The Conversation of the Old People Traversing the Green Fields under the Leadership of Venus
“The occasion for [Marsilio] Ficino’s reasoning of green as the most pleasing color is a chapter in the second of his De Vita Libri Tres (1489) titled ‘The Conversation of the Old People Traversing the Green Fields under the Leadership of Venus.’. . . To Ficino’s way of seeing, green neither dilates the eye with too much light nor dulls the eye with too much darkness: rather, ‘the color green tempering most of all black with white, furnishes the one effect and the other, equally delighting and conserving the sight.’”
—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.
rods and cones
“Each human retina contains two sorts of photoreceptors: rods and cones. The 120 million rods (so called because of how they look under a microscope) absorb light waves across the entire visible spectrum. . . . [R]ods register distinctions only between light and dark—that is, distinctions in value. Distinctions in hue are triggered by a different set of receptors: the cones. The retina’s five to seven million cones (again, that’s what they look like when seen through a microscope) are clustered at the focal point opposite the eye’s lens.”
—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.
Plato’s extramission theory
“The so-called extramission theory of vision has its origin, for western thinkers at least, in Plato’s explanation of color as the mixing in air of two beams of fire, one issuing from the viewer’s eyes and one from the object being viewed. Aristotle argued that color was carried in one direction only, on light reflected off objects, but versions of Plato’s extramission theory commanded the assent of Cicero, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Al-Kindi and were not refuted to the satisfaction of most serious thinkers until the optical experiments of Kepler, Descartes, Huygens, and Newton in the later seventeenth century. . . . Plato’s theory actually does make sense of what vision feels like. We experience vision as being directed at or to something: we decide (or so we think) where to cast our gaze.”
—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.
black, white, and red
“The most basic distinctions in the world’s languages . . . seem to be among black, white, and red. All other discriminations follow from these.”
—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.
black | gray | blue | leek-green | violet | red | yellow | white
“What Aristotle and his Renaissance successors imagined was a range of colors, varying according to greater and lesser degrees of white combined with black:
black | gray | blue | leek-green | violet | red | yellow | white
. . . [S]omething like the same perception is still registered by speakers of many of the world’s languages, who distinguish color primarily in terms of ‘dark’ versus ‘bright.’ ”
—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.
Greenness
“[T]he treatise On Plants attributed to Aristotle observe that ‘Greenness must the the most common characteristic of plant life’ and finds the reason in ‘concoction,’ the slight heat generated by the plants taking of nourishment out of earth and water.’ Green is ‘the intermediate color between that of earth and water,’ as can be witnessed in tree leaves, which grow out of the plant’s white pith and break through its blackish bark.”
—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.
to laugh, and weepe at once
“[Gerard] Legh, in the Accedence of Armorie [1612] . . . specifies what the combination of green and red means in heraldry. Alone, vert ‘signifiethe ioyfull loue, bountifull minde, and gladness, with continuance of the same.’ Combine vert with ‘Sanguine,’ and the affect is ‘to laugh, and weepe at once’.”
—Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green, 2009.
into the yellow
“I gave my name and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all round the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colours of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red—good to see any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre.”
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902.