Colour Theory, Optics and Manuscript Illumination

Abstract

Perspectiva’s synthesis of Greco-Roman, Christian and Arabic theories of light, colour and vision occasioned a revolution in European optics. It is inconceivable that illuminators working in courtly, scholarly or ecclesiastical milieu would have remained unaware of perspectivist ideas, but did they engage with them in their practical works? The perspectivists held that the form and colour of observed objects were transmitted by visual rays forming a pyramid with a base at the objects’ surface and an apex at the viewer’s eye. Since Antiquity, scholars had argued whether the visual rays travelled from the eye towards objects (extramission theory) or from the objects to the eye (intromission theory). The perspectivists attempted a reconciliation of the two theories which resulted in the wider currency of intromission by 1300, without eliminating extramission. The visual pyramid would become the main tool of linear perspective. The latter was the principle organising the pictorial space in numerous miniatures painted north and south of the Alps in the early 1400s, some contemporary with Alberti’s treatise, others preceding it. An interest in spatial relationships had already manifested itself in manuscript illumination c.1300.