A Treatise on Painting

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1. scottlocklinJan 2019
   Cennini's "The Craftsman's Handbook" as well as Leonardo Da Vinci's "Treatise on Painting" are pretty good books from the 1400s and 1500s.

   They use oil and egg as medium instead of acrylic, but the interesting chemistry starting from a piece of rock or whatever is great to nerd out on.

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2. tingleJun 2025
   Chap. CCCLXIV. — On the Judgment of Painters.

   When the work is equal to the knowledge and judgment of the painter, it is a bad sign; and when it surpasses the judgment, it is still worse, as is the case with those who wonder at having succeeded so well. But when the judgment surpasses the work, it is a perfectly good sign ; and the young painter who possesses that rare disposition, will, no doubt, arrive at great perfection. He will produce few works, but they will be such as to fix the admiration of every beholder.

   Leonardo da Vinci, "A Treatise on Painting.", p. 225

   https://archive.org/details/davincionpainting00leon/page/224...

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3. DaubJun 2025
   > especially since there’s no real science or theory behind it (that I know of).

   The literature on hue harmony is fuzzy, but there are a few gems.

   Check out Matsuda [1] who tracked the colors of what his female students were wearing, and tried to identify any principles informing their color choice. My criticism of him is that he plotted hue distribution on the RGB color wheel. The RYB wheel would have been a far better choice. His paper is in Japanese, but is summarized in multiple places. Below [2] is a link to 2 pages from a lecture I gave which summarizes his findings.

   I'm sure you also know of Kuehni's classic tome on color spaces [3]. A fun and informative read.

   There has been no research on hue antagonism (which is the idea that underpins complementary pairs). This is crazy, as it would be a very easy subject to investigate. To me it is obvious that there is a special relationship between antagonistic pairs above the fact that they mix to neutral. Supporting this is the fact that Leondro DaVinci documented this relationship even before hue circle was invented [4]!

   As for the mystical dimension of color harmony... this has been assumed since the dawn of color science. Newton himself believed that there was seven colors in his hue circle for no other reason than this was a spiritually significant value [5]. Itten [6], Goethe [7] and Kandinsky [8] all absolutely believed in the spiritual dimension of color. Personally, I believe that their work has had nothing but a destructive impact on how artists and designers use color. It is wildly inconsistent, vague and often plain wrong.

   [1] Matsuda: Color Design. Asakura Shoten (in Japanese). (1995)

   [2] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4ac93etjyg0z5y2ouq5ge/matsuda...

   [3] Kuehni, R.: Color Space and its Divisions: Color Order from Antiquity to the Present. Wiley-Interscience, Hoboken (2003)

   [4] Leonardo da Vinci, Trans. J. F. Rigaud, A Treatise on Painting (London: J.B. Nichols & Son, 1835).

   [5] Matt Chamings “Why are there seven colours in a rainbow?” New Scientist, Last Word, 2021.

   [6] Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1961).

   [7] J. W. v. Goethe, Goethe's Colour Theory, Trans. C. L. Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840).

   [8] Wassily Kandinsky, Trans. Michael Sadler, Concerning the spiritual in art (Penguin UK, 2024), p. 59.

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4. tomdreJul 2017
   A Treatise on Painting by Leonardo Da Vinci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Urbinas
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