SikkensFoundation
Mondrian Lecture
1981 MONDRIAN LECTURE COLOR AS A SEMIOTIC PROBLEM — UMBERTO ECO — This year the Mondrian Lecture was given by Umberto Eco. According to the press release by the Sikkens Foundation: “Umberto Eco, Professor of Semiotics at the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Bologna, mainly became known for his research into the meaning of images in our contemporary culture, on the basis of literature, architecture, the visual arts and film. His studies, which concentrated on “culture as communi- cation”, have therefore had a far-reaching infuence be- yond the original literary field and are clearly reflected in the visual culture.” Later he particularly became known to the general public as the writer of the medieval detective novel The Name of the Rose. Eco started his speech by saying that color is not an ea- sy matter. When the term “color” is used to indicate the pigmentation of matter in the world, nothing has yet been said about our own chromatic perception of color. In his work, Kunst der Farbe, Johannes Itten made a distinction between pigments as a chromatic reality and the reaction of our senses as the chromatic effect of this. The chro- matic effect in turn appears to depend on many factors such as the type of surface, the light, the contrast between objects, prior knowledge, etc. Eco wanted to concentrate on color from a purely theoretical perspec- tive, on the basis of a general semiotic approach. Back to index
Man is able to distinguish many colors, but the question is how to name them so that someone else knows which color he means. For this purpose, he uses a system based on comparisons. By way of example, Eco used a Roman encyclopedia from the second century AD, com- piled by Aulus Gellius. In this work, reference is made to the philosopher Favorinus, who noted that his eyes are able to distinguish more colors than there are words to describe them. He stated that red – rufus – and green – viridis – exist in many varieties but only have two names. Without knowing that he was doing so, he introduced the current scientific distinction between identification (inten- ded as a categorization) and discrimination. Favorinus continued: rufus is a name, but there is an enormous dif- ference between the red of blood, the red in purple, saf- fron or gold! They are all varieties of red, but to define them, Latin can only refer to the names of objects. For this reason, the red of fire is known as fammeus, of blood it is sanguineus, of saffron it is croceus, and of gold it is aureus. Then there are also different terms for reddish colors such as fulvus, which was associated by Virgil and other writers with a lion’s mane, sand, wolves, gold, the eagle and with the semi precious-mineral jasper. Virgil used the term favus for the hair of the blond Dido, but also for the leaves of the olive tree. The Tiber was usually known as favus because of the grayish- green mud in the river. According to this encyclopedia, fulvus is a mixture of red and green, while favus is a mix- ture of green, red and white. It is possible that the senso- ry perceptions of the Romans were different from our own, but conficting associations should not be written off as a sort of color-blindness. Favorinus and his philosop- hical friends with whom he held these debates about co- lor, were not describing their own perceptions, but were using literary texts from different centuries. This is a sort of cultural puzzle, and as such it was filtered through a linguistic system. In order to solve this puzzle, we must study the semiotic structure of language in detail. Download text as pdf