1 min readOct 14, 2020
I was under the impression colour wasn’t invented until the 1940s and that’s why films, television programs and photographs from before then were in black and white.
And that does seem to be reflected in stuff that tries to recreate the era: you see stuff shot in colour and then filtered to monochrome. It isn’t the same though — the ironic luminance of the shadow is lacking.
I’ve since learned that colour was invented in at least 1903 …
But what I wonder is how painters knew what to do to make their pictures look right hundreds of years later — if the World was monochrome, how did Michelangelo or da Vinci or whoever know what to paint where so that the sky would look blue, or cows brown or stuff today?
