considered to be signs indicating the “essence of things and not their
appearance,” as witnessed by the Egyptian word for “Color,” which also meant
“to be”. According to this thought colors had been separated from the divine
body at the time of Creation and had been assigned to every population, to
every animal, plant or mineral, to distinguish their peculiarities”
Lia Luzzato &
Renata Pompas, Il Significato dei Colori nelle Civilta’ Antiche
Rome blushed, and carried on, only more so. A deep, rich,
red, ornate proliferation of giant columns and stormy skies at sunset. The
counter reformation saw a redoubling of the power of pigment and the exaltation
of art. You no longer had to stand in front of a painting, they had grown so
big that the whole building was now inside the depiction, the street outside,
the entire city was a swirling vortex of putti, saints, martyrs, pediments,
colonnades, chapels and staircases, rising up to a Catholic Trinity at the
centre of which rested the golden poise of an all-consuming St Peter’s. A Roman
riposte in marble and oil.
^Tancredi
Gold gilding, ruby red granite, brilliant white plaster angels,
haloed light through yellow windows, Lapis Lazuli , Latin chants echoing within
the sonorous smell of cloudy incense, an other-worldly rising up through
embodied power, pigmentation and prayer.
"As white is the colour
which reflects the greatest number of rays of light, and consequently is the
most easily perceived, a beautiful body will, accordingly, be the more beautiful
the whiter it is."
Johann Joachim
Winckelmann, The History of Ancient Art.
A whitewash of limpid young men in Carrara marble, Hellenic profiles
standing one after another in the rustling gardens of aristocratic villas,
inviting contemplation, implying a perfect and pure form of permanent
youthfulness. Athletic affirmations of unattainable ideals, the bleached boys embodied
an eroticism of elevated desires. Passions that were once hidden now openly minced
down shady paths, loftily appreciating the pure white buttocks of ancient
Apollos, Antinuous’, emperors, athletes, soldiers…
In the bedroom moving flesh tones and the undulating shadows
of clean sheets, set against unadorned stucco work wrought with the classical
rigidity of the most upstanding scholarship.
Winckelmann worshipped whiteness as a veil behind which he
could hide all the shades of his prohibited pleasures.
^When Niccolò met Gianni and Pierluigi, and Ugo, and Pietro. Detail
“We will sing of the
great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-coloured and
polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals”
F.T. Marinetti, The
Futurist Manifesto
The bourgeois march of a Rome bleeding with notaries,
accountants and bureaucrats, stuffed with parliamentarians and insurance
companies. Its buildings staid as the waiting rooms of family lawyers, coloured
like the backs of filing cabinets, they filled the gardens and the parks and
the pathways and the fields. Fords and Fiats thundered across Piazza Navona,
and trains pumped in and out of the railway stations squeezing more and more
people in between the facades, until there were so many apartments and crowds
and cars and trams and buses and museums and offices, that the Futurist’s
explosive whorls of electric energy were like being on the Via Nazionale and
catching a glimpse of the whole city collapsing as it slid past on the
curving chrome bonnet of a passing bus.
"[colour] works as an
enzyme to catalyse chemical reactions, it generates nervous impulses that open
new doors of logic in the brain, it is a sort of perceptive jogging, an
aerobics for lazy or drowsy sensory cells. Like jogging it requires commitment,
determination, measure, enthusiasm, faith, and patience, and to serve a
purpose, it must be used well."
Barbara Radice, Memphis:
Research, Experiences, Results, Failures and Successes of new design
The polychromy of the Renaissance returns like flowers
growing through rubble left by the war. Televisions pulsating with coloured
light. Piaggios buzzing about the place like tropical parrots. A florescent
green Granita in a shiny translucent cup glinting in the sun on an Ostian
beach. The rose curves of a Cadillac’s wings, the beaming orange of fizzy sodas,
the pacific blue of the banquette seating in new restaurants. The city
effloresces in pink and purple and yellow elevations that look like stacks of
products on the shelves of neon-lit supermarkets. Shiny, loud, cheap, vibrant,
plastic, mass-produced, new new new. Banana yellow Fiat 500s driven by women in
loose, red cotton blouses. Balconies that zig zag, and curve in and out like Bernini
designed them for a 1950s fashion house, and all covered in as many mosaics,
ceramics and colourful make-up as you might find in the bathrooms and dressing
tables and kitchens that they surrounded.
^When Niccolò met Gianni and Pierluigi, and Ugo, and Pietro. Detail
“If I think of spaces
being saturated with colour, or just information, the space that comes to mind
is the screens through which we access our internet.”
Andreas Angelidakis,
The Colour of The Internet
The city’s new museum for the new art of the new century is
steely grey, with squiggly highlights of black, its massive curving pipe-forms
looking like they’re straining with all their tectonic might to return to the
nineties, when grey was the universal soup of a triumphant but somewhat bored
globalisation that just mixed everything together until it was all, well -grey.
The young mothers take pictures of it on their phones, and as they post it to Instagram
they add a filter, sepia or cool, or faded or greenish, they blur it, rotate
it, up the contrast and increase its saturation, ripping it out of its textureless,
colourless reality and blowing it apart so that it can float away on the breeze
like confetti.
If you look up you’ll see them tumbling, and flowing in eddies together with the pieces of everything else that has been digitally detonated into a million glistening fragments, and just as the sun sets, when the swarming cloud is at its most luminous, you can glimpse shapes as it dives over the city, faces, buildings, neighbourhoods, histories, colours, the billion moments that have built Rome.
^Edgidio
