Goethe’s Color Theory and Estienne’s Centones: Handpress Era Zoom Group

Sponsored by FABS

June 10, 4:30pm Pacific/7:30pm Eastern: The Handpress Era group (“printed books and other printed works created before ca. 1800”). This month you’ll hear from both our co-hosts. To join the list contact info@fabsocieties.org.

• David DiLaura: “Goethean vs Newtonian Color Theories: Communicating Perception using Hand Coloring.” Goethe’s 20-year argument with the Newtonian conception of color hinged not on physical abstractions, but rather what we see. Central to both his works on color, Goethe believed that the nature and origin of color was to be extracted from perceptions, and color perception was communicated by hand-color figures in book plates and playing-card-like ephemera.
• Jennifer Larson: “The Neglected Ancient Genre of the Cento and Henri Estienne’s 1578 edition.” Centones are “patchwork” poems composed of disparate lines from epic. In late antiquity, Falconia Proba and Eudocia Augusta composed centones on biblical subjects using lines from Vergil and Homer respectively. I will discuss the Aldine and Stephanus editions of these poems and changing attitudes toward this curious genre in antiquity and the Renaissance.