ABSTRACT
Color unquestionably has and continues to play an important role in the visual arts, design, and media. These roles range from simple decorative roles to more complex roles as a visual language of, among others, emotion, politics and power, social standing, symbolism, and value. The choice of colors which artists use is one of the ways they express these and other messages. How these choices were made has been one of the important subjects of the vast art historical literature.
Most physical, as opposed to digital, works of art fade or discolor with time. As time passes, determining artists’ intent based on the original colors which were used becomes increasingly difficult. Innovations in the field of so-called color science have provided the art conservation field with important tools to help document works of art in “true” color, but supposedly also to provide a basis for bringing objects back to their original color. In this chapter, innovations in color science are examined, which claim to provide the art world with true color documentation and reproduction tools, and supposedly bring heritage professionals closer to what an object originally looked like in terms of color. We then juxtapose this objective technical discussion on color with some brief thoughts on color perception, the question of how people talk about color, and the philosophical question of what color actually is.
