RYB color model

[7] Mérimée referred to "three simple colours (yellow, red, and blue)" that can produce a large gamut of color nuances.

Mérimée illustrated these color relationships with a simple diagram located between pages 244 and 245: Chromatic Scale (Echelle Chromatique).De la peinture à l’huile : ou, Des procédés matériels employés dans ce genre de peinture, depuis Hubert et Jean Van-Eyck jusqu’à nos jours was published in 1830 and an English translation by W. B. Sarsfield Taylor was published in London in 1839.

[11][12] The ancient Greeks, under the influence of Aristotle, Democritus and Plato, considered that there were four basic colors that coincided with the four elements: earth (ochre), sky (blue), water (green) and fire (red), while black and white represented the light of day and the darkness of night.

[citation needed] The four-color system is formed by the primaries yellow, green, blue and red, and was supported by Alberti in his "De Pictura" (1436), using the rectangle, rhombus, and color wheel to represent them.

[15] The first known case of trichromacy coloration (of 3 primaries) can be found in a work on optics by the Belgian thinker Franciscus Aguilonius in 1613,[16] who in his "Opticorum libri sex, philosophis iuxtà ac mathematicis utiles" in Latin (Roughly, Six books of optics: useful to philosophers as well as to mathematicians), graphed the colors flavvus, rvbevs and cærvlevs (yellow, red and blue) giving rise to the intermediate colors avrevs, viridis and pvrpvrevs (orange, green and purple) and their relationship with the extremes albvs and niger (white and black).

[18] This model was used for printing by Jacob Christoph Le Blon in 1725 and called it Coloritto or harmony of colouring,[19] stating that the primitive (primary) colors are yellow, red and blue, while the secondary are orange, green and purple or violet.

The invention of phthalocyanine and derivatives of quinacridone, expanded the range of primary blues and reds, getting closer to the ideal subtractive colors and the CMY and CMYK models.