Manganese black: Art in the Ice Age -- Red ocher: The sacred and dangerous in Australia -- Egyptian blue: King Tut's infrared transmitter -- Greek white: The myth of the white city -- Yellow ocher: Apelles and slime -- Tyrian purple: Cleopatra's royal color -- Cinnabar, vermilion, and minium: Beautiful but deadly -- Black ink: Who needs color anyway? -- Gold: Medieval radiance -- Green earth: Unearthly undertones -- The age of canvas: Painting on sails -- Ultramarine: From the Valley of the Stone -- Cochineal: A new world color in art (and your lunch) -- Logwood black: Puritans and pirates -- Cobalt: Blue at the scene of the crime -- Lead white: The enchantress -- Indigo: Girl power in South Carolina -- Gainsborough blue: Never use blue in the center -- Rose: Madame Pompadour's luxurious pink -- Light: And the Age of Enlightenment -- Titian blue: Simply unbelievable -- Indian yellow: Turner, cows, and mangoes -- Madder red: Inventing the color wheel -- Graphite: Pencil lead is not lead -- Mummy brown: Funeral for pharaohs -- Mauve: Chemistry project gone wrong -- Prussian blue: The blue that was supposed to be red -- Emerald green: The mystery of the poisonous wallpaper -- Black and white and sepia: What you can't see in photographs -- Manganese violet: Monet goes outside -- Chrome yellow: Color from Siberia -- Patent blue, tartrazine, and rose Bengal: Mix with potatoes for delicious color -- Cadmium yellow: Listening to colors with Kandinsky -- Lithol red: Endless journey of the eye -- International Klein blue: This is not your blue -- Orange 36 and violet 19: Lichtenstein and the rise of the superheroes -- Painting with light: Pixels as pigment

Journey from the Ice Age to the Digital Age with a surprising cast of characters on this worldwide tour of color in art. Discover the strange, intriguing, and humorous stories of your favorite colors, the science behind them, and how they forever changed the courses of art and history. Were it not for Cleopatra, for instance, purple might not have become the royal color of the Western world. Without Napoleon, the black graphite pencil might never have found its way into the hands of Cézanne. Without mango-eating cows, the sunsets of Turner might have lost their shimmering glow. And were it not for the pigment cobalt blue, the halls of museums worldwide might still be filled with forged Vermeers. The Brilliant History of Color in Art is also a treasure trove of world art, from cave paintings to Roman treasures and Chinese dragon scrolls; to works by Titian and Michelangelo, Monet and Kandinsky, Rothko and Hockney; to contemporary sculpture and graffiti art. Many of the book's 166 spectacular images are from the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum

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