Color Theory and Rhetoric

Color theory is as old as civilization itself; indeed, one of the metrics anthropologists use to gauge the degree of a culture's “development ” (rightly or not) is the number of distinct colors it names (see the entry for Cross-Cultural Research below). And since ancient times commentators have ascribed to color a great range of symbolic, psychological, even supernatural attributes. For those with normal vision, color is at once omnipresent and ordinary, yet often moving, startling, engrossing—shifting between unremarkable and compelling, from just another sensory datum to an overwhelming intangible presence. So it is unsurprising that color theorists have often identified affect and meaning in color. Yet despite contemporary interest in visual rhetoric, little has been written about color as a rhetorical device or vehicle. Color theories come from many other disciplines, but rarely do they address the use of color for persuasion, except in some limited senses: appealing colors for branding purposes, for example, or the use of bright colors to attract attention. Here, then, I have mostly gathered works on color theory from related fields: art, design, history, philosophy and critical theory, and various sciences, with an eye toward synthesizing a rhetorical theory of color. Sometimes these theories correlate well; at other moments they present radically different, eve