Colour in Five Wounds

‘Painters complain, art historians complain, that everyone these days sees only transparencies, which are the colours of light, not the colours of pigment. And so they get the wrong ideas, they see wrong, these people say. I say, this is new, it exists, we all see this light – we can learn from it – we could even learn to paint things to be transparent – ’
A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower, p. 227

In this excerpt from Babel Tower, the painter Desmond Bull is talking about the effect on his students of encountering oil paintings only via photographic reproductions, which take the form of projected colour transparencies: as if the original canvas had been miraculously transformed into stained glass. The setting for this part of Byatt’s novel is an art school in the late 1960s, so it is probably necessary to point out that the transparencies in question were analogue slides: i.e. positive colour images approximately 35mm by 24 mm on a transparent celluloid base, which were backlit by a projector to be displayed at enormous magnification on a white screen. The effect is similar to digital Powerpoint projection but the technology is quite different.

Bull’s remarks relate to a basic distinction in optics between reflection and transmission: between looking at light bouncing off an opaque surface, and looking at light passing through a transparent surface. An image perceived via transmission - e.g. a colour slide - will always seem more intense, even though it is also, in a sense, more immaterial than an image perceived via reflection - e.g. a painting on canvas. In analogue black-and-white photography, negatives and prints are similarly distinguished. It is notoriously difficult to preserve all the information from a negative in a print, not only because of chemical differences between celluloid and paper, but also because a negative is perceived via light transmission through a transparent celluloid base, and a print is perceived via reflection off an opaque white base.

So the translation from a negative to a print always involves a loss of information; conversely, as Bull points out, the translation from an opaque painting on a canvas to a transparent projection on a positive colour slide arguably adds something that cannot be found in the original. According to the guardians of art historical tradition, it is therefore a bad or garbled translation, which misrepresents the original. Bull disagrees: or rather, he argues that this misrepresentation has interesting consequences.

The translation from paintings to photographic reproductions not only means changing from reflection to transmission. It also involves converting unique, individual pigments into mathematical combinations of cyan/magenta/yellow. Colour photographs are made up of three layers (these are separate emulsions in a colour slide), which are sensitised to different wavelengths of light, and the combination of these three layers creates all the hues in the final image.

The use of colour in Five Wounds is mainly confined to the novel's heraldic coats-of-arms, in which the various tinctures stand for the book's protagonists: blue for Gabriella; red for Cur; black for Cuckoo; silver for Magpie; gold for Crow. However, colour is also used in a few other illustrations: notably the Synesthetic Diptych (above), which I have discussed before (including an explanation of how its composition is based on a section of Tintoretto's Paradise). Here I want to think more about how colour works in this illustration.

The pigments used in the original painting by Tintoretto, with their highly specific and heterogeneous ingredients (some of which are indicated in the written description of the painting in the novel), and with their own chemical histories, are transformed for the purposes of the visual reproduction in Five Wounds, which restricts itself to the heraldic tinctures of blue, red, black, silver and gold. Is this transformation analogous to the combination of dyes on a colour slide?

In the language of heraldry, it is only the idea of ‘red’ that counts, and not the particular pigment that embodies that idea. As in the passage from oil painting to projected slide, colour therefore becomes an entirely abstract category in heraldry, almost equivalent to number in mathematics, or a phoneme in linguistics (or a verse in the Bible?): an atomic element that cannot be subdivided or analysed further.

So in fact the analogy is not quite right. The conversion of any hue or pigment into a combination of constituent CMY elements in a photographic reproduction is not consistent with the conception of colour in heraldry, in which any given tincture cannot be expressed in terms other than itself, and also cannot be mixed with any of the other tinctures.

