The invention of color

Lecture by Philip Ball, freelance writer and broadcaster who worked previously for over 20 years as an editor for Nature. An often neglected components of art is what it is made from: paint. Today, when there are masses of colours available off the shelf in art shops, we tend to take them from granted, and it is easy to forget that these colours had to be invented, one by one, in what was sometimes a painstaking process.