Complementary colors
This model designates red, yellow and blue as primary colors with the primary–secondary complementary pairs of red–green, blue-orange, and yellow–purple.
In more recent painting manuals, the more precise subtractive primary colors are magenta, cyan and yellow.
[6] Saint Thomas Aquinas had written that purple looked different next to white than it did next to black, and that gold looked more striking against blue than it did against white; the Italian Renaissance architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti observed that there was harmony (coniugatio in Latin, and amicizia in Italian) between certain colors, such as red–green and red–blue; and Leonardo da Vinci observed that the finest harmonies were those between colors exactly opposed (retto contrario), but no one had a convincing scientific explanation why that was so until the 18th century.
[citation needed] In two reports read before the Royal Society (London) in 1794, the American-born British scientist Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814), coined the term complement to describe two colors that, when mixed, produce white.
While conducting photometric experiments on factory lighting in Munich, Thompson noticed that an "imaginary" blue color was produced in the shadow of yellow candlelight illuminated by skylight, an effect that he reproduced in other colors by means of tinted glasses and pigmented surfaces.
He theorized that "To every color, without exception, whatever may be its hue or shade, or however it may be compounded, there is another in perfect harmony to it, which is its complement, and may be said to be its companion."
"By experiments of this kind, which might easily be made, ladies may choose ribbons for their gowns, or those who furnish rooms may arrange their colors upon principles of the most perfect harmony and of the purest taste.
The advantages that painters might derive from a knowledge of these principles of the harmony of colors are too obvious to require illustration.
"[9] In the early 19th century, scientists and philosophers across Europe began studying the nature and interaction of colors.
The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe presented his own theory in 1810, stating that the two primary colors were those in the greatest opposition to each other, yellow and blue, representing light and darkness.
"[10] Out of the opposition of blue and yellow, through a process called "steigerung", or "augmentation" a third color, red, was born.
Young was also the first to propose that the retina of the eye contained nerve fibers which were sensitive to three different colors.
His 1839 book on the subject, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l'assortiment des objets colorés, showing how complementary colors can be used in everything from textiles to gardens, was widely read in Germany, France and England, and made complementary colors a popular concept.
These books were read with great enthusiasm by contemporary painters, particularly Georges Seurat and Vincent van Gogh, who put the theories into practice in their paintings.
[16] In 2022 a team from Los Alamos National Laboratory found that three dimensional perceptual color space is not Riemannian, as has been widely accepted since being proposed by Riemann and furthered by Helmholtz and Schroedinger.
They conducted comparative tests with human subjects using 'two-alternative forced choice' tasks for greater accuracy.
This painting, with its striking use of the complementary colors orange and blue, gave its name to the impressionist movement.
[19] Describing his painting, The Night Café, to his brother Theo in 1888, Van Gogh wrote: "I sought to express with red and green the terrible human passions.
In the case above the photoreceptors for red light in the retina are fatigued, lessening their ability to send the information to the brain.
Red and cyan glasses are used in the anaglyph 3D system to properly visualise the stereoscopic images produced.
