Category Archives: Art

Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet

“Over the past 20 years, I visited 193 museums in 42 different countries. Equipped with 1,500 Munsell colour chips – the world-standard samples for colour science – I examined 139,892 works of art, searching for violet. I concluded that there were indeed only a very few artworks before the 1860s that contained this colour from my childhood….

…I can’t help but wonder whether a muon shower might have enhanced our ability to see violet midway through the 19th century on Earth.”

Allen Tager

https://psyche.co/amp/ideas/why-it-took-us-thousands-of-years-to-see-the-colour-violet

And more here…

https://brill.com/view/journals/jocc/18/3-4/article-p262_2.xml?language=en

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/col.22638

Leonardo’s Brain: What a Posthumous “Brain Scan” Six Centuries Later Reveals about the Source of Da Vinci’s Creativity

Using a wealth of available information from Leonardo’s notebooks, various biographical resources, and some well-reasoned speculation, Shlain sets out to perform a “posthumous brain scan” seeking to illuminate the unique wiring of Da Vinci’s brain and how it explains his unparalleled creativity.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/11/17/leonardos-brain-leonard-shlain/