Eras and pictorial styles
Prehistory, Ancient Ages and Middle Ages
Since the discovery of the Altamira caves, there has been theorizing about prehistoric cave painting and its chromatic characteristics, which have been preserved only in cases where the pigments used were stable (mainly minerals, such as ocher). Stylistically, the differentiation was established between the Franco-Cantabrian school, whose representations are polychrome and realistic, and the later Levantine school, whose representations are monochrome and schematized.
;Old painting.
The bichromaticism of Greek ceramics was obtained by opposing the color of the clay and that of the varnish (red-figure ceramics and black-figure ceramics). Greek painting also used polychrome, but its works (cited in literary testimonies and copied in Roman times) have been lost. Even so, there is speculation about its chromatic characteristics:
Although this is the opinion of most authors, some believe that the mysterious pictura compendiaria mentioned by Petronius (Satyricon 2, 9) and Pliny (Naturalis Historia, 35, 10, 36) alludes to some abbreviated form of drawing, which would leave the models suggested or sketched.[27].
The truth is that Pliny's opinion, characteristic of the Roman search for virtue in sobriety and traditional customs, was that the painting of the Greeks, for him already ancient and worthy of praise, used few colors, or at least few pigments, while in his time, the excessive wealth of the Romans led them to abuse; in a similar way to how moralists denounced the corruption of customs:
;Early Christian and Byzantine painting.
Paleo-Christian painting") and its successor, Byzantine, determined the trajectory of medieval painting both in the iconographic aspects and color symbolism (mantle of the Virgin, tunic of Christ) as well as in the techniques (illustration of manuscripts, fresco, mosaic and tempera on panel) and the preferred pigments, which came from Antiquity and had a very high price: gold for yellow (the other precious metal, silver, of very different chromatic value, had a lesser use -Codex Argenteus-), purple (the one reserved for Roman emperors and princes of the church) for red, although today we consider it an intermediate tone between blue and red ("purple was considered a kind of red... the medieval red pigment sinopia was also known as porphyry"), the Greek name for purple";... a dark red or carmine hue... it is often related to blood. Pliny says that "the Tyrian color [Phoenicians -phoínikes- were named by the Greeks with the same name as the dye and the mollusk that produced it] is most appreciated when it has the color of coagulated blood, dark under reflected light and bright under transmitted light." In the century the Emperor Ulpian defined all red materials as purple except those colored with coccus or carmine dyes)[5] and lapis lazuli (ultramarine blue) for blue. Others, introduced at different times and with variable prices depending on availability, were, for red, vermilion ("the best red pigment of medieval painters"), red lead, alizarin lacquers, carmine; for yellow, Indian yellow, gutagamba, Naples yellow, orpiment, lead-tin yellow")[33] ("the yellow of the Old Masters"); and for blue (the one that had worse alternatives), indigo, enamel"),[34] malachite and azurite.[5].
;Pre-Romanesque, Romanesque and Gothic painting.
15th century
At the same time that the so-called "International Gothic" was developing throughout Europe, the Italian Renaissance was defined in the Quattrocento by the theoretical discovery of geometric perspective while the primitive Flemish people made the artisanal discovery of oil painting, with all the gains that this allowed, in addition to detail and thoroughness (the paste is more fluid and dries much slower than any other technique, allowing innumerable touch-ups), in chromatic nuances (greater brilliance and possibility of glazes, although at the time the limitation of the available pigments limited them to blues, reds and greens).[43] Acquisitions (such as that of the Portinari Triptych) and artist trips (such as that of Roger van der Weyden) allowed the fruitful exchange between both artistic nuclei. The taste for color became a distinctive characteristic of the Venetian school, benefited by its location in the largest market for exotic products (such as pigments) and by the inconvenience that the permanent humidity of the lagoon represented for fresco painting (a technique preferred by the Florentine-Roman school).[44][5].
The color palette "Palette (paint)") seems not to have been used in Antiquity or the Middle Ages: the colors were prepared in small tanks, the number of which ranges from the half dozen that appear in an English text of the century to the ten or eleven that appear in a Flemish scene of the century where the life of Zeuxis is represented. Boccaccio (De claris mulieribus) describes one in the hands of a woman painter, and two Burgundian manuscripts of the century present illustrations with what looks like a palette in the hands of two painters, curiously also female. In Saint Luke painting the Virgin[45] by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (who is known to have used more than twenty different pigments), a palette appears in the hands of the painter and another larger one that is being prepared by his assistant. Vasari reviews the use of palettes by Lorenzo di Credi, Leonardo's colleague in Verrocchio's workshop, indicating that he made a large number of mixtures, graduating them from the lightest to the darkest con troppo e veramente soverchio ordine, reaching the point of having thirty mixtures on his palette, for each of which he used a different brush. Testimonies from the time show that efforts were made to arrange the colors so that there was the greatest possible separation between black and white, and that mixtures were usually made before being placed on the palette. Tonal palettes with prepared colors are typical of the centuries and .[46].
