Is color just a psychological reaction, or a pure physical sensation? Does it have an effect on our feelings or moods? John Gage examines the phenomenon of color from a new and extraordinary perspective, convinced that, like language, it is a historically determined fact whose meaning resides in the various contexts in which it is experienced and interpreted. Thus, his erudite research—illustrated with more than one hundred images, thirty-seven of them in color—covers topics as diverse as optical mixtures in a technique such as mosaic, the medieval symbology of colors, the syntax of colors and their uses in Latin America at the time of the conquest, the early history of optics and the prism, or the ideas about color in the work of Goethe and Runge, Blake and Turner or Seurat and Matisse. A text full of ideas, as essential as it is enjoyable.