Roman marble copy of bronze bust by Lysippus, ca. 330 BCE
The classic Greek philosopher known as Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece to a father who was the physician to the local king. At 18 years of age, he joined philosopher Plato’s Academy in Athens where he stayed until Plato’s death in 347 BCE. At that time, the ruler of Greece, Philip II of Macedon, requested him to tutor his son Alexander the Great, which he did for 33 years. Aristotle is often recognized as the World’s first scientist. Tutoring Alexander provided various opportunities for Aristotle one of which was to set up in 335 BCE the Lyceum and its library in Athens, the leading educational facility of the time, where he taught until 323 BCE. Here, he is believed to have authored most of his written works.
It is generally assumed that only about one-third of his written works survived into the present. They consist of 47 essays, of which a few may actually have been written by followers as representing his views. The range of subjects is very wide, indicating how broad Aristotle’s thinking and interests ranged. The subjects include several categories, including analytics, logic, physics, the universe and heavens, soul, senses, memory, sleep, animals, plants, ethics, morals, politics, rhetoric, poetry, and many more. The subject of color was of considerable interest to him. He covered it briefly in Meteorologia, more detailed in Sense and Sensibility, and at some length in the essay On Colors usually taken to have been written as representing Aristotle’s views by Theophrastus, one of his followers [1].
3.1 Aristotle and Color
Known thinking about color in ancient Greece ranges back to Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE. He is said to have named the basic color species white, black, red, and yellow. These categories became influential and were related to the four elements of nature of the time: air, fire, water, and earth. A related important and controversial subject was the idea that eyes are sending out radiation that is reflected back from objects and reveals their colors (the emission or extramission theory), introduced by Empedocles. Aristotle, unlike Plato, was not a supporter. Aristotle expanded the list of basic color categories to seven. In Meteorologia, he briefly discussed the rainbow and attributed three colors to it: red, green, and purple. “These are almost the only colors which painters cannot manufacture; for there are colors which they create by mixing, but no mixing will give red, green or purple. These are the colors of the rainbow, though between the red and the green an orange color is often seen.”
Aristotle did not relate colors to the elements and believed in the intromission of radiation into the eyes for the purpose of seeing. In Sense and Sensibility, he described his idea that five kinds of basic chromatic colors are generated by mixtures of white and black in simple ratios (3:2 or 3:4, for example). There are five such basic categories; he identified as yellow, crimson, violet, green and blue, “and from these, all others are derived by mixture.” Aristotle was aware that divisibility into many ratios implied an infinity of possible colors.
In On Colors, his ideas are presented in more detail: “We must not proceed in this inquiry by blending pigments as painters do, but rather by comparing the rays reflected from the known colors, this being the best way of investigating the true nature of color-blends. Verification from experience and observation of similarities are necessary if we are to arrive at clear conclusions about the origin of different colors ….” This brief excerpt provides insight into the breadth of his thinking on colors and his insistence on a scientific approach. His approach to problems was one of empiricism.
These texts, handed down through multiple paths of translation, have been read and commented on by many people over the past 2300 years. The ideas monopolized Western thinking on color into the sixteenth century and continue to have an impact today.