Colour

This book is the catalogue for the exhibition of the same title that was staged at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 2016. It gives detailed and scholarly entries on each of the manuscripts exhibited (more than 150 in total) and provides fourteen thematic essays, one for each of the sections of the exhibition. Though it was useful to have copies of the catalogue available in the gallery space at the Museum (and many visitors consulted them on the occasions when this writer was at the exhibition), this book is also much more than an exhibition catalogue, and stands alone. Those who attended the exhibition will enjoy delving further into the material, but readers who were not able to attend the exhibition will also benefit greatly from reading this book. On the one hand it provides detailed information about, and over 400 beautiful colour illustrations of, a fascinating selection from the extensive collections held by the Museum (along with a few loans from collections in Cambridge, Britain and Continental Europe). It is a handsome and enticing volume, and invites dipping in and flicking through. A reader can focus upon one or two catalogue entries at a time, and learn much about the individual manuscripts featured. However, the catalogue really comes into its own with its thematic orientation: essays range from technical aspects of colours available to manuscript painters, through trade in colours and the making of pigments, to techniques of painting in different colours (including gold and silver), attitudes to colour and light (the very first sentence of the catalogue reminds us of the Newtonian observation that colour is simply an effect of light) and the meanings of colours. Each essay precedes a number of catalogue entries dealing with manuscripts that are carefully judged to be able to shed light on the theme of the essay in each case

Art · Art history · Exhibition · Painting · Reading (process · Space (punctuation) · Visual arts · Computer Science · Conservation Techniques and Studies · Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis · Law