Color as “Other”

Théodore Géricault, Raft of the Medusa, 1818, Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Domenico Cresti, Bathers of San Niccolò, 1600, Oil on canvas, Private Collection.

While 200 years separate Domenico Cresti’s Bathers of San Niccolò (1600) and Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818), color unites them. In each painting, bodies converge. Flesh on flesh, skin into skin. Hues animate. Warm yellows and reds enliven the curving, musculature of nude arms, torsos, necks, and faces. Yet, in both paintings, not all bodies are vital. Swaths of smokey greys, pasty whites, and glazes of shadowy greens render figures differently, “Othered.” Mercurial clouds, brooding shadows, and dark water enhance the moonlit sheen of each person’s form. Wet bodies glisten. The effects of chiaroscuro thrust flesh color into the focal point of each composition. We must resolve the question of body color – its evocations of life and death, health and illness, normality and abnormality – before shifting our gaze to the rest of the scene. Notwithstanding each artwork’s different historical contexts, both Cresti’s and Géricault’s paintings demonstrate the symbolic capital of color as means to signify pathology or Otherness. With a simple stroke of green or white, a normalized body transforms into alterity. This is the magic of color. 

The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s book Theory of Colors (1810) is a node in this matrix of chromatic Otherness. Goethe’s book was written in a different time period as Cresti and may not have been known to Géricault. Yet, the commonalities between the two paintings and the book reflect shared conceptions of color. In his book, Goethe described “pathological colors” as a “deviation from the ordinary mode of seeing.” As he observed, for some people, red appeared blue and orange as green. Hypochondriacs frequently saw dark objects accompanied by visions of red-yellow stripes, flies, spiders, or semi-transparent small tubes. Those with ear-aches saw sparks and balls of light. Moreover, pathological vision was not just an individual experience. Goethe’s description included entire groups of people. He proclaimed:

“Lastly, it is also worthy of remark, that savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colours; that animals are excited to rage by certain colours; that people of refinement avoid vivid colours in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.” (1) Link to source

What is powerful about Goethe’s description of pathological colors is that it implies a normal way of vision and a normal use of color. Women, savage nations, children, those with color-vision deficiency or illness are all listed under his section on pathology. Their perception and use of color did not conform to implicit conventional standards. Non-conformity meant to deviate from con-formity, to digress, deflect, or disavow the collective (“con-”) experience of “form.” Just as the predilection for color was pathologized, colors could pathologize. As suggested by Cresti and Géricault’s paintings, color could be used by artists to differentiate humans from one another. Green, grey, or white applied to a flesh mixture could evoke death, decay, or disease and bright reds could convey – quite oppositely – too much vitality, indicating the rush of boiling blood of fury or excitement.

In Aidan Flynn’s HTC SMArchS thesis “Bawdy Bathers: Locating Male Bathing Culture in Early Modern Florence,” Flynn investigates how Cresti’s painting, as well as other visual objects in early modern Italy, shed light on the real and lived experiences in which transgressive sexual encounters of sodomy occurred. He examines Cresti’s figures in detail, but also looks beyond them, considering the body’s relation to space and context. Important to Flynn’s research is the historical conception of sodomy as sexual deviance, and how such an idea manifests in paint. Among many details in the painting, deviance is represented through the deviation of flesh color from its normal color recipe. Many bodies depicted contain far too much white and grey. Color, here, is deviant. Its cultural meanings in context will be fleshed out in Flynn’s master’s thesis.

(1) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colors. Trans. by Charles Lock Eastlake. Project Gutenberg, 2015: 45.