It was short but I really enjoyed this little thread this morning, added much color to my life!

> Starting in the Renaissance, artists made sculpture and architecture that exalted form over color, in homage to what they thought Greek and Roman art had looked like. In the eighteenth century, Johann Winckelmann, the German scholar who is often called the father of art history, contended that “the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is,” and that “color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty.” When the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were first excavated, in the mid-eighteenth century, Winckelmann saw some of their artifacts in Naples, and noticed color on them. But he found a way around that discomfiting observation, claiming that a statue of Artemis with red hair, red sandals, and a red quiver strap must have been not Greek but Etruscan—the product of an earlier civilization that was considered less sophisticated. He later concluded, however, that the Artemis probably was Greek. (It is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek original.) Østergaard and Brinkmann believe that Winckelmann’s thinking was evolving, and that he might eventually have embraced polychromy, had he not died in 1768, at the age of fifty, after being stabbed by a fellow-traveller at an inn in Trieste

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-wh... cited by https://bsky.app/profile/ellipticalnight.bsky.social/post/3m...

Man, what a line. What a horror, this projection of opinion! From the "Father of Art History"! To rob the world so! I feel this way all the time, that anti-sentiment, that the pure marble world just stately and so is art and perfection, over the colors of the universe & it's possibility!

> "the whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is"

This should make your blood run cold, imo. A world locked in amber view of reality, static, sedate. Whew.

Agreed. I absolutely adore the idea of it! But all the brownish colours tell the same story.

For some additional context; many old pigments were not stable at all.

https://www.vangoghstudio.com/what-were-the-original-colors-...

This is a very interesting perspective. I'd thought the muted, brownish colors in these paintings had to do with the quality and availability of pigments during that period.

It’s the colours you will see today when looking at the paintings, however. Your point is valid, but even the somewhat "chromatically degraded" versions of many of these are gorgeous.

An additional problem is that it looks like the colors are from the intersection of 3 random paintings. The masters already picked their colors on one painting. If you randomly average them it is like a kid mixing finger paints. You aren't going to get a better color scheme from 3 random masterworks.

It‘s vibecoded slop that turned an idea that should have stayed a bad idea into poor execution, convincing the vibecoder that the idea is validated. The vibe coder has absolutely no domain specific knowledge to understand what you picked up in a second, yet no AI ever mentioned that, they didn’t learn, and instead reinforced their bias by producing another piece of forgettable slop. Yes, I’m fun at parties.

> is because of dirty & old oxidised varnish

And the pigments fade. And even worse, they fade at various rates and some are almost completely gone.

A few points on how a painter's intentions do not always align with how we see their work many years later:

Generally, a painting is best viewed and photographed in as close a lighting environment as it was painted. I have seen many paintings 'blasted' by unnaturally bright gallery lights. There is a reason why a gallery lighting designer is a real job. However, in my experience effective gallery lighting designers are as rare as rocking horse shit.

It is true that the paint the artists applied many years ago will often bear little resemblance to that which we now see. This is less true of earth browns and very true of paintings done at the beginning of the pigment revolution, when wonderful colors were produced which were later discovered to be very 'fugitive'. However, the relative relationship between these paints remains more or less intact, and IMHO this is the most important factor in aesthetic evaluation.

Another factor is how a photo flattens such differences as rough vs smooth (and their consequent light reflection properties). In a Titian painting, huge areas are untouched rough red oxide primer on rough canvas, vs the slight gloss of oil paint. Importantly, old masters would often apply their lights as (smooth) thick paint and their dark as thin glazes (or scumbles) above a thin primer (red or green or yellow ochre or whatever). The frisson between these layers gave the darks their depth that they would otherwise have lacked. This is mastery of dynamic range at its finest. Googles art project photos comes close to capturing this. For an example, check out any portrait by Durer in Google art project.

So we can use AI or even deterministic algorithms to recover the original palette.

I see these palettes shown everywhere and see no value in them whatsoever. As a designer or painter, one needs to develop their own palette for what they are trying to create. So what difference does it make what someone else used no matter how famous? I just don't get it.

The intention of this site is to showcase time tested palettes (with empirical evidence) of greatest visual artists instead of listing endless sea of neon bright color palettes we see everywhere in popular palette sites like coolors or colorhunt. Consider it using like a color grading tool for you art/design project similar to cinematographers who use contain color combinations to bring emotions, mood to the movie shots to tell the story in more visually captivating fashion.

Adding OKLCH color codes will be a great addition. Thank you for your suggestion!

There are 2 art style pages namely Advertising and Posters styles: https://paletteinspiration.com/advertisement-palettes/ https://paletteinspiration.com/poster-palettes/

I am aware that Advertisement palettes mostly based on Alphonse Mucha work since I could not include more recent ad illustrations for copywrite reasons.

As you suggested OKLCH colour option is added now to the site. Thanks again.

Great points! 1. I'll try to add RYB option for color harmony wheel 2. You are absolutely correct, there are no consistent palettes across genres, but I thought it will be interesting to see multitude of palettes artists use for the same genre 3. User S0und's observation about oxidized or decayed colors is very interesting, but even with muted, brownish colors these artworks still look amazing. 4. Any suggestion how can I add such color visualization across body of work of a given artist or a style?

I love the website about color pigment history - it explains a lot about some of the color choices artists made in different time periods. Thank you for sharing the link.

Sorry for the inconvenience. The email works now. Regarding the article - I use similar ideas to extract colors form artwork images, only difference is I added color prevalence scale for each color and limited it to 10 colors per palette.

It is puzzling for me why you see these colors as Claude UI colors, since I carefully choose these colors as my main brand colors across all other art related sites (eg https://ouliart.com).

Most contemporary artists works are still under copyrght laws.

Both issues are fixed now. Yes "Modernism" and "Modernismo" are the same, only some Latin American artists have art style as Modernismo instead just Modernism.

Thank you for kind words! That was my exact intention to share empirically proven color palettes for artists and designers like you. Adding API endpoint is a great idea. I'll let you know when it will be ready.

Great suggestion, thank you! I'll try reaching out to some art schools to see if they'd find the site useful.

You are absolutely right, I did not realize how similar some of these palettes are to Commodore 64 palette

see this palette for example: https://paletteinspiration.com/fauvism-palettes/fauvism-19-p...

or other Fauvism palettes: https://paletteinspiration.com/fauvism-palettes/

I fixed it. Thank you for helping to correct such an obvious error!

Great observation. Thank you for pointing to an obvious error. I will fix it as soon as possible. it is not acceptable to order artists by their first name.

Thank you for your kind words!

Yes, exactly this. It falls far short of the potential if it just shows the colours alone and not how they might appear if applied to sites, charts, illustrations or whatever you might want them for.

Thank you. Glad you find it interesting.

Thank you for the kind words and insightful feedback. My intention with page-switching on scroll was to offer more color palettes without requiring extra clicks. I had some reservations about it too, but couldn't find a better way to provide a continuous feed of similar palettes. I'll work on improving that feature.

I fix it. hope the new version provides better user experience

coming soon