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Born in 1452, this was a special moment in early modernity, because over the Alps in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg was part way through his momentous three-year-long project, printing his 42-line Bible, revolutionizing the process by means of which written text is rendered as image.^§AS1.4.7b

On his side of the Alps, not only did the polymath da Vinci paint. He participated in another revolution in visualization, in his case developing the theories and practices of optics. “Black and white,” Leonardo said, “are not reckoned among colours; the one is representative of darkness, the other of light: that is, one is the simple privation of light, the other is light itself.” There are four colours, properly speaking: yellow, green, blue, and red. Together with black and white, “the mixture of colours may be extended to an infinite variety.”¹⁹⁰

Mixing of base colors becomes the fundamental mechanism for the creation of color in modernity. It was da Vinci’s genius to have theorized and put into practice this manufacturing principle – though his four were later reduced to three “primary” colors, aligning (although only indirectly) with the trichromacy of the human eye.^§MS1.3.1c However, given the chemistry of color creation, the range of colors that can be so generated in any particular medium – its “gamut” – is broad though not infinite.

For the centuries following Leonardo, color mixing was always “subtractive” because coloring was for viewing of objects and images illuminated by reflected light. The ground for the image (the page or the canvas) was white. “Additive” color processes are based on seeing colors in a light source, where the ground for the image is black. Additive coloring does not happen at scale until the mid-twentieth century, when there is a radical shift to viewing light sources, first with analogue televisions and later with digital displays. Seeing a light source is for the human eye quite a different process from seeing reflected light.^§MS1.3.1b

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¹⁸⁹ Francesca Fiorani, 2012, “Leonardo Da Vinci and His Treatise on Painting,” Charlottesville, VA: Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (www.treatiseonpainting.org/intro.html ).

¹⁹⁰ Leonardo da Vinci, 1651 [1835], A Treatise on Painting, translated by J.F. Rigaud, London, UK: J.B. Nichols and Son, pp. 125–27.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 147-148. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Leonardo da Vinci’s Color Mixing §MS1.3.1d