ABSTRACT
Until the early seventeenth century, Aristotle’s ideas dominated natural-philosophical thinking on colors. Before that time, new views on colors, as had been developed by artists since 1400, did not have any impact on scholarly thinking. In Renaissance painting, color mixing had become commonly accepted. Painters had begun to reject Aristotle’s opinion that black and white are the fundamental colors from which all others are composed. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), in De pictura (1435), strictly separated black and white from the chromatic primaries from which others colors can be derived. François de Aguilón (1567-1617) was one of the first scholars who adopted the painter’s primaries. In Opticorum libri sex (1611), Aguilón proposed a scheme of color mixing in which black and white are dismissed as generators of colors, although not unequivocally as being colors. In the course of the seventeenth century, the scheme of colors based on black and white as primaries was generally abandoned.
