Bright Earth by Philip Ball, Penguin, £18.99, ISBN 0670893463
FOUR and a half thousand years ago, Egyptian craftsmen took limestone,
malachite and sand, ground them together and created a vivid blue pigment to
colour their wall paintings. Since then, the history of art has been influenced
as much by the availability of colour as by ideas of form and aesthetics. The
spectacular progress of chemistry in the 19th century spawned new pigments that
fed the impressionists’ desire to capture the vibrant hues of natural light.
In Bright Earth, Philip Ball traces the technological developments. Moving
easily between the worlds of…
