Aristotle
Every color, he said, is a mix of light and dark, and the rainbow has three. Europe agreed for 2,000 years.
- Lived
- 384–322 BCE
- Color idea
- Colors are mixtures of light and dark
- His rainbow
- Red, green, purple (yellow by contrast)
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) thought colors were born between white and black, light and darkness. In his short work On Sense and the Sensible he suggested that colors are blends of white and black in different proportions, and that the pleasing ones follow simple ratios, like the harmonious intervals of music, an idea that echoes all the way to Newton's musical rainbow.
He counted seven species of color, if grey is treated as a kind of black: white, yellow, crimson, violet, leek-green, deep blue and black. He liked the number: he counted seven tastes too, and paired the two lists. Greek itself had many more color words; the much later idea of basic color terms asks which ones every speaker shares.
His rainbow, in the Meteorology, had three colors: red, green and purple, with yellow appearing between red and green only by contrast. He added that these are colors painters can't mix: “no mixing will give red, green, or purple.” He was wrong about how the rainbow forms, but his careful look at it was unmatched for centuries.
A treatise called On Colors, long credited to him but probably by a student such as Theophrastus or Strato, spelled out the light-and-dark theory in detail. That view ruled until Newton's prisms showed that white light holds all the colors. Goethe's Theory of Colours, which also sees color arising at the meeting of light and dark, is in some ways a return to Aristotle.
Swatches
- White · light, one pole
- Black · darkness, the other pole
- Rainbow red · Aristotle's band 1
- Rainbow green · band 2
- Rainbow purple · band 3
Colors
Sources
- Aristotle, On Sense and the Sensible, ch. 3; trans. J. I. Beare.
- Aristotle, Meteorology, Book III, ch. 2–4; trans. E. W. Webster.
- Pseudo-Aristotle, On Colors (De coloribus).
- Lee, R. L. & Fraser, A. B. (2001). The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in Art, Myth, and Science. Penn State Press.
Hex values are screen approximations. Every page lists its sources.