16th century
"The color of Titian, the drawing of Michelangelo," Tintoretto proclaimed as his pictorial ideal.[49] However, the Florentine-Roman master was always claimed as a great colorist and not just "a sculptor who paints"; If any doubt remained, it was cleared up with the recent restorations of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, which rescued the power of the original colors.
17th century
;Velázquez and Rembrandt, "chromatic sobriety"[5].
18th, 19th and 20th centuries
Technical innovations gradually came to be used by painters with applications to pigments, binders or their application (rediscovery of encaustic, invention of pastel colors and pencils - which took a long time to replace the traditional charcoal and sanguine); but the predominance of academicism in the training and professional framework of painters meant that in general color gave way to drawing, there was even a conscious search for the "ennoblement" of painting with homogenizing layers of varnish that muted the bright colors towards honey or wood tones. Rococo is defined as an art of private spaces) or restricting itself to the taste of the artists themselves, increasingly aware of their own individuality, which went so far as to claim their status as "rejected" (damnism, Salon des Refusés) and the search for scandal (épater le bourgeois). The search for spaces led to the abandonment of the workshop as the only workplace to seek the freedom of creation outdoors, in front of the models of nature (plen air), which ended up producing decisive transformations in the conception of colors and light.
;Constable and Turner's "gun."
An anecdote that pitted two competitors against each other at the annual exhibition held by the Royal Academy in 1832 was very significant; and that allowed the finishing touches to be made with the paintings already hung, in the so-called "varnish days". John Constable, complaining about the audacity of J. M. W. Turner, who had added a striking brushstroke of minium in the middle of his painting, perfectly summarized the impact of the new image: [I see that] he has been here, [because] he has fired his gun.[54] Also significant are the dampening effects of color that the custom of varnishing had, and that in addition to the preservation of the paint they aimed at its "ennoblement."[5].
;Goya, colors between two eras.
Like another Spanish painter decisive for contemporary art (Picasso, whose early periods are named by colors -pink, blue-), the phases of Goya's work are opposed in a marked chromatic contrast: the period in which he painted cartoons for tapestries is in cheerful tones that are related to the Rococo (when the young painter stars in a brilliant professional and social rise); at the time when he painted the Black Paintings it is of somber tones that prefigure styles much later even than Romanticism (when he is mired in personal and collective hopelessness - added to his deafness are the Spanish historical catastrophes, which are not remedied, but continue after the War of Independence-).
;Impressionist, post-impressionist and avant-garde painting.
The name chosen in 1911 to refer to a group of German Expressionist painters (Der Blaue Reiter "the blue rider") was significant both for the importance given to color and for its disconnection from the appearance of the objects represented.
Paintings from civilizations other than the Western one
From the huaniao hua") ("painting of flowers and insects")", since the century in China),[58] other types of painting were developed, such as the mocochrome shuǐ mò huà or sumi-e ("washed ink", both in China and in Japan and other Far Eastern countries), which used the same black ink as Chinese or Japanese calligraphy and was considered an occupation of shì dàfū") ("learned officials")")[59] and intellectuals.
In pre-Columbian ceramics "the most common technique was pigmentation with reddish, brown, white and black colors; of vegetable or mineral origin, on the natural background of the clay, fixed with a brush and often by the negative procedure, in which the body of the vessel was previously covered with resins or waxes, to then clean and reveal the parts that had to be impregnated with paint, after the englobe, which was the bath of uniform color to which the object."[63] Much more chromatically significant was the mural painting of Mesoamerica: "Color was the main decorative resource of Mayan arts and architecture, which since the Middle Preclassic period" (ca. 900-300 BC) began to show off bichrome, and even polychrome, facades, which shortly after began to be combined with highly complex painted iconography."[64].
The so-called Mayan blue and Mayan green are two pigments obtained artificially, with an inorganic base (clays such as attapulgite or saponite) on which an organic pigment (vegetables, such as tree sap or the indigo plant) is permanently fixed, achieving extraordinary resistance to both weather and acid attack.[66].
The Teotihuacán frescoes were made on a thin layer of stucco. The pigments were crushed minerals and the binder was cactus slime. The most frequent themes were sacred animals and cult scenes, such as the performance of fertility rites by rulers.[67].