A Venetian Wedding, Norwegian Music and Networks of Color
By Stoyan V. Sgourev
In the early 16th century a “color” revolution took place on the Venetian peninsula. In contrast to the dominant approach in Rome and Florence, Venetian artists attributed primary importance to color in the pictorial space, rather than to composition. Color served a twofold purpose. It allowed Venetian artists to create a coherent collective identity that differentiated them from artists in Rome, Florence and other artistic hubs. Venice became synonymous with bright, vivid colors, implemented through recently developed oil paint techniques. Color contributed to the emergence of an alternative tradition and a contrasting image to the Florentine pictorial language established in the High Renaissance. But color did something else too. It provided opportunities for the construction of visible, recognizable individual identities, as Venetian painters became known for the use of particular colors, allowing to attract buyers’ attention and to differentiate between artists in a crowded, highly competitive market.
An exquisite illustration of the two purposes of color is Veronese’s magnificent “Wedding at Cana” (1563), hanging opposite Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre. A visitor positioned between the two paintings would easily recognize the main differences between the Venetian and Florentine approaches: the use of bright, eclectic colors to represent an emotional scene and to structure pictorial space, juxtaposed against the delicate use of color to reinforce the pursuit of compositional balance and formal perfection. The Veronese painting demonstrates that color is not simply a technical device, but has a social meaning, as it serves to convey the social status of represented figures, and distinctive color preferences of the diverse cultures intermixing in cosmopolitan Venice. The visual impact of the painting is so pronounced that it invites the spectator to identify relations of colors on the canvass, and try to decipher how the network of colors connects people.
Veronese (Paolo Caliari), The Wedding Feast at Cana.
The notion that color is relational in nature, connecting people in what can be designated as aesthetic networks, echoes through the centuries. The poet Goethe observed in his celebrated treatise on color in 1810 that color is a “relational force” that is ever in movement between subject and object. This relational force is on display when people or companies make everyday decisions on the palette or intensity of colors to feature in their clothes or products. A choice between bright and muted colors signals our identities. This choice is rarely independent of the choices of those around us: our friends, competitors or enemies. Furthermore, the choices are also influenced by trends in culture and fashion.
Understanding these networks of colors is a challenge, considering the multiple sources of influence to which we are exposed. Thankfully, recent developments in computational methods for the analysis of digital images facilitate this task. With my colleagues Erik Aadland and Giovanni Formilan, we decided to analyze the colors featured on digital images of covers of music albums, turning our attention to a music genre where color looms large: “black metal”. Originating in Norway in the early 1990s, this genre is defined by its predilection for the black color, associated with veneration of dark forces and opposition to institutionalized religion.
We relied on a database of 5,125 album covers between 1989 and 2019, analyzing two types of relations: between bands playing black metal and other types of heavy metal in Norway, and between the content of music and colors on the album covers. The results of our models demonstrate that black metal bands associated with past color choices of non-black metal bands up to a point, after which they started to disassociate from them. Imitating the color choices of other genres contributed to the legitimacy of an emerging genre that simultaneously aspired for a distinctive collective identity by emphasizing the black color on album covers.
This positioning is dynamic, allowing the bands to respond to external events. We found that black metal bands reacted to their stigmatization in Norwegian society in the mid-1990s by bolstering the appeal of their albums and making their covers more colorful. However, they subsequently returned to a darker aesthetic dominated by the black color in defiance of the commercialization of a formerly underground genre. We also confirmed the relation between content and colors, as bands with “heavier” sound had darker album covers.
Our analysis confirms something that Venetian artists must have felt intuitively: that color is a powerful means of positioning, allowing the projection of an identity based on forces of association with and disassociation from others. Basic principles of positioning apply similarly to 16th century art as to music in the 1990s. Aesthetic networks are present not only in music and art, they are in fashion, design or consumer goods. Color connects people at the Wedding at Cana, but also at our workplaces, where a complex web of affinities and enmities is materialized in colors, apart from less visible ways.
Article Details
Relations in Aesthetic Space: How Color Enables Market Positioning
Stoyan V. Sgourev, Erik Aadland, and Giovanni Formilan
First published online November 23, 2022
DOI: 10.1177/00018392221137289
Administrative Science Quarterly
About the Author
