Discovering colors

Il Giallolino It is a shade of yellow that appears for the first time in Florence around 1300 used by Giotto and then by Tiziano, Tintoretto, Rembrandt up to Rubens - in the famous double portrait of him and his wife.
It is a colour that dominates, unchallenged, in the art world between the 1400 and the 1700.
Also known as lead and tin yellow, it was rediscovered around 1940 by Richard Jacobi who, analysing various paintings, frequently found traces of lead in the yellow colour.
Intrigued, he tries to recreate the colour discovering that by combining three parts of lead monoxide with a part of tin dioxide, depending on the heating temperature, you get a colour that varies from more reddish shades to lemon yellow.

Yellow chrome
The summer of 1888 was the happiest in Vincent Van Gogh’s life; he lived in Arles, in the yellow house, waiting for his friend Paul Gauguin. In the meantime, he dedicated himself to the creation of the famous series of paintings of the Sunflowers.
At that time, painters already had saturated and beautiful reds and blues, but they did not have a yellow that was up to the task yet.
The Yellow Chrome arrived just in time and Van Gogh fell in love with it. Its discovery is due to the discovery of a bright red crystal in the gold mine of Beresof in Siberia in 1762: the crocoite, which contained an element that will be what specifies this shade of yellow: chrome.
The negative aspect of this colour, unfortunately, is that "aging" it rusts while darkening, which is what is happening to the wonderful Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.

Imperial Yellow
It’s a colour with a fascinating history. On August 5, 1903, Katharina Augusta Carl was in the throne room in the Forbidden City in front of the Empress Mother Cixi. Her task was to make the portrait of the Empress using one of the colours strictly reserved for the imperial family, namely red-gold yellow.
The robe worn by the Empress was in imperial yellow silk. In China, in fact, yellow had represented royalty for more than a thousand years.
Along with red, green-blue, black and white was one of the five colours of the Five Elements theory.
The yellow was associated with the earth, the centre, the long and late summer, the dragon and those in charge.
 

Gold
Talking about gold in arts, how not to think about the famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer immortalized by Gustav Klimt in 1907, a painting at the centre of a legal diatribe for a long time, now exhibited at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan.
Gold has always been the colour of reverence, the one that is given and the one that is claimed for itself, used to arouse awe and admiration.
In addition, the shimmer of gold makes it an easy emblem of divinity. How can we forget Giotto’s altarpiece created for the church of Ognissanti, where the figures are resting on a beautiful gold background!