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Goethe's color theory
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the greatest poet, playwright, novelist and essayist in the German language comparable to Shakespeare, Dante, etc.
Nobody had questioned the correctness of Newton’s ideas about light and color, before Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Goethe was both a writer and a scientist. His 1400-page treatise on color was published in 1810. According to Goethe:
“That I am the only person in this century who has the right insight into the difficult science of colors, that is what I am rather proud of, and that is what gives me the feeling that I have outstripped many.”
Goethe misinterpreted some experiments. Therefore, he incorrectly thought that these experiments showed Newton to be wrong.
Goethe’s diagrams in the first plate of Zür Farbenlehre (Theory of Colors) include a colorwheel, and diagrams of distorted color perception. The bottom landscape is how a scene would look to blue-yellow colorblind.
Goethe re-formulated the topic of color in an entirely new way. Newton had viewed color as a physical problem, involving light striking objects and entering our eyes. Goethe realized that the sensations of color reaching our brain were shaped too by our perception — by the mechanics of human vision, by the way our brains process information. What we therefore see of an object depends on the object, the lighting and our perception.
Goethe sought to derive laws of color harmony, ways of characterizing physiological colors (how colors affect us) and subjective visual phenomena in general. Goethe studied after-images, colored shadows and complementary colors. And he anticipated Hering’s “opponent-color” theory which is one basis of our understanding of color vision today. Above all, Goethe appreciated that the sensation of complementary colors did not originate physically from the actions of light on our eyes but perceptually from the action of our visual system.
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发表于 2005-12-26 17:52
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