*

As Goethe relates at the conclusion of the 'historical' part of his
Farbenlehre,4 he was drawn to study colour by his wish to gain some
knowledge of the objective laws of aesthetics. He felt too close to
poetry to be able to study it with sufficient detachment, so he turned
to painting - an art with which he felt sufficiently familiar without
being connected with it creatively - hoping that if he could discover
the laws of one art they would prove applicable to others.

His visit to Italy, a land rich both in natural colour and in works of
art, gave him a welcome opportunity to pursue this inquiry, but for a
long time he made no headway. The paintings he saw suggested no
inherent law in their arrangement of colours, nor could the painters he
questioned tell him of one. The only qualitative distinction they
seemed to recognize was between 'cold' and 'warm' colours.

His own observations led him to a definite experience of the quality of
the colour blue, for which he coined the phrase 'feebleness of blue'
('Ohnmacht des Blau'). In some way this colour seemed to him to be
related to black. In order to rouse his artist friends and to stimulate
their reflexions, he liked to indulge in paradoxes, as when he asserted
that blue was not a colour at all. He found, however, as time went on,
that in this way he came no nearer his goal.

Although the splendour of colour in the Italian sky and the Italian
landscape made a powerful impression on Goethe, he found not enough
opportunity for systematic study to allow him to arrive at more than a
dim surmise of some law underlying the occurrence of colour in nature.