ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the figures of gender employed both to praise and to deprecate color, and their effects on the way color was subsequently perceived and written out in the Renaissance. The relationship between disegno and colore as one of gendered opposition originates in antique conceptions of form and matter. This attitude toward color may appear a far cry from the laudatory treatment color receives at the hands of Leonardo da Vinci. In his paragone, or comparison of painting and sculpture, Leonardo asserts that painting's superiority over sculpture rests largely on the properties of colors. For theorists who wished to claim painting as an art of the intellect rather than one of the senses, color's materiality was the source of both its attraction and repulsion. The exploitation of the seductive charms of color in painting constituted a defection to what can be seen as the female competition, one which elicited an uneasy concern on the part of Renaissance theorists.