In keeping with this conceptual singularity, when the various tinctures are combined in a heraldic shield, they are never ‘mixed’ like paints on a palette, or like the dye layers that make up a colour slide: rather, their combination, in, for example, a division of the field, is a matter of juxtaposing independent segments, all of which by definition contain only a single tincture (as in a painting-by-numbers exercise). In any given shield, the constituent tinctures are therefore articulated like words in a sentence. The borders between them remain inviolable conceptually, even when (as in the heraldic shields Dan created for Five Wounds), the actual paint overruns the indicated borders.

And so to return to the written description of Tintoretto's Paradise in Five Wounds, Cur, standing before that painting the Ducal Palace, actually experiences it in a manner that is opposed to colour theory in both its photographic and its heraldic versions. For Cur, there is no absolute separation between pigments; but also, things are identifiable in terms of their history and their usage as well as their abstract, theoretical relations to other things. To return to the analogy with language, one might say that, while both photography and heraldry are interested exclusively in how colours may be combined within a closed system, Cur is interested in the etymology of colours (their origins and derivations), but also in the ways in which new combinations of pigments can generate new meanings.

The visual translation of Cur’s experience in the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych introduces these various ideas on colour theory into the subtext of the image, even though they are alien to Cur’s own way of thinking, because these theories place Cur’s experiences within the broader conceptual universe of the novel: that is, the images do not in fact reproduce Cur's experience so much as they relate it to that of the other four protagonists in the novel, who are represented in the diptych not only by their likenesses (which substitute for the four evangelists and Christ in the original painting) but by their associated heraldic tinctures.

I am not sure that any of this makes sense, but it all relates to the idea of translation. To the extent that certain nuances or concepts may be ‘lost in translation’, other nuances or concepts may be added, as Desmond Bull suggests. The Synaesthetic Paradise diptych translates both the original painting by Tintoretto and the written description of its constituent pigments on pp. 28-29 into its own visual idiom: one that draws on heraldry and photography as well as on painting. In doing so, it both removes aspects of the original painting and adds elements that are not in the original; similarly, it both reinterprets and adds to Cur’s experience of the painting (as described in the text) by superimposing several entirely different conceptions of colour onto it.

To summarise, the various conceptions of colour at play in the Synaesthetic Paradise are:

1) Colour as the product of the chemical properties of particular pigments. This conception underlies the written description, in which Cur perceives colour in terms of the smells of these pigments rather than their appearance.

2) Colour analysed in terms of optics and physics as the product of particular combinations of primary colours (cyan. magenta, yellow) or wavelengths of light along a spectrum. This conception of colour remains implicit in Five Wounds, in which the only available photographic technology is that of daguerreotypes, which are purely monochromatic images. However, Cur’s character is always opposed to / linked to that of Magpie, who is the novel’s daguerreotypist, so Cur's experience of the painting therefore implicitly invokes an opposed possible photographic reading of its contents.

3) Colour as a grammatical element within a semiotic system: i.e. heraldry. Individual colours therefore have no positive meaning, but instead only acquire meaning in combination with other colours, and only when they are articulated into grammatical statements (i.e. heraldic coats-of-arms). In terms of this system, the Synaesthetic Paradise is nonsensical: a gobbledy-gook visual statement that uses the heraldic tinctures, but fails to articulate them in any coherent or meaningful way, like a word salad. In that sense, it does correspond directly to Cur's initial impression of the picture.

4) Colour as one term in a binary opposition, which in this case is that proposed by Giorgio Vasari’s theory of art, which opposes Florentine disegno to Venetian colore: rational form to sensual content. This opposition corresponds to several other analogous binary oppositions, all of which can be used to organise elements within Five Wounds. Thus: disegno is to colore as line is to tone; as reason is to the senses; as theory is to data; as transcendence is to immanence; as the picture space is to the picture plane; etc.

The written description of the Paradise involves conception 1, and, implicitly, conception 4 (hence the accompanying running head is COLORE); the visual translation of this description into the Synaesthetic Paradise diptych involves conceptions 3, 4, and, implicitly and of necessity (since the book was actually printed using a CMYK process), conception 2.