J. K. Stieler, 1828 (Wikimedia Commons)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt, Germany, to a lawyer and the daughter of the mayor of Frankfurt. He studied law in Leipzig and Strasbourg (France). Based on his early fame as a poet and novelist, Goethe, at age 26, was invited by the 18-year-old Duke of Sachsen-Weimar to join his court as an advisor. He moved to Weimar where he remained until his death on March 22, 1832. At times, he worked as a diplomat and a public servant for the duke. He became known as the pre-eminent German poet, novelist, and playwright. The philosophical nature of much of his writing and his battle with Kant influenced several later philosophers, such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Goethe’s interests were very broad, including pictorial art and certain aspects of science, most importantly in the latter the metamorphosis of plants, where he displayed a pre-Darwinian point of view, as well as the source and nature of color experience.
29.1 Goethe’s Theory of Colors
He considered his Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) [1] the most important of his works. Goethe’s views on science were strongly influenced by the very complex relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. He believed strongly in experimentation, with variability in conditions and multiple replications, which might lead to objective truths. Circa 1793 Goethe wrote an essay Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt (The experiment as mediator between subject and object) which he shared with his friend, the poet Friedrich Schiller, in 1798 in which he described the value of scientific experiments as a bridge between subjectivity and objectivity and the possibility of establishing via multiple experiments of this kind the existence of objective laws of nature [2]. The essay was only published in print in 1823.
His interest in color began early in his life and received input during his extended journey to Italy in 1787 where he began studying Leonardo da Vinci’s manuscripts on painting. His first writings on the subject of color date from 1791: Beiträge zur Chromatik [Contributions to chromatics], 1792: Von den farbigen Schatten (Concerning colored shadows), and 1794: Versuch, die Elemente der Farbenlehre zu entdecken (Attempt at discovering the elements of color theory). Zur Farbenlehre, in three volumes, was published in 1810, the same year P. O. Runge (well acquainted with Goethe) published his Farben-Kugel (Color sphere). The first volume of Farbenlehre presents his description and interpretation of physiological colors, physical colors, and chemical colors, a chapter on the possibly singular natural source of color experience, a chapter about the relationship of color science with other intellectual domains such as philosophy, mathematics, general physics, and natural history, and one on the general esthetics of color. Volume 2 is an extended attack on and critique of the color work of Isaac Newton, its main component being the “unnatural” methodology used by Newton when splitting daylight into its spectral components. Goethe considered it replaced by his method of investigating the effect of the prism when viewing contrasting boundaries in daylight. The result in the former case is the classical spectrum of colors, in the latter the series of so-called boundary or edge colors (for an informative discussion see [3]). Recent complex optical experiments have shown that there is no discrepancy between Newton’s and Goethe’s findings (e.g., Rang [4]). The third volume consists of an extended, if somewhat prejudiced, review of the history of color science (Geschichte der Farbenlehre), beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending with contemporaries of Goethe.
Partial collection of color-related equipment and materials owned by Goethe in the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar
Goethe devised a color circle consisting of six hues in three complementary pairs, with a purplish red on top, followed on the left, warm side by orange and yellow, and on the cold, right side by violet and blue, with green on the bottom. Colors diametrically opposite are approximately complementary. Such opposing colors were viewed by Goethe as harmonic pairs. He also used their relationships in the circle to demonstrate presumed psychological effects.
The response to Goethe’s Farbenlehre was mixed. However, in a commentary of 1892 Hermann von Helmholtz said: “And I for one do not know how anyone, regardless of what his views about colors are, can deny that the theory [Goethe’s] in itself is fully consequent, that its assumptions, once granted, explain the facts treated completely and indeed simply” [5].
The English painter Charles Eastlake published in 1840 a translation of Part I as “Theory of Colour” [6]. It became an important source of information for painters, such as J. M. W. Turner. In an introduction to a modern version of the translation in 1970 (remaining in print today), D. B. Judd wrote: “This book can lead the reader through a demonstration course not only in subjectively produced colors (after images, light and dark adaptation, irradiation, colored shadows, and pressure phosphenes), but also in physical phenomena detectable qualitatively by observation of color (absorption, scattering, refraction, diffraction, polarization, and interference)” [7].