4. Brain and colour.

Part of an essay on Vermeer, brain channels, neural stimulus, visual perception and art appreciation

A 20,000-word essay on the interface between the fields of Vermeer, Art History and cognitive science, neuroscience and neuresthetics

written by Vermeer specialist, art historian Drs. Kees Kaldenbach, Amsterdam.

Chapters:

1) Foreword
2) Introduction and terminology. houding, perception of reality, realism, illusionism and trompe l’oeil
3) Understanding Vermeer’s Perception of Reality; a Discussion of Characteristics
4) Brain and colour
5) Form as registered by the brain
6) Facial recognition, depth, movement, fine vs broad
7) Using this knowledge in studying and appreciating Vermeer
8) Workshop matters, Painters’ Supplies, Palette, The fijnschilder style versus the loose style, fourteen Qualities listed by Philips Angel
9) Naturalness, enticing the viewers
10) Delft artists influencing Vermeer
11) Vermeers Early, Middle, Late period. Camera Obscura
12) Vermeer’s World of Interiors: a Reality or a Construction
13) Landmark Vermeer literature (in print on paper form)
14) Digital Art History Studies and Presentations on Questions - on Perception of Reality in Vermeer Paintings
15) External CD-Rom, DVD, film material on Vermeer
16) Selected Bibliography

Updated June 9, 2016. Updated 15 February 2017.

3.2.1. Colour

For emotional experience and appreciation, perhaps the major one of the three centres for visual appreciation listed by Zeki is the brain centre responding to colour. Colour in itself is a fleeting perception, experienced by primates [humans and higher apes] -but strangely not by most other mammals - and by many other life forms such as birds and insects. Colour does not exist independently as a phenomenon; it is perceived in the brain as a response to observing light rays oscillating within particular electromagnetic frequencies. The human brain is wired to respond not so much to single fields of colour and luminance but rather to observe differences in juxtaposed fields of colour and juxtaposed fields of luminance.
In this respect, the American painter Philip L. Hale (1865-1931), writing around 1910, makes some important observations on the subject of Vermeer’s particular qualities of colour harmony:
“Vermeer’s conception of composing in colour was different from that held either by the Venetians or by Whistler. His ideal was to achieve a full chord of colour, with most of the available tones present and beautifully arranged. The originality of his accomplishment lay in the success with which he made each tone true. There is in his work no keying up of one colour, no muting of another colour, in the interest of harmony. […] Vermeer achieved the difficult arrangement of a group of colour tones each true to nature and beautiful in effect.” […] “Where he varied from others was in his profound feeling for design, his intuition for colour values, his indifference to anecdotage, his bulldog way of hanging to a thing until it was thoroughly well done”.[1]

Vermeer began his career with history scenes in a broad-brush Italianate style with warm deep colours.
From about 1658 on he started his mid-career series of interiors with a muted palette often with the colour areas in the chord blue - red - yellow, but from about 1665 onwards, in what I consider the late period, Vermeer shows a growing penchant for ‘colder’ hues, leaning towards tonalities of blue, grey and green.
Vermeer may have seen examples of major use of blue in one object as it was used in Chinese and Japanese pottery. Philip Hale makes the point that these exotic objects were around in Delft, because of the local Delftware workshops, each seeking to imitate porcelain from China and Japan. This preference for blues and cool silvery greys, with even some green in the under-paint and shadowy areas of faces, is very obvious in Lady Standing at the Virginal (National Gallery, London). Vermeer chooses and combines these hues quite differently from other contemporary painters and he also succeeds in developing wonderful tones in the shades – not the usual muddy shades of brown of black, but shades of many hues, some being close to complementary colours, the nature and effects of which were not yet described in seventeenth century art theory as far as I know.[2]
Vermeer comes close to working magic by giving the viewer the sense that there is more than just that image. He succeeds in this by his subtle permutations in colour for enriching the viewer’s experience. One of his sources of this new trickery may have been in observing the miracle of enhanced luminosity and colour in a camera obscura.[3]

Painter Jon Boone makes the point that Vermeer is a class in itself when it comes to permutations of light:
“He was in the final analysis a painter of the behavior of light. He certainly was aware of its fugitive qualities. But he surely was as aware as anyone who has ever lived about the fact that light gives form and color to everything in the natural world, that it is the root ingredient in the process of perception. Our very word “illusion” is literally built out of the way light spreads itself over the terrain and through our sense organs. For a painter who studied the “optical way” (Gowing’s very accurate phase), Vermeer’s technique and style flowed from the fountainhead of his rigorous inquiry about the nature of light. Vermeer’s “scientific” contemporaries, such as Christiaan Huygens, van Leeuwenhoek, and earlier Kepler) understood the provisional nature of “reality,” how it seemed to change because of time and circumstance. It seems very clear to me Vermeer understood this, too. Like Monet several centuries later (who painted the same haystacks and cathedrals, each appearing different from the other because of the different slants of light hitting them at different times), Vermeer recorded a number of the same scenes in the same settings, differing mainly in the way light informed them. Descargues precociously called them Vermeer’s light “experiments.” [4]

Thus for Hale and Boone the glory of Vermeer was both in his choice and application of colour, in other words in his effective houding, within a startlingly simplified design. Hale will be quoted here liberally because I find it important that Vermeer paintings are viewed and judged with painterly eyes. For Hale, Vermeer was ranking at the very top of the pack:

"There were giants, of course, such as Vélasquez, Rubens and Rembrandt, who did very wonderful things, but none of these ever conceived of arriving a tone by an exquisitely just relation of colour values - the essence of contemporary painting that is really good. [...] We of today particularly admire Vermeer because he has attacked what seem to us significant problems or motives, and has solved them, on the whole, as we like to see them solved. [...] By and large, Vermeer has more great painting qualities and fewer defects than any other painter of any time or place."[5] .
He looked at his work to see "...if there was anything he could do to his picture to make it portray more closely the real aspect of nature - la vraie vérité , as Gustave Courbet liked to call it.” [6].

"...there is beauty in rightness... [...] Vermeer's art has this quality of cool, well-planned rightness to the full. He holds, as it were, a silver mirror up to nature, but he tells no more pleasant tales as he holds it. His work is as intensely personal as any that was ever done, but it offers a personality disengaged from self-consciousness during the making process.” [7].

The personality [...] is revealed in the device of the subject, in the arrangement of colours, in the registration of colour values and of edges.. [...] The man simply painted on [...] striving for and attaining the rightness of things [...]. He conceived and sought the best arrangement of line and colour that he could achieve."[8]

Notes

[1] Hale 1937: 88.
[2] He complementary colour of yellow is purple; that of blue is orange ; that of red is green. The latter is used in the Red Hat. The red-yellow-blue form a triangle chord on the colour circle.
[3] A good history of the camera obscura is in Steadman 2001. For Steadman’s theory on Vermeer’s use of the camera see my paragraph 3.10.11.
[4] Jon Boone, e-mail message, June 29, 2003.
[5] Hale 1937: 3.
[6] Hale 1937: 4
[7] Hale 1937: 5
[8] Hale 1937: 8-9

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Written 2002-2003. Published online, July 17, 2011. Updated July 17, 2011.

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