10 h 47 minAudiobook6 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens when a poet looks through a prism and challenges Newton’s account of light?
In Goethe’s Theory of Colours, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe begins with the eye itself. Bright windows, afterimages and coloured shadows lead into a bold claim: he argues that colour appears where light meets darkness, rather than lying hidden within light. Looking becomes a way to question what colour is.
Goethe takes on Isaac Newton, who describes white light as a mixture of differently coloured rays. A teaching section presents Goethe’s account; a polemical section challenges Newton’s experiments; a historical section follows ideas about colour from the Greeks onward. Physicists reject his attack, but his questions reach beyond optics into art, perception and feeling.
What you’ll discover
- Begin with your eyes Explore afterimages and coloured shadows through Goethe’s close attention to the act of seeing.
- Look through the prism Follow Goethe’s challenge to Newton and examine the observations at the heart of their disagreement.
- Sky, mist and colour Discover how Goethe uses cloudy media to account for blue skies and red sunsets.
- Colour as a feeling Consider Goethe’s links between colour and the mind, from yellow’s warmth to its sense of activity.
- Ideas across the centuries Trace the study of colour through thinkers including Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle.
Who will love it
Perfect for painters, designers and photographers, lovers of optics and the history of science, and anyone who enjoys testing ideas with a prism, a candle and a sheet of paper.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- The eye makes colour as well as receives it
- Every colour calls up its opposite
- Coloured shadows show that colour lives in shade
- Light seen through a cloudy medium turns yellow, darkness turns blue
- Prisms colour edges, not plain surfaces
- Newton's spectrum is a complicated case, not a simple one
- Colours fade, shift and fix across physical and chemical change
- Colour has a polar order, with red as its summit
- Colours act on feeling, and artists can use them
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La teoria dei colori di Goethe
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1810
A poet challenges Newton by asking you to look through a prism at a white wall and study where colour appears.
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In short
Why does a red poppy seem to glow at dusk, and why are shadows on snow blue? Goethe's Theory of Colours, published in 1810, answers by asking you to look.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
The eye makes colour as well as receives it
Goethe begins with colours that belong to the healthy eye itself. He calls them physiological colours. Earlier writers dismissed them as illusions or defects, and he insists they are the foundation of the whole subject.
He asks you to stare at a bright window against a dark room and then shut your eyes. A cross floats before you, and its brightness reverses. He describes a glowing iron in a forge, after which a red image drifts over a dark coal shed and turns half green on lighter boards.
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What is Goethe's Theory of Colours about?
It describes how colours arise in the eye, through prisms and glass, and in matter, and argues that colour comes from the meeting of light and darkness. It ends with colour harmony and its use in art.
Why did Goethe disagree with Newton?
He held that colour does not come from splitting white light into rays. In his view prisms show edges between light and dark, and the spectrum is a complicated special case, not a basic fact.
What are physiological colours?
They are colours produced by the healthy eye itself, such as afterimages and coloured shadows. Staring at red gives a green afterimage, and Goethe treats these as the foundation of colour harmony.
The author
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749–1832 · German poet and novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was Germany's towering man of letters — poet, novelist, playwright, and scientist. The Sorrows of Young Werther, the novel that made him famous across Europe in his mid-twenties, helped ignite the Romantic movement.
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