Abstract
In Zur farbenlehre (1810), Goethe argued that colour harmony in painting required the presence of all three pairs of complementary colours, but did not specify in any detail how artists should put this principle into practice. Before his time, they had tended to handle colour in one of two distinctive ways, based either on the relationship of the different hues to one another, or on their tonal values. Goethe's and Heinrich Meyer's many scattered observations on the subject show them rejecting tonalism in favour of purely hue-based harmony, using local colour and the colours of reflected light, including cangianti. Their advocacy of this approach, exemplified for them by Veronese but also by ancient fresco artists and by Pietro da Cortona and Gottlieb Schick, brought them closer to Romantic art theorists such as A. W. Schlegel than to their classicizing contemporaries, who tended to diminish the role of colour in painting.
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